I can't stand the term, "Content." I never refer to the original shows I produce for Noisivision as "content." Content is the stuff a bottle manufacturer needs to fill his product. Or what a garbage truck dumps into a landfill. Or what a backyard distillery produces. "Hey Billy-Bob, I spent all day fishing these here bottles out of the landfill -- let's fill 'em up with our finest eighty-proof content."
To some, entertainment has become secondary to the delivery mechanism. "These are the finest cardboard boxes ever made. Who cares what you put in them, people are gonna pay to see the boxes."
As we saw over a hundred years ago, when nickelodeons showed "Moving Picures" of couples dancing or bears wrestling or couples dancing with wrestling bears, technology always precedes "content." The novelty of those early flickering images enticed crowds into the theaters of yesteryear, just as today's Internet users flock to YouTube, Brightcove, VEOH, et al.
But as some point -- and I believe it will happen sooner than later -- audiences have their fill of "novelty," and start looking for substance. It's not enough to watch college kids parade around their dorm in their underwear, or a repeat of last night's Conan O'Brien. They want to be entertained, enlightened; they want to laugh and cry and empathize. Whether it's a short "Video Bit," a cutting edge music video, a commercial parody, a dramatic series, a long-form work of fiction or a thought-provoking documentary, audiences will soon be demanding more than the novelty of watching movies on their PCs or MACs.
They will demand stories. They will demand humor. They will demand imagination.
In every medium, from the early cave paintings to today's hottest portable digital devices, storytelling and humor and imagination reign supreme. They are not secondary to the delivery mechanism.
"Hey Billy-Bob, we got ourselves a mighty fancy website here. We done the hard part. Now all we need is some content."
blm
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