You are in the one and only business of entertainment

Every modern entertainment industry, from book publishing, to comic books to major motion pictures or video games, is experiencing rapid change in the business of entertaining and delighting people.  Production models are changing, distribution and monetization models are changing, consumer behavior is changing, as are marketing theories, capital flows and almost every aspect of the business.   Old business models are being disrupted while we struggle to keep up with technology and establish new ones.  Legal frameworks are woefully inadequate in their ability to evolve at the rate that producers and consumers are renegotiating the morale economy of entertainment exchanges.

And while the concept of change in the entertainment business has been a constant, change in the “computer era” feels different in two very important ways.   First, the rate of change is dizzying and it undermines our ability to conform our businesses to new formats and audience dynamics.   Like parents of young children, as soon as we learn how to manage the two year old, the two year old disappears and we are faced with a four year old that requires a brand new skill set that we don’t have.  Many of us in the video game industry feel that way with respect to console gaming.   As soon as we get really good at creating, selling and managing a AAA console video game business, we have to think about social gaming, free-to-play and transmedia.   And the tools we have to adapt, the business model templates, the score cards, the brainstorming, the competitive war gaming, the three-year plan, the P&L and the vision/mission statement can’t keep up.   So not only do we feel behind, we have to reconsider the tools we use to adapt.

The second remarkable aspect of the change in the computer era is that everyone, regardless of entertainment vertical they are in, is talking about the same type of change.  Go to a film conference, read an article on the newspaper business, see an interview with a video game producer, read public statements from technology companies in the entertainment business such as Netflix and Apple and you will see that everyone is talking about very similar problems related to the impact of creating, distributing and consuming entertainment with a computer.  And this shouldn’t be surprising.  When everything from news articles to card games, television and movies to photography is created on a computer, distributed over the Internet and consumed on a connected device, isn’t everyone in the same business struggling with the same issues?

You could go so far as to say that, from a business perspective, there is only one media format today: the screen that connects to the Internet through which people enjoy entertainment.  Does it make sense for the music executive to think differently than the film studio executive or the indie video game creator?  After all, they are all in the same business of moving bits around to delight and entertain.  And those bits have the same attributes, born of their nature as computer-mediated zeros and ones, regardless of what you make.

More importantly, the economic opportunities and limitations of those bits are common regardless of how consumers experience them.  While it still makes sense for the creator to describe themselves as a film maker, a writer, a painter, a designer or a musician, it increasingly makes no sense for their business counterparts to say they are in the “film business,” or the “video game business” or the “publishing business,” as if those are separate endeavors.  Given that there is but one format and the production distribution and consumption tools are identical, they’re not.  From a business perspective, I argue that the sooner business people think of themselves as being in the entertainment business and not in a business defined by increasingly outdated analog technology, the better they can adapt to the exponential change that technology is bringing to this one and only business of entertainment.