Accessing the Cinematic Cloud
The demise of Blockbuster Video has become a kind of shorthand for describing what might be called the end of the video store era. Video stores, we are told, can no longer compete with the many different forms of digital delivery, whether streaming videos or digital downloads. But as I informally survey my students, colleagues, and other avid consumers of movies, much less Hollywood trade publications, there is still quite a bit of uncertainty about what comes next. Part of this challenge entails the difficulty of finding, accessing, and paying for movies on digital platforms. For this reason, I have been fascinated by some recent discussion in film industry blogs and trade publications that sought to compare the experience of paying for digital access to a movie to the early experience of using an ATM, a metaphor that seems to offer quite a bit of potential for describing how we will be buying and watching movies and television shows in the near future.
The ATM metaphor seems to originate with a comment made by Lori McPherson, the executive vice president of global product management for Walt Disney Studios, during a panel at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January 2012. In her discussion of how consumers might grasp the idea of cloud storage, McPherson remarked that “The exciting thing for content in the cloud is any consumer who has used an ATM machine should intuitively understand what it is now.” McPherson, of course, is arguing that our familiarity with interfaces that enable us to conduct transactions also allow us to grasp how accessing movies and TV shows online might work. We know that we can go to virtually any ATM and obtain cash and conduct many other basic transactions.
Screenwriter John August expanded on this metaphor in a blog post that, in many ways, helped me to rethink some of my own assumptions about digital delivery. As August points out, this early experimental stage of cloud distribution might be compared to the first generation of ATMs, which introduced a number of “bugs” that banks and software writers needed to work out. August points out that initially some ATMs would take your card while others wouldn’t, and some demanded longer PINs than others, initially making it difficult to adjust for some consumers. I would add that we should also consider the degree to which consumers had to be “taught” to accept the practice of conducting transactions without the presence of a banker. Users had to be assured that an ATM transaction was as “real” as one completed by a person, which is probably why so many ATM networks were anthropomorphized (my bank featured Tillie the Teller). The issues of cloud ownership continue to be perplexing for many consumers who want the tangibility of physical media. But eventually consumers adjusted as ATM interfaces became more standardized, and Tillie was retired (and her bank has been swallowed up twice by even bigger banks).
August raises some other interesting complications. First, is the fact that money is “fungible.” All $20 bills are essentially equivalent, but movies are not identical, and one network or delivery service may have the movie you want, while other services don’t. As digital catalogs remain incomplete, I think this will be an ongoing problem. The backlash against Netflix over the last year has been due in large part because their streaming catalog features only a limited portion of our cinematic history and excludes most new releases. August describes this term as an industry need for differentiation. Each piece of hardware (or interface) needs to offer features that differentiate it from its competitors.
August goes on to argue that the ATM metaphor can help us to understand the ongoing struggle between the consumer’s desire for standardization and the industry’s need for differentiation and uses this conflict to illustrate why some early forms of digital delivery, including UltraViolet, seem likely to fail. As August implies, the confusion about digital copies leads consumers to feel uncertain about digital lockers and other unstable platforms like UltraViolet. These points all seem relevant to me, but I think that August’s exploration of the ATM metaphor could be taken even further, especially in light of some of the current complaints about banking. First, it’s not quite true that our ATM cards work “anywhere.” When my family was traveling abroad, some of our ATM cards didn’t work in Spain, forcing us to use others. Although there may have been other factors at play, it’s worth considering whether and how geography will matter in these new forms of cloud storage and distribution. More crucially, banks charge fees if you go outside of your “network” and, in at least one instance, sought to charge users a monthly fee just for using a debit card. Once we have paid for movies that are on the cloud, how will ownership of those movies be defined? Finally, what sorts of information are we providing to the media industries when we make these online rentals and purchases?
Mark Andrejevic’s recent Antenna post, in which he discusses the new regimes of privacy in the era of digital delivery, answers at least some of these questions. As Andrejevic points out, companies are allowed to collect vast amounts of data on these online purchases, and our digital trails–through tweets, Facebook updates, Netflix reviews, and purchases–often mean that consumers are doing much of the work of data compilation for these companies, practices that August associates with the term “targeted messaging.” Andrejevic acknowledges that users are, for the most part, voluntarily sacrificing their privacy.
The digital multiplex opens up any number of possibilities for distribution and storage models. As John Calkins of Sony observes, these delvery systems may provide a new home for special features and interactive media. But I think we are well served by thinking about the intersections between digital delivery of movies and ATMs, about the fantasies of personalization, convenience, and ubiquitous access, as well as the real costs of these new delivery models.
Another way in which ATMs and digital/streaming movie services are alike is that both artificially limit out activities (capping how much money we can take out at a time, or which movies we can access). But, another key difference is that it is very difficult to discover just how many movies Netflix, Amazon Prime, and similar services possess. These services are database-driven, and the interface is designed to resist our attempts to be completists of any genre, director, star, etc.
[…] case you missed it elsewhere, I have a new post on the Antenna Blog, “Accessing the Cinematic Cloud,” which responds to John August’s comparison of digital movie delivery with ATMs. […]
I am curious what happens to all that information that is stored in a cloud that is not used. The Cloud seems very fascinating, yet, a problem that I see with the continued development of new technology is the amount of virtual junk that is in the air…
Good points, both about the degree to which our access is controlled and about the limits on completism. In fact, it’s relatively unlikely that any single database/service will have control over or rights to all of the films of a single director, much less a full collection of, say, film noir or silent-era comedies.
I think you’re heralding the rise of a third-party consultancy (industry), rather like a personal media shopper, who receives the titles of works in all of your libraries and extrapolates your interests and means for you to access content from all of the sources and aggregators whose interest in their customers (as opposed to consumers) is less-encyclopedic, more protective of your privacy and significantly less proprietary. Customerizing the consumer media industry.
I’m not quite sure I follow your observation. But I think the subscription model has its limits, in part because we might end up paying multiple services for small parts of the cinematic pie (rather than simply going to a video store where no membership fee is required).
I think there could be a need for a meta-aggregator, and GoWatchIt.com is growing on me, although it’s unclear to me (at this point) what the privacy and proprietary issues might end up being. Still, the idea that we can access any movie anytime and anywhere is largely a fiction, one that the ATM metaphor doesn’t quite grasp.
Thank you. Branded sources of entertainment have traditionally pushed product toward consumers. In this present period of transition, distributors of content and the new aggregators have refined the pushing process within proprietary constraints.
The logical next step involves and pull-agent, one who knows the tastes and interests of the individual customer (books, films, television, music…) and proposes titles for the customer’s exploration, regardless of the proprietary limitations governing the pushers. A TA for each member of the audience, furnishing routes of custom access to specific content for the continuing education of interested individuals, whether the quest is for the creative work of Franklin Pangborn, or the pronouncements of Ronald Neame, or Tim Minear’s condemnation of the modern broadcast network’s ability to find an audience.
I think the need surely does exists for a meta-aggregator, as you say. And that it has yet to be met for reasons that revolve around enfeebling financial competition between proprietary domains. Thanks also for GoWatchIt.
AdditionallY, the selection of the ATM that reduces the probability of customer mugging (by the bank or mugger), and the presentation of content that runs counter to the proscribed interests and avidities of the customer would be the responsibility of the pull-agent. Which means of access to content is more favorable to the content creator than the studio/distributor/aggregator? An agency dedicated to the service and protection of the enduser and content creator, rather than the middlepeople.
Robin, in some cases, it seems that “virtual junk” eventually gets taken down, but in others, we are left with websites, videos, and music that don’t run properly. I think that one big concern there will be that some filmmakers will not be able to pay for upgrades and films that are digital-only could get “lost” as formats evolve over time. We need to give these failures and gaps much more attention that they are receiving.
Other factors to consider: not all services stream high quality images, I can’t select the language or type of subtitles, not enough closed captioning, I don’t have access to commentary tracks or special features, and I have to go online instead of watching when and where I want. I still want my dvds for these reasons.
All good points. Some services are expanding their offerings of “special features,” but many of those come at an extra cost. And I agree that physical media, i.e., DVDs, will die much more slowly than people expect.