Part 2 – What
In Part 1, I discussed the Double Standard of The Director’s Guild in stopping firms like Clean Flicks from editing their movies to provide cleaned up versions of their fare, but turning a blind eye to HBO Asia, who edits
There is a tectonic shift under way. We have already discussed the democratization of media. We have talked about the challenges to traditional publishing. There is a shift from tightly controlled by a small elite group media production and distribution to a chaotic broad based, user controlled consumption.
Maybe only Chili Palmer can make the jump between the two industries. Has
Probably not. The music industry still hasn’t learned their own lessons. They are still practicing thug tactics against Midwestern moms and their 13 year-old daughters.
Napster unleashed a pent-up market demand for audiences to “consume culture [and content] on their own terms – not the producers.”
That is why iTunes has sold over 1 billion unbundled songs – Consumers are able to access the content they want. They are able to be their own producer and create their own playlist and burn their own cd with songs that they want, instead of being forced to buy an entire album to get the only 1 or 2 songs worth listening to.
Michael Apted, the President of the Directors Guild, in regards to the
"Audiences can now be assured that the films they buy or rent are the vision of the filmmakers who made them and not the arbitrary choices of a third-party editor."
Could not a record producer make the same claim?
I have a certain vision of how the album flow should go and you can’t break it into different chunks and repackage them.
Yet every MP3 playlist is exactly that. Arbitrary choices of a third-party editor.
Clean Flicks, by providing edited versions of
Hollywood is teetering on the edge of a precipice. As the barriers to video-on-demand fall, as services such as YouTube catchs hold, as it becomes easier to get that movie from your Tivo or PVR onto your iPod, Hollywood will discover that consumers will continue to demand to play a hand in editing, altering, remixing, mashing up their content. Or as Umair Haque states, content becomes plastic – moldable, mixable, and reemerging in different forms.
Hollywood can continue to hunker down behind the castle walls and let their 
lawyers slay their dragons. They can continue to brow beat us with guilt-ridden ads about piracy. They can even equip ushers with night vision goggles to capture pirates wielding camcorders.
But this shift, this continued democratization of media, of the audience getting content on its own terms, and able to consume it how they want, when they want, will only grow stronger.
The Director’s Guild shuts down Clean Flicks and other third parties, yet they do not step in to fill the vacuum and provide the product themselves. Why?
They are willing to meet the market demand for raunchier, more explicit, or more violent versions of their films.
Why are they not willing to meet this market demand for cleaner versions of their film? If they don’t provide it, someone, somewhere will provide it.
Nick Gillespie adeptly summed up these points:
CleanFlicks was simply part of a great and liberatory trend in which audiences are empowered to consume culture on their own terms—not the producers'. Big content providers may have prevailed in this specific case, but the sooner they understand and adapt to a much larger and more powerful cultural dynamic, the better they'll be at serving the audiences who are increasingly in control of what they watch, listen to, and read.
Hollywood either has to embrace and enable (thus having the ability to influence) this shift, or some outside entity will fill the void (legally or illegally) and change the rules.
Five years ago, who would have believed that Apple Computers would have been one of the biggest forces in the music industry?
Posted by: Hal Halladay | July 14, 2006 5:16 PM | Permalink to Comment