I’m in the city of Austin, Texas for the interactive conference that is part of the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) Festival – an event for the music, film and interactive industries which optimistically promises that “Tomorrow Happens Here”. But fear not that you might miss a sneak peek at the future as I’m attending the full five days of the event and blogging some of the best insights from the hundreds of sessions on offer.
The interactive portion of the conference is basically a five day nerdfest devoted to all things internet and defines the industry. It is attended by close to 10,000 intelligent, curious professionals talking smart geekery. It’s an eclectic scene of major tech company CEOs, start-up founders, strategists, designers, web developers, innovators, researchers, “internet famous” geeks, journos, bloggers, content creators and digital advertising people.
It was three years ago during this conference that the alpha early adopters of technology which attend SXSW figured out how Twitter could be used effectively as a social, real-time information sharing tool. It was here that it gained industry acceptance, with mainstream popularity then following from these online opinion leaders.
Everything relevant to our industry and its impact on individuals, brands, organisations and society is discussed; web content strategies, user experience, web development processes, social media, online privacy, user behaviour, e-commerce, social change through technology, mobile applications, online games, Government 2.0, viral content, online education, and much more. With so many topics being covered, there can be twenty or more events happening at any one time for all five days of the conference. This makes choosing which workshops, sessions, keynote speeches, trade-show events and sponsor parties to attend a sometimes difficult, but enjoyable task for a geek like myself.
A medium-sized city in the middle of Texas is an unlikely host of such an event. New York or Silicon Valley would seem more appropriate, but Austin is a city I have been describing to first-time Australian SXSW attendees as a charming friendly mashup between Darwin and inner city creative hubs like Fitzroy, Surry Hills or Fortitude Valley multiplied by one hundred. With an unofficial motto of “Keep Austin Weird” it is a city that organically inspires learning, collaboration, idea sharing and creativity. About half the size of Brisbane, it is a quirky mix of rural Texas, college town, self-proclaimed music capital of the world and innovation/high tech hub (companies like Dell and Wholefoods were founded here). All of which combine to make it the perfect town to hold such an industry defining event.
The highlight of Day 1 for me was the debate ‘Pay TV or the Internet: Battle For Your TV‘. It was between Mark Cuban, a dot-com era entrepreneur who started a live video broadcasting service which he sold in 1999 to Yahoo! for $6 billion dollars that is now the owner of “old-media” subscription television channel HDNet. He was up against founder and CEO, Avner Ronen of Boxee, a popular internet-enabled video content download service with social networking features central to its offering.
The debate centred around if consumers will opt to do all of their home entertainment consumption solely on internet-enabled devices – prompting them to cancel their Pay TV subscriptions, or would the satellite and cable subscription television networks continue to retain market-share in the delivery of video content into homes.
Avner, operating a service with one million users but not yet generating revenue looked at the long term potential of the internet. He believes there would continue to be a generational shift away from subscription television, as the user experience (via services like Boxee) delivers a superior, more interactive and consumer-focused viewing, which will deliver new revenue opportunities as it gains critical mass.
Meanwhile, Cuban focused on the immediate future of TV. He felt that broadband video delivery capacity/quality will hold back its adoption as the primary video source into homes – also reiterating his opinion that consumers’ reluctance to pay for content online or online video services (like Boxee and YouTube) is leading to a failure to adequately monetise the content to compensate its creators.
It was a fascinating debate by two people at the forefront of the sector, and one that we will see play out in the market over the next few years.
Anthony Dever is an Interactive Strategist at BCM
I think one of the big misnomers here is that people are continuing to think of ‘the internet’ as a separate medium, when the reality of it is increasingly and unavoidably encroaching on almost all other mediums.
Having a delineation between a computer screen and a television screen is a line that is blurred and getting blurrier (at my house our television is primarily used for console gaming, and our computer screens are primarily used for watching ABC iView and downloaded television series).
It’s obvious to my mind that the interwebz are just going to become reality – how we connect to everything, all our media; and so it is just a matter of how that’s going to happen – how it’s going to be monetised, how content and advertising are going to intertwine, how pay-per-view is going to compete with torrents etc.