Todd Wagner’s Vision of Entertainment
For those who don’t know who Todd Wagner is, Todd is best known as having been the CEO of Broadcast.com and one of it’s founders. Alongside his partner, Mark Cuban, they sold the company to Yahoo! in 1999 for $5.7 billion. Currently, Todd and Mark coown and manage a number of properties including 2929 Entertainment, HDNet Films, Magnolia Pictures, Landmark Theatres, HDNet, and HDNet Movies. While I was visiting Hollywood last week, I was fortunate enough to receive a verbal braindump from Todd on what his vision of the past, present, and future are. With so much power, he has the influence to create change. Being able to hear his insight first hand was truely a privilege.
Todd started his dump with the past, speaking to Broadcast.com and what their vision was. In a nutshell, I got the feeling he was describing it as a global, archived library of media to the effect of a YouTube, but with only traditional media assets. He made comparisons with what is going on today and mentioned that it is just a reverb of what happened then, only now it is being truely realized. He went on to reason that the dramatic push we see today is rooted in a generation coming of age. He felt that the youth that grew up in this digital age are now pushing it as part of their lives. Though I agree with this, I would add that there is a deeper root, experince and technology. At the time of Broadcast.com, the experience and technology were completely different. Broadband wasn’t a commonality like it is today and the metaphor for the web was a page and not an application. There was an explosion of services and information early on, but it didn’t fit into our lives easily. The web was slower, the applications more cumbersome, and the information harder to sift through. We have seen all of these elements mature. To that effect, the masses won’t adopt something unless it is a pleasure to use and provides some benefit in their daily lifes. Case in point, look at MP3s, Napster, and the IPod. Though we all may have visions of what is to come, they will never be realized until we make them accessible to the masses. It is when things become beneficial to us by either desire or need that we push them into our lives and our culture.
As Todd switched gears to what he is doing in the present, the endpoint of his ideas touched on “experience”. You can see from Todd and Mark’s endeavor’s that they are vertically integrated in the entertainment industry, from production to distribution. This integration could be partially compared to Apple’s vertical integration with ITunes Store, ITunes software, and the IPod. Though parts are different, they are seeking to make the end to end routing of entertainment more efficient. Apple currently handles the digital route, while Todd and Mark are seeking both traditional and digital routes. Todd’s thoughts on these routes came out like a line for line play out of Bill Gate’s “The Road Ahead”. In Gate’s book, published in 1995, he describes entertainment breaking down into a multiplatform release, with variant pay points for each platform. For example, some will pay more for the convience of accessing a movie at home, while others want the experience of socialization and will go to the theaters. I completely agree, and would say that it applies to various media distribution, as we have seen with ITunes. The problem is that traditional media fears emerging distribution routes as being canablistic on existing routes. In reality, parts of the consuming public don’t feel the experience of existing routes are appealing. Therefore, some people are not consuming because the routes are not appealing to them, and an entire audience is being missed out on. Therefore in a lot of ways, emerging routes are for an audience that you are not getting, or are losing. If you do not open up an easy route for that audience, they are lost or they turn to unsanctioned (pirated) routes.
In retrospect, I would say I’m excited about what Todd and Mark are doing. They are owning the “shop” versus convincing it, which I struggle with constantly. Being in the same space, it was an honor to get first hand insight from someone so influential in shaping the future of entertainment.
August 3rd, 2006 at 9:09 am
The issue is those properties he has are distributed, is he creating an overarching business model.
Ironically, I recently interviewed with a company that owns the hardware and backend systems to do this. With a large subscriber base and agreements with the biggest media outlets, they are actually well into making this dream a reality. They are at the Interaction Design phase of the project and turning towards visualization artists to create the interactions. They relied to much on research and usability testing in previous products, and they appreciate creative approaches.They are doing first phase prototyping right now. I was amazed at the backend, its all there. Kenny, it shouldn’t be to hard to guess who it is, but they are actually going to beat everyone to market. The question is, will they really deliver with an intuitve interface that anticipates the emerging ubiquitous computing shifts? I know they have been working with IDEO, will be intersting to see what happens.