The Four Horsemen of the TV Apocalypse

What Happens When Barriers to Entry Fall in Content Creation Too?

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For a revised and shorter version of this essay, please see Forget Peak TV, Here Comes Infinite TV.

Source: Stable Diffusion 2, prompt: “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”

“Everybody’s a dreamer and everybody’s a star
And everybody’s in movies, it doesn’t matter who you are” — The Kinks, Celluloid Heroes

Apologies, this is a long one. I’ll get right to the point.

Tl;dr:

• There is a lot of hand wringing in the entertainment business right now as it grapples with the decline of the traditional pay TV business and realization that streaming video will not be as profitable as hoped. Disney CEO Bob Iger recently called it “an age of great anxiety.”
• Every corner of the TV and film value chain is affected: talent, agencies, advertisers, networks, stations, distributors, theaters, you name it.
• One notable thing about all this angst: it has been caused primarily by disruption of the way TV and films are distributed and, to a lesser extent, changes in how they are consumed. The way they are created, however, has not changed much.
• In fact, while the Internet caused the costs to distribute content to plummet over the last decade or so, the cost to produce TV series and films has risen dramatically. It’s expensive and risky and consequently is still dominated by only a handful of big companies.
• So, what happens if the barriers to produce “high quality” content fall too?
• In this essay, I discuss four trends that, collectively, could disrupt video content creation over the next 5-10 years. Several are early, but they are not theoretical. They are all happening now.
• The explosion of short form may change consumers’ definition of quality, lowering the bar for production values; the hand-in-glove technologies virtual production and AI are on a path to dramatically reduce the labor and time required — and therefore the costs — to produce high production value content; and web3 has the potential to lessen the risk of financing production.
• I am not making a value judgment about these trends, especially AI, which is deeply unsettling to many. They are progressing whether one thinks they are good or bad.
• It is difficult to foresee all the implications now, but they could have a more profound effect on the entertainment business in the next decade than what occurred over the prior one.

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