Digital Culture Always Online And Always in A Hurry

Michael Hedges May 12, 2015 Follow on Twitter

Changes that have come to the media sphere this century are always attributed to technologies. The Web and the genius inventions using it have been transformative. New, of course, begets newer, last week’s favorites forced to adjust or left to fade. Ultimately technologies are bound to physics; digital culture not at all.

Spreading the gospel of new media is, more often than not, the domain of American digital pioneers. To insure a big turn-out, organizers of every conference, convention or summit even vaguely attached to emergent technologies invite one or more. Successful in their ventures and polished in their pitches they are crowd pleasers.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings gave the keynote presentation at the re:publica 2015 digital conference in Berlin this past week. He is understandably in demand. Netflix migrated from a DVD marketing company to online video streaming service. It has about 60 million subscribers, roughly a third outside the US. The company is a major force in television and everything that is changing it.

"The idea is basically quite simple,” he said. “The internet is global and entertainment should be global. We hope soon to be available all over the world and to be able to offer more and more movies and, of course, television series like 'Bloodline' or 'Orange Is The New Black' everywhere. No location-specific filter or restrictions.” Netflix debuted the commissioned original dramatic series 'Bloodline' at the Berlin International Film Festival in February. All 13 episodes were released simultaneously in March. The trailer alone was viewed a million times that first week.

That simple idea is original content. Another is simple flat-rate pricing. Commissioning original content affords the opportunity to avoid complex - and confiscatory - rights fees. "We wanted to act more globally,” he explained, reported deutschelandradio.de (May 6). “To achieve this, we have to offer our own content because it is very difficult to get global licenses for shows we don’t own. In each country, everyone wants a piece of the pie. To realize our dream, to create a truly global service, we must create more original content."

Just as Mr. Hastings was speaking (figuratively) the European Commission announced its Digital Single Market strategy meant to cure many ills, including rights issues. “We can’t wait for the Commission, they may or may not pass rules,” he offered. “We are going to try and solve the problem commercially.”

That Netflix invests in premium content is a marketing advantage that has set competitors scrambling. “We have nothing to lose,” he said channeling the attending digital natives. “If you have nothing to lose, you can risk more than others who have to lug around a large system, like Sky or HBO now tasked with adapting quickly. Sky is moving there very quickly and at some point you will no longer know that Sky was a satellite TV provider. The same is true for HBO.” YouTube, owned by Google, is widely reported in early stages of offering original premium video content. Music streaming service Spotify, close to raising US$500 million in an IPO offering, is engaging big video producers in search for video content.

In the next twenty years linear television will be “irrelevant,” he told the change enthusiasts, comparing the old TV model to fax machines. "The television of the future is a big iPad with a certain number of apps and different channels.”

The week-long re:publica digital celebration, conference and expo in Berlin brought out bloggers, and media entrepreneurs mixed with social and political activists. Digital culture is finding a definition, as each generational boom or bubble does, a woe be unto those who ignore it. It is a culture of “more colorful working models,” said one participant, quoted by Deutsche Welle (May 6). And there were no nerds, explained Die Welt (May 7), “because we are all nerds now.” Digital culture is the now thing.

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