Week 7 - Shorter Content Will Always Be Free

In Bill Wasik’s talk about modern media, he discusses how "shorter content will always be free". This is a rather generalizing statement, that is only made true when applying specific parameters to it. A more true statement would be "Short and non-unique content that lacks scarcity will always be free."

The "non-unique" component is necessary, otherwise iTunes immediately proves the statement false. Nearly all of songs on the iTunes music store could be considered relatively "short". However, if the standard song isn't considered to be short enough, there also exists a massive economy in the "ringtone industry" (which are generally 10-15 seconds in length). In other media, iTunes also sells several film shorts in there online store, some of which are quite successful. In the space of "unique" content, people are not paying for quantity, but rather an auditory or visual experience.

The "lack of scarcity" component greater covers content as information, rather than something experiential (like music or film). As Wasik pointed out himself, "short is inherently free because there is so much of it." For example, as long as there are thousands of individuals willing to share free videos of dancing kittens, the "Cat Dancing Video Industry" will never be able to monetize themselves. The same holds true with news. There is such an abundance of free news information, that it is silly for a consumer to pay for it. However, length ("shorter") does not play into the free aspect here either. There are plenty of services online that sell "Sports Handicapping" information at a premium. The length of this information sold is quite minimal, but because there is a scarcity of "expert" opinion, people are willing to pay for this content.

I think Wasik made the comment of "shorter content will always be free" as a way of degrading "free", for the sole purpose of emphasizing his point that we greater value the things we buy. With the surplus of content available online, it's easy to consume it all will very little impact. However, if we make some sort of personal investment into our consumptions, we are more likely to appreciate them.

Week 6 - The impact of Hulu charging

Under the pressure of its investors (primarily big media companies), Hulu is planning on converting itself from a free service supported by advertisers, to a paid subscription model. From an investors standpoint, this makes sense. The advertising on the website essentially cannibalizes the advertising revenue received from their television properties, not to mention at a rate substantially lower than that of TV.

As a free model Hulu offers a lot of value for its major media investors (which include the likes of NBC, Fox, Universal, and Disney) outside of its modest advertising revenue. Hulu was the first to market with an online service that offers premium content, and in a user friendly interface that actually works. Their successful marketing and implementation have led to an enormous user base and a strong brand. Having this popular property fends off alternative options, which are primarily piracy based. So while the revenue received from the advertising is small, it is better than alternative scenarios (zero dollars).

Investors like to make comments like "between $2 billion and $3 billion of professional produced content sits on Hulu -- supporting a $200 million market cap", and "trading analog dollars for digital cents", but those are manipulated comments in a failed attempt to draw sympathy and change. The content produced by these companies has a high fixed cost (the "$2-3 billion" spoken of) , but also a high margin (it costs near nothing to deliver and sell their digital media). So making a comment about the value of the content on the website is $2-3 billion, is a little like saying the content in a Best Buy movie shelf is $2-3 billion. The fact is, it is irrelevant. Most costs are made back and exceeded on initial sales, which in this case TV is broadcast advertising, and so the online revenue is all gravy.

Charging for Hulu is not creating a video apocalypse for digital storytelling, but rather just the creation of another revenue stream for big media. The occurrence seems to parallel when Apple first opened up the iTunes music store. Instead of people consuming digital music online for free (be it via piracy, or other alternatives), a new venue was opened up to purchase it. While it is definitely advantageous for music producers to distribute their music through iTunes, the store didn't kill independent producers from distributing or monetizing their music in other ways. The same is likely to happen with the Hulu, which if anything could be a benefit for online storytellers. Hulu could act as just a optional delivery channel, however not the only way to get a story told.

Week 5 - Telling a Tale

I tend to side against A. Kiedi Varga's statement that "the image is not a second way of telling the tale, but a way of evoking [that is, recalling it from memory] it." Using images in conjunction with words makes this statement true, as it acts as a compliment to the narrative taking place. However, I don't see this as a fact that spans across all media forms.

In "Narratives Across Media" (Ryan, 139) the authors describes how the ballet Sleeping Beauty has an established story, so a spectator of it recognizes the plot purely from his memory. It is then claimed that this same experience then spans across other mediums, including illustration and painting. The argument is that the stories are (in a way) being recreated by the images, as opposed to being told by the images.

The problem with this argument is that action, narration, and thus storytelling can in fact be told through a static image. A sense of movement and action can be created in a painting, as well as the creation of implied change in space and time. For example, imagine a painting of a man in movement over a hill, with a background of a house in a distance. How would experiencing this visually be different from a text stating "a man leaving his house, crossed over a hill". They both accomplish the action of telling a story, not evoking one.

One things required by the stories being told by static images is a prior knowledge of the medium. A person viewing a painting must understand how to read visual queues to be able to imply action. A person viewing a photograph has to have an understanding of how to interpret light, so as to follow the emphasis of direction. This takes us to a medium with no established prior knowledge, storytelling on the web.

Most frequently digital storytelling involves taking an established media (i.e video, photographs, illustration), combining it with other text and media, and then delivering it on a medium that is quite foreign to the media's origins. This can destroy the effectiveness of a lot of the media that can normally tell a story on its own. The most obvious example of this is with a painting. When a painting and placed in a confined and flat surface (of say a laptop screen), all sense of space and texture is lost. When these visual queues are lost, the image merely becomes a compliment to the accompanying text.

The structure of the web interface, if anything, calls for a new media of it's own. One that isn't tangled in pre-existing (especially organic) medias, but rather one that is specifically manufacture for a digital experience.