The first Netribution office stunk of curry and rubber, I lived in it.
You reached it by groping through the tunnel with the smashed light between the tyre shop and Indian restaurant on a main road in Wembley. At the top of the dark stairs that climbed out the far end there was a narrow walkway along which a row of bright-blue industrial refuse bags that bulged with beer, wine and vodka empties marked the trail to the faded red door of a smoke-filled student flat behind which Nic and Tom dreamed about the future while I, one of Nic’s two flatmates, pulled on B&H cigarettes and loudly (and wrongly, as it turned out) defended the past.
We had all met as film students, Nic was excited about the expanding galaxies in cyberspace and the opportunity to connect filmmakers directly with their audiences. He grabbed a bottle of vodka from the freezer and talked energetically about a film studio in every bedroom and fridges with barcode scanners that would order new tubs of marge when you ran out.
“Don’t be silly”, I said, “buying things is not the reason that people go shopping. People go shopping to get out of the house, meet their mates and browse the racks, you can’t do any of that at home, on your own, sitting in front of your computer. That Amazon website is never going to take off”.
As history ran past, giving me a kick in the nuts on its way, Nic and Tom’s Netribution project steadily expanded: lists of film festivals and funding bodies assembled on the site, young film journalists started sending in reviews and interviews, bewildered couriers emerged from the pitch dark between the tyre shop and the curry house with boxes of merch and other freebies; Nic started making exotic trips to Paris and meeting American financiers in SoHo. Netribution was soon out of the bedroom in Wembley and into a proper, grown-up office from where it sailed ahead, into those online galaxies, which would eventually swallow us all.
A decade later Nic and I were walking through the East End, embroiled in another argument about film future. This time it was YouTube that Nic was excited by, and the realisation of his prediction that the internet would connect films and audiences, emancipating creatives from the shabby commercialism, gatekeeping and exploitation of the old industry and its parasitical middlers. I demurred.
As a working filmmaker and owner of a production company, I couldn’t see the economic logic. I worried that it would incentivise a race to the bottom, that it would make anything that didn’t pander to the maximum possible numbers uneconomic and unviable and that artists who produced creative, intelligent, difficult or niche work for a naturally limited audience would be reduced to hobbyists. And I worried that the film business would become a sub-branch of the tech sector. In that argument, unfortunately, I think history has proved me right.
When Nic and Tom launched Netribution and I launched my studio, Spiritlevel (together with a different Tom), the DVD boom was in its summer. This, in hindsight, was genuinely a golden age for film, and particularly independent film, because the economics of DVD made spectacular sense. Films could achieve a wide theatrical release through back-end security: a disappointing box-office showing could be made up on DVD, a box-office hit could be sold to the same audience twice, once at the cinema and then again on DVD. Films that couldn’t achieve theatrical distribution or TV acquisition could find their audiences by going direct to DVD, and could turn enough profit to earn producers a decent living.
There was, of course, the quiet foreboding – that what had happened to the music industry, when the Mongol hordes of file-sharers and tech disruptors swept in to pillage and burn, could come to the peaceful valleys of the film business, with its glorious DVD boom, but the technology was not there yet and so why worry before you have to?
Regrettably, worrying before you had to is precisely what the industry did. Clearly unable to withstand the sweaty pressure of a latent threat, studio executives collapsed in anxiety, and burned their own house before the tech hordes got there. They embraced streaming too quickly, prior to rationalising the economic model, and killed-off DVD sooner than necessary, with knock-on effects for theatrical.
Initially, the arrival of the streamers provided a fillip. They were hungry for content and competed with linear TV to drive up acquisition fees, their novelty stimulated audiences and generated excitement, they provided additional revenue streams and encouraged AVOD platforms like YouTube to develop competing business models that might provide producers with greater rewards and an opportunity to revivify their back catalogues.
Alas, as time marched on it became clear that the economic vandalism of tech “disruption”, which has a habit of colonising industries and leeching the value, would accompany the streaming revolution. Physical media was buried, theatrical exhibition destabilised and linear television placed on life support.
Now, it may be that all this was inevitable, technological change is the indelible fact of human and economic development. But it is not the inevitability of technological change that is at issue, but whether that change provides an environment that is as good, if not better, for the producers and artists whose hard work and ingenuity power the creative industries.
Like other disruptions, the streaming revolution has struggled to make sense of its economics, and the film and television industry has been in a state of emergency for the past couple of years. The catalyst for the present crisis was the Covid pandemic. It’s complex and multi-faceted, so rather than attempt to litigate all of it, I’ll share a representative example.
Amazon Prime, initially a decent source of recurring revenues, had been arbitrarily reducing the royalty rates that it paid to producers for some time as, like all the other streamers, it struggled to identify a sensible business model. Then in early 2021 Amazon abruptly purged all nonfiction content, hurling indie producers, including us, into existential crisis. What appears to have happened is that Amazon’s limited income from fixed subscriptions collided with it’s potentially unlimited outgoings on producer royalties. As audiences sat at home during the pandemic, consuming unheard of quantities of streaming video without paying a penny more for the privilege, Amazon’s royalty payouts went through the roof. You see the problem.
How the industry will emerge from its current malaise is an open question, but I imagine that it will track quite closely to what has happened in other sectors: there will be a period of consolidation. Linear television will end once and for all, the streaming marketplace will narrow, and various players will either cease to exist or become absorbed by a small cartel of emerging superpowers. We saw this happen in music, and the first phases are already in evidence within the television industry – the rise of Banijay is an obvious example.
What does this mean for independents and creatives? I’m afraid that there are reasons to be concerned. Experience shows us that consolidation produces cartels which quickly seek to dominate their industries. Independents are often faced with a choice between abandoning meaningful autonomy, and going to work for the cartel, or remaining independent but struggling to make a living.
Another interesting phenomenon that has attended the streaming era is a neurotic fixation on “IP”. This arose in part because streamers were vulnerable to having content pulled by producers who would either license it to rival platforms, or retain it as exclusive to their own, competing streaming services. It wasn’t long before the leading streamers addressed this by moving from exhibition into production.
But the intense focus on IP is much bigger than simply ownership of production and/or content, it narrows the scope of the types of productions that are likely to attract finance and support and, in my view, is an enemy of creativity. It sets pre-conditions, insisting that some form of proprietary rights should be engaged by production, and it has a tendency to favour re-production, the repeated exercise of those rights in an effort to sweat the property asset. It has also led to a more jealous, litigious culture in which rights-holders seek to aggressively guard and police their “property”.
These tendencies have been intensified by the emergence of AI, and the fear that the tech sector will imminently plagiarise creatives into wholesale redundancy. I think the concern is justified, but I would caution creatives against becoming over-protectionist and property-obsessed: that is a game that favours capital and plays into the hands of the cartels.
The counterpart to both the move of film and TV to online streaming and the obsession with IP is the role of data. And here I again see blaring red warning lights. The fastidious insistence on being “data led”, a concept absolutely intrinsic to the tech sector, naturally leads to an effort to re-create what has worked in the past, rather than create what might work in the future. The whole purpose of data analysis is to minimise risk, but it is in risk, difference, unknowability that creativity thrives.
However, there may be some causes for optimism. It’s true that filmmaking has become ever cheaper and more accessible, and it’s possible that Nic’s vision of a truly decentralised independent sector, connected directly with audiences, economically viable and able to thrive outside the tyranny of the cartel could still happen. It certainly remains the dream.
But while the past 25 years have been characterised by a revolution in the production, distribution and exhibition of stories, I think that it will be storytelling itself that is transformed over the next 25. Online life has completely reconfigured how we communicate and interpret story; accelerated demands and abbreviated attention has already led to film form becoming more immediate and concise, not just on TikTok, but in mainstream studio cinema, where narrative construction and pacing is different to what it was a couple of decades ago. And whereas audiences, in particular young audiences, once viewed subtitles as an impediment, now young people, conditioned by viewing primarily on social media, prefer video to be accompanied by text.
It will be interesting to see how these themes evolve and I look forward to kicking the questions around with Nic. We’re both now fortunate enough to live in decent housing, although one of the ironies of the past 25 years is that the drive to get out of the smoke-filled bedrooms and into proper offices has been usurped by remote work and a civilizational march back to the bedroom. I no longer smoke, though, and with an additional 25 years on the clock, immoderate vodka sessions are of course inconceivable.
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