“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” quipped A. J. Liebling, the editor of the New Yorker, in 1960. Thanks to desktop publishing and the Internet, this quip has been relegated to a droll artifact of the linotype era. Today everybody with a smartphone owns a publishing system.
Now mobile video and YouTube are doing the same to television as PostScript did to printing with breathtaking speed.
The first time I saw mobile video was in 1999. I was senior vice president of Digital Media at Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE), and my job was to figure out how to make a business out of Sony’s vast library of great TV shows and movies on the Internet, interactive TV, and mobile. My colleague Tim Chambers had come across a company called PacketVideo Corporation at a trade show. “They claim they can stream video to a mobile phone,” Tim told me, so we invited the company to visit us at the SPE campus in Culver City, California.
I’ll never forget that meeting. The two founders, Jim Brailean and Jim Carol, arrived carrying a big duffle bag from which they pulled out a pile of electronic components that they set on the gleaming mahogany conference table in our offices. There lay a long green circuit board, the color screen from a dismantled Compaq iPAQ handheld computer, the antenna of a wireless Sprint PCS phone, and a small set of speakers from a laptop computer. The entire mess was held together with alligator clips and wires that curled all over the conference table. It looked like they had spilled the random contents of a nerd’s high school locker in front of us. But when they turned their funky assemblage on,
something magical happened. A movie trailer flickered across the screen. It was a Sony Pictures film!
It wasn’t loaded on the device, but, using the cell phone antenna, they were able to receive data at the very thin rate of 14.4 Kbps. They were streaming video live from the Internet over the air.
The quality of the video signal was not great. In fact, it was atrocious, but I was hooked anyway. I knew exactly what was going to happen next: the components would eventually be miniaturized and embedded into a future chipset for mobile phones, the chips would get more powerful, and the radio signal would be faster. Color screens and tiny speakers would be embedded in phones too. It was immediately obvious to me that every mobile phone would eventually play video. We were going to turn the phone into an entertainment device, just like the computer a decade earlier.
In 1999 it seemed laughable that anyone could be excited by these video clips. In the earliest days, the video was grainy and would freeze, and sometimes the phone would overheat or crash.
Occasionally, during demonstrations, we had to use a cable to connect the phone to a handheld computer because the phone didn’t have a color screen that could refresh fast enough to display video. In retrospect it was hilariously bad. It took heroic amounts of imagination to envision mobile video as anything other than a novelty.
Most of my friends in the TV business thought I had lost my marbles. They said, “TV belongs on a television, just like music belongs on a stereo.” In their opinion, judging from the standards of
broadcast TV, the video quality on mobile phones was terrible. It was too hard to get a signal, too hard to use, and too grainy to bother watching. Besides, mobile data was expensive. They couldn’t imagine how it would ever improve. Who was going to pay for such a service?
What no one could have imagined at the time was just how big the change would be, and how fast it would occur. In a way it was a repeat of the digital transformation that had swept through the
typesetting industry. In 1980 nobody used computers for typesetting or page design. By 1990 the entire advertising, publishing, and design industry had adopted it. Similarly, in 2000 nobody was using mobile phones for video. Just a decade later, everybody did.
The TV industry may not be entirely aware of it yet, but a sleeping giant has been roused. The activated audience will behave in ways that are completely different than the passively programmed audience of yesterday. Already we are becoming our own individual broadcasters. We post and share video on social networks so routinely, we take it for granted. We are making our own shows, telling our own stories, documenting our own experiences. In the process we are erecting something that will soon overshadow mass media and transmit massive change rapidly through society.
The greatest TV networks in the world are limited in their reach to one single nation, one language, one audience. In contrast, digital media can easily transcend the traditional barriers of language, culture, geography, and even state censorship. And social media is the fuel in the mobile rocketship.
The versatile smartphone puts a printing press, a camera, a personal TV station in one device that is always accessible to capture any incident or inspiration. The social network is the personal broadcast system to transmit information to friends and followers, who retransmit. We are exchanging ideas faster than any previous society on Earth.
As I write this, more than one-quarter of humanity belongs to a social network, according to research firm eMarketer. Seventy percent of the adults in industrialized nations own at least one smartphone. Of those smartphone users, more than 75 percent use the device to watch video. And, even more amazingly, more than 70 percent use their smartphone to create content: to record and share video and photos on social networks. That’s more than a billion people creating, sharing, and watching video on their phones. Among the youngest cohort, the percentage using and creating video is significantly higher. In the span of a single decade, a billion people have taught each other a brand new way to communicate.
Many professionals in the television industry hold a negative opinion of user-generated video.
They dismiss it. They reject it as below TV quality and therefore unworthy of their attention.
Television executives have told me that “YouTube video is Web junk. It’s not important.” Just a few years ago, I would have agreed that Internet video and especially video shot on mobile phones was generally of poor quality. That’s no longer true. Just like desktop publishing, people are learning to do it better.
It doesn’t really matter, however, if the video is good quality or bad according to broadcast standards. On the two-way digital network, relevance equals quality. And TV programming that comes from a broadcast network seems so detached from our normal daily experience that it is often significantly less relevant than other mobile video. Broadcast TV programming is no more or less pertinent than my niece’s video from her trip or my best friend’s video of her son’s wedding. If I am interested in learning to play a piece of music or master a particular cooking technique, a homemade YouTube video can be far more relevant, and therefore higher quality, to me in that moment.
We create more video than ever before, and the rising flood of this user-generated content (UGC)
contains a certain percentage of high-quality clips. It may be a small percentage of the total, perhaps less than 10 percent, but that percentage will remain constant even as the volume grows
exponentially. In other words, the sheer amount of quality UGC video is growing exponentially too, but from a smaller base. It may take longer, but eventually just the high-quality segment of UGC itself will dwarf the output of the Hollywood studios.
What’s also interesting—or terrifying if you are employed by a television network—is that
YouTube’s total video library appears to be growing at an exponential rate, doubling every eighteen to twenty months. In 2007 users uploaded eight hours of video to YouTube each minute. By 2008 the number had nearly doubled to thirteen hours, and by 2009 users were uploading twenty-four hours of video each minute. In 2011 the figure doubled to 48 hours uploaded per minute, and the following year it spiked to seventy-two hours per minute. The amount of video uploaded increases
geometrically.
As of 2014, YouTube reported that people now upload more than 300 hours of video every minute of the day to YouTube. That’s twelve days of video uploaded every minute. The equivalent of
Hollywood’s entire annual output of movies and television shows is uploaded to YouTube in an afternoon. And within two years, this figure will double again. By 2020, at this rate, YouTube fans will be uploading sixty-six days of video per minute. That’s more than ten years’ worth of video every hour.
THE MOBILE PHONE IS NOW THE PRIMARY SCREEN
These numbers are staggering but they are not fiction. There is a simple reason that explains why we can be fairly certain that this doubling will occur, even though these numbers may seem preposterous and hard to achieve. The mobile telecommunications industry is banking on the fact that the number of people using their smartphones to connect to the Internet will also double and double again, from the 1 billion in 2013 to 2 billion in 2016 and 4 billion two or three years after that.
Every year for the rest of this decade, the mobile industry expects to sell at least a billion
smartphones. Some of them will be replacements for existing phones, but about half of them will be sold to first-time users. That’s 500 million new Internet users each year. What’s more, in addition to uploading video and photos, these new users will use their smartphones to buy groceries, obtain financial services, and gain an education. The smartphone is the first and last stop for most information searches. It will support the world’s largest transactional marketplaces.
These new users won’t be using a $600 iPhone. They will probably be using ultra-cheap smartphones like the Firefox phone, designed by Telefónica in partnership with the Mozilla
Foundation. Versions of this phone, which uses an open-source operating system, can be purchased for one-tenth of the price of an iPhone. That price will surely drop as the volume of users rises, which means we’re rapidly approaching an era of the $25 smartphone. The global phone. The free phone.
The everybody phone. Maybe someday soon, the disposable phone. The more people who connect and communicate, the more video will be shared.
It’s really hard to envision this rate of growth, particularly in the beginning. But today every person who uses video, and especially every advertiser, marketer, or producer who deals with television, must recognize the fact that the mobile computer is about to transform the media landscape so
completely that everything we have come to call “television” is about to be reordered. Professionally produced TV programs are a tiny and dwindling percentage of a vast ocean of video that continuously
expands at an exponential rate.
WHAT HAPPENS TO TELEVISION WILL HAPPEN TO YOU
If you don’t happen to work in Hollywood, you may think this tale does not pertain to you. Why should you care about what happens to TV? You need to care because not only is TV the dominant medium of our contemporary culture and the most valuable marketing channel, it’s also how we communicate and share ideas as a society. More importantly, what happens to TV companies will eventually happen to every company faced with vaporization.
Pause for a moment and consider what might happen to your business if it, too, is vaporized. What happens if your product can be delivered digitally by anyone? What happens when you or anyone else can sell direct to consumers? When every customer your industry touches can suddenly respond,
contribute, add to, explain, ask questions, answer them. When peer-to-peer sharing renders your services obsolete. How will your marketing evolve? How will the experience of consumption change? How will you cope with the flood of incoming content?