The Multimedia Sound and Fury: Let’s Get Real
When the gurus of multimedia peer into Hollywood, they see a community just aching to be transformed by silicon implants. They see silicon turning television sets into home computers and movies into video games. They see telephone companies evolving into interactive cable TV networks. Multimedia mantras, such as “don’t just merge, converge,” increasingly dominate the innovation dialogue.
So Silicon Valley’s digerati and Hollywood’s more analog moguls now woo each other with the sort of passion you see only when the pheromones of Really Big Money are wafting in the breeze.
IBM just signed a multimedia deal with “Terminator II” creator James Cameron. Time Warner owns a huge chunk of 3D0, an aspiring Silicon Valley multimedia concern. Paramount recently launched a Silicon Valley “new media” group; Barry Diller swears tomorrow belongs to interactive home shopping; Matsushita and Sony are desperately trying to wring synergies from their U.S. pop culture factories. Microsoft and Apple Computer will talk to anyone with a video library. And Michael Ovitz’s minions at Creative Artists Agency are programmed to materialize wherever the word multimedia appears.
So will all these multimedia matings invent the future of pop culture--or merely put it into high-tech turnaround?
All this activity would indicate that something truly important is going on. Alas, that’s emphatically not the case. The sound and fury surrounding multimedia is reminiscent of the joke Silicon Valley entrepreneurs love to tell.
Question: What do you get when you cross a lemming with a sheep?
Answer: A venture capitalist.
Today, the punch line is “multimedia investor.” Ask around Hollywood--or Silicon Valley, for that matter--and no two companies will agree on what multimedia is. Some believe that it is the convergence of publishing, broadcasting and movies; others believe that it is anything on CD-ROM; still others insist that it is the digitalization of information so that everything from “Jane Eyre” to “Howdy Doody” to “The Crying Game” is represented in bits and bytes of computerese.
Normally, the entertainment industry would get jittery over such an absence of consensus. But that hasn’t happened with multimedia because the concept is so seductive. It seems right and sounds right that the lines between video and film are blurring; it seems technically feasible--if not inevitable--that video games can be television programs and vice versa.
And who would deny that telephone companies and cable operators probably have more in common than not? When you really understand the flow of technological innovation, multimedia makes perfect sense.
Unfortunately, it is precisely at this point that the inevitability of multimedia collapses as cruelly as the Dutch tulip craze centuries earlier. Trend ain’t destiny. Just because technology permits previously disparate media to converge doesn’t mean that the marketplace will give a hoot about that convergence.
What makes anybody think that the public is prepared to pay a premium for all that multimedia? Look at the history of pop culture technologies and you’ll note that the public has never been willing to pay a premium for technologies that integrate different media. Mass media consumers have always been subsidized--either by advertisers or economies of scale.
Literacy didn’t become a pop phenomenon until society had the penny dreadfuls and a host of other cheap print media. Radio didn’t take off as a mass medium until radios became cheap. The same is true of television (where the programming, initially, was also “free”). The overwhelming majority of American households weren’t even prepared to pay a premium for color television when it was first offered.
Most recently, the VCR and CD player didn’t invade the living room until their prices collapsed from over $1,000 to under $300. Don’t forget that VCR software was also either free or rentable for under $2 a night.
Sure, people are willing (for a time) to pay a premium for a Walkman or a camcorder--not because of their power to “integrate” media, but because they deliver a known value for the price. Indeed, these technologies have succeeded in the marketplace precisely because of their cozy media familiarity, not because of their multimedia novelty.
In fact, consider the possibility that many people will actually choose not to take advantage of multimedia. Their notion of interactive television isn’t video games or computerized “Star Trek”--it’s pressing the channel changer on the remote-control unit.
No one should doubt that media technologies really are redrawing both the conceptual and technical boundaries between Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Tokyo. But it is the most foolish--and expensive--form of mass delusion to believe that this automatically means that companies will be able to charge more for the hardware and software. If history is any guide, they won’t. It’s time to, um, deprogram the cult of multimedia.
