Thread by @ShapiroDoug

Forget about Peak TV

Over the next few years, the entertainment business will increasingly turn its attention to the implications of Infinite TV

🧵

What's Infinite TV?

Infinite TV describes the blurring distinction between professionally-produced and independent (indie/creator/UGC) content, as consumer standards fall, high production value tools are democratized and financing becomes more broadly accessible

Currently, there is a lot of hand wringing throughout the entire entertainment industry value chain as it becomes clearer that streaming TV is much less profitable than the declining traditional TV business

bit.ly/3X6PKqA

All this angst has been caused by disruption of only one part of the value chain

The barriers to distribute video have plummeted, but the barriers to create TV and films have risen

10 years ago, a high-cost cable original was $3-4MM/hour

Now 8-figures is common

So, production is expensive and risky and consequently is still dominated by only a handful of big entertainment and tech companies

(Source: Morgan Stanley, May 2022)

The technology that enabled the disruption of video distribution was, of course, the Internet

Here are four enabling technologies that could similarly disrupt video content creation over the next decade

1) Short form is changing quality standards

Users upload 30k hours of video to YouTube every hour, equivalent to Netflix's entire library

Many consider this different than TV/movies, lower quality and with different use cases

tubefilter.com/2019/05/07/num…

But for some, short form is changing their definition of quality & lowering the bar

They care more about low-cost attributes, like virality, surprise and personalization

And less about high-cost attributes like high production values

~1/3 of TT users consciously watch less TV

2/3) Virtual Production (VP) and AI are democratizing high production value tools

VP is enabled by increases in compute power and real-time 3D rendering engines (Epic, Unity and Nvidia)

Each element in the frame (real or virtual) can be seen, adjusted real-time and repurposed

The initial application is hybrid live-action/virtual productions, as seen in this example for The Mandalorian

Estimates are that VP can cut production costs by 30-40% due to more efficient shooting, no locations, fewer re-shoots and less time in post

The frontier is entirely virtual projects, where every element, including people, is virtual

Note that every "actor" in this short film produced in the Unreal Engine is a MetaHuman

Also watch this demo from WB and Epic

Key takeaways:

* It was rendered real-time in UE5

* It's tough to tell, but every building, car, lamppost and person from about the 2-minute mark on was created in the engine

As compute power increases, even real-time rendered digital humans will become indistinguishable from real people

AI

The near-term significance of AI is not that generative AI will replace human creativity, but that a wave of AI-enabled tools will greatly increase production efficiency

These include tools like RunwayML

Deepdub, which uses AI to dub audio into any language, using the original actor’s voice

DreamFusion from Google which generates text-to-3D models

A rapidly evolving set of generative AI tools from Nvidia

developer.nvidia.com/blog/rapidly-g…

NeRF technology, which enables the creation of photorealistic 3D environments from 2D images

...among many more

Many of these tools are imperfect, but they will get better fast

The trajectory is clear: combining real-time engines and these kinds of AI tools will make it possible for smaller teams or even individuals, working with small budgets, to create very high quality output

It currently requires thousands of people to make a big budget movie or TV show

In the future, it won't

(Source: @StephenFollows)

4) Web3 can broaden access to capital

The combination of public blockchains and tokens can enable "crowdfunding on steroids" by providing fans governance rights, perks and economic incentives

This can weaken Hollywood's oligopoly on financing

Web3 also promises to invert the traditional risk profile

Rather than spend heavily to develop & market IP before finding out if anyone shows up, web3 projects develop the community first and IP second

Examples include Aku, Jenkins and Shibuya, among many other #film3 projects

The surprisingly far-reaching implications of the disruption of video distribution over the past decade show how hard it is to predict the implications of a similar disruption of content creation

Even first order effects suggest profound change:

* Ripple effects along the entire chain
* Vast increase in quality content, w/ hits emerging from the tail
* Far greater content diversity
* Curation will be even more valuable
* New cost structures = new monetization models

None of this is a focus yet in traditional entertainment, but in coming years it likely will be

The good news for the media conglomerates is that it's still early

Much more here:

bit.ly/3ZbbIe8