IP as Platform
How Entertainment Companies Can Capitalize on Infinite Content
Starting April 2025, all full posts, including archived posts, will be available on my Substack, The Mediator.
Last month, I published a post called Forget Peak TV, Here Comes Infinite TV. It made the case that over the next 5–10 years, several technologies (including virtual production and AI) will cause the quality distinction between professionally-produced and user-generated content to blur, resulting in effectively “infinite” high-quality video.
Putting aside the specific technologies, there are two basic ideas here that I think are hard to refute: 1) technology generally makes it possible to do more with less; and 2) the collective creative energy of the general population is far greater than the tiny percentage of people who have navigated the established system for creating content.
We have already seen both play out in journalism and music. What once required an entire newspaper printing and distribution infrastructure to accomplish can now be done with Substack; what once required a record label now can be done with Logic Pro and Spotify. The vast, vast majority of self-published writing and music is not worth reading or listening to. But some is. Today, some of the best journalists in the world never worked at a newspaper and most new superstar music acts emerge from the tail of self-distributed music. The arc of technology suggests that inevitably film and TV will face the same dynamics. This doesn’t mean the end of Hollywood. But it has the potential to be extremely disruptive.
Rather than focus on the threat, let’s focus on the opportunity. Suppose you were running an entertainment company and you bought the premise. Could you capitalize on it? Even if you think the trends I’m describing are years away, the recent explosion of activity and attention around AI make the question worth asking now.
One way to harness this creative energy, as opposed to fighting or dismissing it, is to think of your IP as a platform.
Tl;dr:
- It’s easy to see why “infinite TV” could be extremely disruptive for entertainment companies. But they can also capitalize on it.
- “IP as platform” means enabling and encouraging creators to expand on your intellectual property and curating this fan content for consumers.
- This may sound like a radical idea, but fan art is an inherent part of the music business and the gaming industry has been built by commercializing emergent fan behaviors.
- Not every entertainment franchise will inspire fan creation. But facilitating fan art could have several benefits for entertainment companies, such as strengthening their relationships with their most ardent fans and attracting new ones; providing free marketing; possibly sourcing new stories and talent; and boosting revenue. Plus, it might be hard to prevent even if they wanted to.
- I discuss a basic framework for how all this might work.
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