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[Wednesday at NAB]
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New Hollywood Can Learn From Old
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by David E. Williams,
~ April 16, 2008
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DV MAGAZINE
“No one would want to sit in the dark with strangers and watch a motion picture,” said George Eastman more than 100 years ago, explaining why he was not interested in pursuing projection technology.
The famed inventor was, of course, ultimately wrong about how his day’s latest media development would eventually combine with creativity and consumer demand — as were many of his fellow tech giants in their time.
This tradition of being wrong continues into the modern age, and it was the central idea proposed during yesterday’s “The New Hollywood: A World of Entertainment!” Super Session, moderated by Suzanne Stefanac, director of the American Film Institute Digital Content Lab.
Among the other tech legends who made erroneous predictions about how some of their inventions would be employed? Auguste and Louis Lumière, Alexander Graham Bell, Nikola Tesla and Eadweard Muybridge, to name a few. Eastman was in good company.
Stefanac’s well-made point was that without the proper vision and direction, technology itself can be of little use — especially if this lacking is on the part of the technology’s creator.
“Tesla, who was the first tech rock star, died penniless, proving he wasn’t much of a businessman,” Stefanac said, then relating that situation to today’s vast array of digital solutions suppliers who are struggling to understand how their offerings can be effectively and profitably used in today’s diverse entertainment economy.
An equal part of the equation is how can creative users dream up new applications for existing technologies?
This theme was picked up once Stefanac brought her panelists to the stage: John Honeycutt, executive vice president of media technology and operations for Discovery Communications Inc.; Christopher Carey, chief marketing and technology officer for the Technicolor Services Division of Thomson; David Gale, vice president of new media at MTV Networks; Paul Ledak, vice president of development, digital convergence, at IBM; and Barry Rebo, chairman of Emerging Pictures/Emerging Cinemas.
Asked about the biggest technological hurdles they currently face, each offered a unique reply. “Figuring out what people want to see and how they want to see it,” said Gale, noting how the Internet, DVRs and gaming, among other factors, have fundamentally altered audience behavior.
For Honeycutt, the vast scale of Discovery’s digital holdings has become a hurdle, making “metadata a primary concern.” “The industry as a whole is struggling with the changes in distribution,” said Ledak. “There are epic battles going on in the consumer industry; battles about how television will merge with the Internet — there’s plenty of technology available to us, but what is the business model?”
For Carey, “harnessing technology and applying it to business models we already have” is one strategy, but “the move from physical media distribution to digital distribution are going to have their own affects on the visual medium, as it will on viewers.”
As the discussion shifted gears, the notion of standards and formats prompted debate, as Rebo argued things like the Digital Cinema Initiative — designed by Hollywood to set a bar for the technical quality of exhibition in digital cinemas — served to suppress creativity as it excludes those who could not meet its criteria. “I’m concerned about how it could be used to keep competition out,” Rebo said.
Carey, who served on the group that helped create the DCI in 2002, disagreed, explaining that it was not an exclusionary tool, but a tool by which creatives could protect their images in digital exhibition.
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