Rise Of The Consumer Producer, part 2

In a previous post, I described how the proliferation of free video editing technology might create a new generation of Consumer-Producers willing and able to produce reasonable quality content at a fraction of today’s market rates. Who are these Consumer-Producers? They are the generation of kids raised on social media in an era where shooting HD video and publishing the edits to YouTube is common place. The widespread use of no cost editing software and affordable HD cameras by these Consumer-Producers will bottom out the market for low budget TV and web video production and the professionals that remain will work for little or no money per job. After I wrote the original post, a few people asked me what I thought would become of the current middle class of working video editors – the professionals who cut reality TV, magazine shows, news packages, how-to shows, etc. Will there still be a need for that content? Absolutely. In fact there will be massively more need for content as the delivery mechanism shifts away from networks and cable TV and onto the web. Web video on the TV is already a viable platform, and there will likely be a point in the near future where the viewer doesn’t distinguish cable TV content from Web delivered content. It will all be on-demand, and piped to your 50″ TV in High Definition. Sadly for the producer/editors working on that kind of TV content, the massive increase in production is going to result in lower production standards, reducing the skill level necessary to work in TV. The requisite skill level will fall until it meets the rising skill level of the Consumer-Producers, and we’ll have a new crop of pseudo professionals who won’t know that the previous generation of TV Producers and Editors were drastically over paid.

There is a fairly recent precedent for what I am describing. Some of you may remember the Telecommunications Act of 1996. It sounds totally boring, but it was a defining event that reshaped the television business. Basically, the big media conglomerates lobbied President Clinton and the Congress to reduce the restrictions on how many cable channels one company could own and operate. The President was happy to comply, and moguls like Rupert Murdoch were able to acquire and create as many cable channels as they could afford. In 1996, they could afford quite a few. That led to the wide proliferation in cable channels that clutter our dial today, and an explosion in content production to fill those channels. They needed it fast, they needed it cheap (compared to network TV budgets), and they didn’t necessarily care if it was good. So we had a massive increase in content demand, and a lowering of the delivery standards. This created a massive employment boom in Los Angeles, and there were jobs for every warm body, including me. Happening at the same time was the integration of desktop video into post production. Avid had been around since 1989, but it took 6 or 7 years for the technology to be broadly useful for producing TV content. Even at $100,000 per system, the Avid still represented a substantial savings over traditional post production, with a huge gain in editing productivity. By 1996 every production company in town was buying an Avid, but experienced editors were slow to adopt the workflow, creating a staffing vacancy filled by young editors who grasped the technology and worked for less money than their veteran counterparts. So there you go — less experienced editors employed for less money by the the virtue of cheaper, more accessible technology to service a boom in content demand.

Fast forward 15 years or so. We have another boom in video content production, and the technology of editing is about to become freeware. So what happens to the professional Producer/Editor when basic post-production skills become common knowledge? It occurred to me that the few Producer/Editors who were still paid for their services will be treated more like freelance writers, producing segments from home offices using web based editing tools and footage shared over the internet. These freelancers will produce and edit the bulk of TV and web content; magazine shows, clip shows, news stories, reality TV, short form webisodes, etc. Will any of them be Walter Murch? No, they won’t. But they will probably have the skills to produce and edit effective content on par with contemporary reality TV, except they’ll do it for a fraction of the money without creating overhead for the production. Basically, the business of post-production will become less about setting up a shop and arranging technology, and more about aggregating and managing freelance Producer/Editors working on a broad range of lower quality video productions to fulfill the boom in content. Yes, its a “long-tail” model. In the long-tail, aggregators win and producers lose, and the middle class of Producer/Editors gets squeezed out by better equipped freelancers with a greater understanding of the market.

If you want to stay in the business of post-production, but you’d prefer to live like a fat cat, then you can try to join the elite 1% who work on ultra expensive, high profile tent pole entertainment. More on that in a future post…