The Emmy® Awards, New York Chapter National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences 1375 Broadway Suite 2103 New York, NY 10018 Ph 212-459-3630 Fx 212-459-9772
Less than a decade ago, if you wanted to get into the television business there were of course certain barriers. The obvious ones were talent, skill and willpower…but there were “technical” ones as well. The gateway to success was zealously guarded by a few “gatekeepers” with large capital investments, armies of engineers, and platoons of their very own technically oriented artisans.
For people with something to contribute, it exacted a heavy toll. By the mid-nineties, the cost of studio time reached an all time high and the complexity of the technology made it a conspiracy against the laity.
That was then.
Now, many of the biggest post-production houses in New York have closed, National, Post Perfect and East Side to name a few. And although there were many reasons for the end of this era, the biggest was simply -- there were no more gates to guard.
What does this mean? Technology, once the bastion of the “rich and famous” is now available to everyone who wants it. Programs like Final Cut, Nuendo, Pro-Tools, Logic and After Effects can easily be combined to create broadcast quality television and music - all in the comfort of your living room running on a desktop computer. What was once a million dollar installation can now be duplicated for under $20,000. For all practical purposes, there is no longer a barrier to entry into our industry.
Of itself, this is not news. The endless pursuit of cheaper production and manufacture built our entire country. From the days of Andrew Carnegie to every corner of our present global economy, businessmen seek lower production costs to increase profits.
But in our case, the ramifications are thought provoking in a different way. One of the qualities of the “barrier to entry” into our business was that only big successful choosers of content flourished -- the Networks, the big publishing houses, the big movie studios and record companies, all had internal mechanisms to guard the gates, so only the most “saleable” properties made it to market and only those with “hit” potential received the allocation of resources required to make them successful. Now, there is another disturbing trend, number-crunchers have all but replaced creatives in gatekeeping roles.
The rub is…without gatekeepers our new found technical freedom will yield a great deal of sub-optimal work product. As Fred Siebert once opined on a panel I moderated, “most people are not very talented.” And now, since literally anyone who wants to make a TV show can now do so, with production costs heading down, there will undoubtedly be an overabundance of low quality, low cost programming. The surviving gatekeepers will have some job figuring out what to do with it!
The good news is -- the impact new technology will have on the quantity of inferior programming will be short term. Ultimately, the market will self-regulate, and the over zealous wannabe Spielbergs will return to their day jobs. The exciting part is that new technology is also available to talented people. For them, the revolution is the dawn of a new era in creativity. If you can conceive it, you can realize it.
And, you can show potential clients EXACTLY how it will look to the audience!
Next issue, we’ll discuss the “death of the demo” – a happy demise.
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