Ten years ago people thought that visual storytelling would be democratized; that new cameras, new editing suites, cheap streaming, and BitTorrent would combine to render high-cost obsolete-infrastructure Hollywood irrelevant. A worldwide cohort of genius independent filmmakers would use this new generation of accessible tools to slowly supplant Hollywood studios and producers as the drivers of visual and narrative culture.
And what are the longer-term effects of the triumph of Branded Worlds on the grassroots, and the next generations, of pop culture?
Maybe it’s a lot easier to shoot and edit movies/TV than it used to be, but sets, locations, actors, scripts — those are all expensive and difficult.
A 10x increase in the number of TV shows, however accessible they may be, does not 10x the time any person spends watching television. For a time the “long tail” theory, that you could make a lot of money from niche audiences as long as your total accessible market grew large enough, was in vogue.
This makes sense — it takes a lot of work to engage with a new world and a new cast, with no guarantee at all that they will be worth the effort. If Branded Worlds take enough of the mindshare of the masses that the batting average of original works drops faster than their production cost, then we’ll start seeing even fewer of those.
Original article