In The Future, All TV's will be triangular...

Deep in the depths of the early 1990's, before I turned to writing full time, I was a producer on a show called media television.

media television was fairly revolutionary for its time. How revolutionary? In the second program, the show profiled the first issue of a brand-new magazine called WIRED. We were (arguably) one of the first programs to regularly display our email address at the end of the show. mediatv was slugged "the modern art & science of persuasion." We covered the intersection of advertising, modern television and emerging new media. This is back in the day when everyone called it "the information superhighway."

For whatever reason, Toronto's always been a hotbed for the whole "prognostication on the future of media" industry. We had Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. We also had Citytv, which, along with shows like media television was the brainchild of a Canadian media shaman and raconteur named Moses Znaimer. Once upon a time, Citytv was a mind-blower of a local station. In shows like The New Music, it did MTV before MTV was even a wisp. It went to an all videotape newscast while other stations were intoning, "film at 11..." It also got those newscasters out from behind the desk. Today, if you watch Citytv, it's a pale shadow of its former self -- like everything else in media, it's chasing the same trends and dollars, and is now in the pleasing shareholders business -- but once upon a time, it was a weird, wonderful, and mind expanding place to be.

What working on media television gave me was a front seat for the rise of the first internet hype bubble. Over a period of four years, I interviewed all manner of futurists, visionaries, prognosticators and analysts -- along with a passel of twenty-one year old geniuses who were burning through millions in venture capital, but who giggled any time you said, "how are you eventually going to make money at this?"

Well, we know pretty much how that ended now, don't we?

I look back on my experience at media television as kind of the geek equivalent of the journey Cameron Crowe's eponymous narrator goes through in Almost Famous. I can tell you what I saw at the revolution. But in the end, what it mostly added up to was bullshit.

I've been mostly inoculated against the "where things are going" virus since. Especially on the internet, it seems, any discussion of changes in distribution models seem to be driven by people with a very shaky understanding of consumer behavior, economics, psychology, business, and techology...take your pick, really... William Goldman famously opined that "Nobody Knows Anything." And when it comes to the changing nature of how TV will be distributed, he couldn't be more right.

Not that it stops people from trying.

In New York, a writer I quite like, Adam Sternbergh, tackles the implications of subscription TV, and how TV on the Ipod might spin out and change the distribution model of TV. Read it here.

Sternbergh makes some interesting points, but he also falls pretty far down that prognostication well. Over at Brollywood, John Sullivan points out the major flaw in Sternbergh's argument: what he calls, "The Josh Paradox."

Basically, it's all well and good to say that advertising is irrelevant, and that the Joss Whedons of the world can cut out networks and sell directly to consumers -- but that belies the fact that no one is going to pre-buy from someone they don't know. So you need the reputation first. And how do you build that reputation without big media companies and their promotional push behind you?

This is exactly the same argument as "artists don't need labels anymore." No. Madonna doesn't need them. Elton John doesn't need them. If you're a young band just starting out, sure, you can post your album on your website. Like 2 million other bands. Now. What do you do next?

I know that this is not hard and fast. I recognize comics like Dane Cook have been able to leverage the 'net to bypass some of the traditional routes to success. And yes, the Nobody Knows Everything dictum applies to the gatekeepers and big companies, too: FOX did cancel Family Guy, then reverse themselves. DVD sales are changing how success is measured, and definitely have affected how serialized you can make your stories -- but the problem with predicting how things will play out down the road is that you can never, ever take into account all the variables in all the right proportions -- never mind account for the "X Factor" -- that nebulous accident that could change everything.

What do I find interesting in media trends? Well, I think that the product placement thing will probably continue and increase. Hopefully, it'll be subtle, like Ford's alliance with 24. But maybe not. I also think the recent trend of single sponsors for shows may continue, and increase. And how interesting is that? That part of the solution to TV's future may come from its past -- the single sponsor show. In a world where everybody has PVR's, maybe breaking into the program for ads six times doesn't make sense.

I think DVD sales will continue to change what gets greenlit, and how long things run.

I think networks and production companies probably will sell reruns at low price points. You will never have to miss LOST again (as I did last night...I'm in Canada, so I can't download it legally from Itunes, but if I could, I'd be there, boom, no problem.)

But if the history of media teaches us anything, it's that things don't get destroyed by technological change. TV did not destroy radio. TV did not destroy movies. Neither did the VCR. To say that we're moving toward a "viewer buys from program maker" model ignores the example of that recent Internet boom: eventually, everyone decided that what they wanted most was entertainment and info from the same sources they got them from before. Big companies had the pockets, and they still had the edge. Maybe it wasn't quite the 100 percent stranglehold it used to be. Maybe it was just...90 percent.

If you were a 500 pound gorilla in the old order, you had a great chance of being one in the new order. Not to say that there wasn't a chance for a new monkey to come along and grab some love, but people still prefer the New York Times to Bennie's Spokane News Hut.

After I moved on from media television, I started working at Canada's version of the Sci-Fi channel. What I noticed there is this: people talk about how they want things first. And some do. Some people probably will pay top dollar. But the other side of that argument is this: no matter how long they've been available on DVD, no matter how many times they've been rerun'ed -- every time we took a show off the air, somewhere, somehow, viewers complained. There is always an audience. There is always someone new to reach. There's always a different way to get to them.

The audience is not monolithic. It's a big tent, and the lesson is that there's no one way that audiences want to consume their entertainment anymore.

So if you're a creative person, what should you make of all these emerging trends?

Well, honestly? I think the only thing you can do is hone what it is you have to offer, and not worry about it. Work on the creative side. I am nowhere near as interested in the idea of how someone will watch TV on an Ipod as I am, for instance, in the fact that in the upcoming King Kong game, we now take for granted that you can "play as Kong, or play as a human." That has way greater implications for people who are trying to create compelling stories than 99 cent downloads from Itunes.

Back in the mediatv days, the big thing was going to be interactive tv. The idea that the videogame would take over the narrative arts. Then you had people like Penn Jillette, who dared to call "bullshit." I'm paraphrasing here, but he said something to the effect that, even 2000 years ago, sitting round the campfire, a storyteller could weave a tale and then stop and ask you, "okay, what happens next?" And you wouldn't care. Because that sucks. What you want is a good story.

And let's face it: everybody thinks they can write. Fans on TV Without Pity will always say that if only those stupid program makers had listened to the fans, the show would have been better. I have one cab driver a week who thinks he could come up with way better stories than what's on tv right now.

Okay. Great.

But they don't do it, do they? And that, my chickens, is the key. Worrying about how the distribution model is changing and 'what that means' is just one more excuse for anyone trying to be creative, not to buckle down and do the really hard thing, which is to get your ass in the seat and get to work.

So by all means, if you're creative and you want to write or create, keep abreast of how things are changing. But don't believe for a second that there's some great egalitarian future out there where you can directly reach out and pluck your audience.

You will always have to deal with the Man.

The trick is to do it in such a way that you don't become the Man.

Because the Man can talk all he likes about how this model or that is going to go...
But yesterday I sat in a room with three writers for six hours, and at the end of it we had two broken out half hour episodes. Funny episodes, where in the morning we had nothing.

And that's the thing that has real value. The rest is just prognostication. Leave that for the pointy heads and MBA's. Work on the stuff that actually matters. And when people tell you how the future is going to be, nod politely and remember that anyone can predict what comes next. Especially if you don't mind being wrong.

But if you can face down the blank page, well, then that's the wine, my friends. The rest is just arguing over the shape of the bottle, and the color of the label.

I'd rather talk about the wine.