III.8 The Television
Industry:
Since
visual images require much more bandwidth than print or music, the digital
revolution has only recently begun to affect the motion picture and television
industries in the past decade. However, once the changes began, they moved with
astonishing speed, and digital technology is now the standard for most film and
television production around the world.
Since television already was an electronic
medium, the television industries of the world have adapted relatively smoothly
to digital technology; once the initial speed bump of the cost of upgrading
infrastructure from analog to digital was passed, business was able to go on as
usual with greatly improved audio and picture quality.
However,
in the very near future, internet television, will completely demolish the
traditional business model for commercial television, which is dependent upon
control of consumer. As a result, as is the case with print media, many
television stations are creating internet channels which can be seen on YouTube
and other websites. Sponsors for commercial television are already dwindling,
and, as they disappear, so will commercial television as we know it; in 2012,
Tim Cook, Chief Executive Officer of Apple, Inc, has been making hints about
the creation of
some
form of i-TV in the very near future, so it is likely that consumers will be
getting television over the internet.[1]
III.9 The
Motion Picture Industry:
For
the American motion picture industry, digital technology has been a mixed
blessing. While production techniques have been streamlined and made more
efficient, production costs for commercial features have actually increased as
producers aim for bigger blockbuster, hoping to cash in on ancillary markets
and spin-offs when the blockbuster becomes a hit.
This
strategy necessitates determining the lowest commercial common denominator to
reach the mass market, which means minimizing variables like creative
expression. In his essay “Conglomerate
Aesthetics- Notes on the Disintegration of Film Language”, American film
critic David Denby describes the aesthetic results:” Constant and incoherent movement: rushed editing strategies; feeble
characterization; pastiche and hapless collage – these are the elements of
conglomerate aesthetics and there’s something more going on here than bad
filmmaking in such a collection of attention-getting swindles…What we have now
is not just a raft of routine bad pictures but the first massively successful
nihilistic cinema.”[2]
Denby
is cautiously optimistic about the impact of digital technology on production,
noting that cheaper production costs might well result in the birth of new
cinema movements around the world, though he cannot name one.
Meanwhile,
the clock would seem to be running out on the analog motion picture industry.
In January, 2012, Nick James wrote in the British cinema periodical Sight and Sound that: “ January 2012 will apparently mark the
point at which there will be more digital screens in the world industry than
analog, and by the end of 2012 it is estimated that 35mm production’s share of
the global market will decline to 37 per cent. What’s more, mainstream usage of
35mm will have vanished from the USA by the end of 2013, with Western Europe
set to be all digital in the mainstream one year later.”[3]
As was the case with the American music
industry, the American motion picture industry has made the war on file sharing
a top priority, and has embarked upon international crusades to shut down file
sharing sites such as Limewire, Megaupload, Demonoid and Pirate Bay. Owners of
these websites have been tracked down and arrested under international warrants
in countries like New Zealand and Cambodia.
Meanwhile,
ISP providers in Europe have begun to police the downloading habits of their
customers, punishing those who download from file sharing sites with fines and
removal of access to internet.[4]
Nonetheless, sales of DVDs are still falling every year, and soon the video
store will be as obsolete as the music store, not to mention the bookstore.
Meanwhile, cinema attendance figures continue
to decline around the world, as the increased availability of increasingly
inexpensive widescreen HD digital televisions make staying at home to watch
movies with family and friends a more convenient and, in the long run, a more
economical option than going to the movie theatre.
The
decline of the international motion picture industry began over two decades
ago, according to the late American intellectual and film critic Susan Sontag ,
who wrote in 1995 :”Cinema’s 100 years
seem to have the shape of a life cycle: an inevitable birth, the steady
accumulation of glories and the onset in the last decade of an ignominious,
irreversible decline.. Cinema, once heralded as the art of the 20th
century, seems now, as the century closes numerically, to be a decadent art. Perhaps
it is not cinema that has ended but only cinephilia – the name of the very
specific kind of love that cinema inspired…” [5]
Like
Denby, Sontag attributed the decline of the medium primarily to the
astronomical rise in production costs of Hollywood productions and the
concurrent reliance on the huge blockbuster loaded with special effects and
stars. She concludes her essay on a pessimistic note:” … if cinephilia is dead, then movies are dead too..”[6]
Nonetheless,
today, a bit over a decade and a half later, cinema is still very much with us,
albeit permeated by a digital technology which is changing the medium
profoundly and dramatically. Among other things, digital effects have created
the potential for entirely new dimensions of artifice of a kind the early
French cinema pioneer George Melies could have only dreamt of. Indeed, some
critics have gone so far as to predict that:“ all movies will be animated or computer-generated within fifteen
years.”[7]
In
addition, the entire viewing experience has been radically transformed from a
group endeavor in a movie theatre to a very private one - on a cellphone or a laptop. Some, like the
legendary French cineaste Jean-Luc
Godard, also see a profound difference between the rhythmic flicker of analog
film 24 frames per second, and the unbroken stream of digital light even when
moving digital images are projected on a screen.
Regardless,
there appears to be a general consensus that, although Hollywood studios are
still finding inventive ways to make money, the Twentieth Century art form
known as cinema no longer exists. [8]In
the words of James Monaco,” After ninety
years of dominating the way we view our world – a long, tempestuous and
rewarding life- cinema has quietly passed on.”[9]
[1] http://www.idownloadblog.com/2012/06/01/munster-itv-in-the-works/
[2]
David Denby (Do the Movies Have a
Future?) Simon and Schuster, 2012, p.32
[3]
Nick James ( Editorial in Sight and
Sound, January, 2012) as quoted in David Thompson’s THE BIG SCREEN, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. P. 509
[4]
The many copyright issues raised by the Digital Revolution will be dealt with
in greater details in Chapter VIII, Fair
Use and Copyright Conflict
[5]
Susan Sontag (Frankfurter Rundschau, 1995) southerncrossreview.org/43/sontag-cinema.htm
[6]
Susan Sontag ( ibid)
[7]
Bruce Goldstein(“Flashback; The Year in
Movies”) Village Voice, December 28, 1999
[8]
Even in 1987, the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman was quoted by Lasse
Svanberg as saying that he did not think the film medium would survive.( ibid)p.74
[9]
Monaco ( ibid) p. 421
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