The final panel at OnHollywood focused on "consumer generated media," which was the major undercurrent at the conference. As Ted Cohen of EMI Music said, "The audience is taking over the programming," creating and distributing content outside of the traditional entertainment industry channels. The networks aren't totally clueless about leveraging the Internet. CBS (Viacom) launched Innertude, an ad-supported broadband channel with some original series produced for the Internet, Each person or business can be a media enterprise, but not necessarily of any quality. new programming that is a companion to popular CBS shows and encores episodes for CBS's library. But the networks are on a collision course with content created outside of the network and studio system. Content consumers will have many more choices about where to place their attention, changing how people watch 'TV.' They''ll still watch shows like CSI, including outtakes, remixes and other related content via the Web, but also have access to tens of thousands of consumer-generated audio/video micro-channels on the Web.
"Consumer generated media" is not much of better term than the more commonly used "user generated content." Citizen media isn't much better, but the point is that rich content from every corner of the planet is exploding online for all the obvious reasons. The super-sized poster children are MySpace and YouTube, but there are hundreds of other sites that give users tools and palletes for self-expression and creative license.Consumer generated media panelists, from left: Mary Hodder (Dabble), Cynthia Francis (Reality Digital) and Ron Bloom (Podshow)
Each person or business can be a media enterprise, but not necessarily of any quality. Mary Hodder, CEO of Dabble, a video search and remix startup, said that most consumer-generated content could be described as "crap," but aimed at smaller numbers of people it can have value. For many creators money is not the value proposition, Hodder continued. Attribution, reputation, authority and personal brands have value to users. That said, value is associated with financial gain. Some startups are pioneering ways for media creators to monetize their work.
Steven Starr's company Revver has developed a sponsorship marketplace. monetizing consumer-generated video content with ads. Hodder said the the ads have to be tuned for the medium--you can't have a 3-minute ad in front of a 30-second video. As people get paid for their efforts, they quality can improve and sustainable business can be created, Starr said. Atom Entertainment CEO Miko Salmi added that quality not the key--different audiences have different reactions and sensibilities. For some niche audiences the production qualities are less relevant to the experience. Atom Entertainment aggregates and distributes games, short films, and animations on the Web.