Netribution turned 25 years old on New Years Eve. The ltd company doesn’t reach that date until later this month, and the hard-launch of the first website wasn’t until 2nd Feb 2002 – but it’s soft launch onto the internet was December 31st 1999 (an ambition to launch ‘last century’).
Netribution had three 8-ish-year long acts – focusing on Publishing, then Research, then Development. I know most people here from projects associated with one of these stages but perhaps most from the first act – publishing – and within that, again most from the first scene – Netribution v1 – which ran for 99 weekly issues.
Netribution 1 grew in the fertile ashes of the dotcom crash, before learning during my two years as Shooting People’s employee #1 how free user-generated ‘content’ can build a business. Netribution 2 took that knowledge and naîvely attempted to implement it on a Joomla CMS from January 2006 while a new world of Web 2.0 titans, built on AJAX, gamification and dark patterns emerged, flattening and hoovering up any who stood in their way. People still posted there until 2014 (mostly filmfests, PRs and spam farms) – and I shared half-baked thoughts for a few years more, Netribution 2 peaked towards the end of 2008, when I began to shift focus to R&D, mostly staying there for the next 16 years.
Netribution 1’s editor Tom Fogg and I have been discussing for some months how to mark these 25 years. Netribution 1 had the antiquated but fully curated format of a weekly issue and email; Netribution 2 was rolling 24/7, open access, with low barriers to posting. This time we fancy something in between, perhaps one single curated issue marking the 25 years towards the end of the year, with a rolling work-in-progress website and periodic (no more than monthly) email updates.
Why now?
There’s obviously a lot happening in film and TV with AI threatening artists, creators and copyright holders, while also offering the potential of studio-grade CGI to the masses (plus the carbon footprint of a small country or cryptocurrency).
But the big subject for me is we (web evangelists, optimists and hopers) failed in delivering on the web’s promise from 25 years ago. We never succeeded in building a viable independent space for creative media, connecting filmmakers directly with audiences. Yes you can connect via a handful social media platforms, but you’re forced to accept their business terms, perform and conform to satisfy their algorithms, while keeping your audiences forced to consumer whatever messages the platforms want to wrap around your work, this week. This isn’t like the indie video store, fleapit cinema in town or the late night pic you VHS’d off the TV; this is very opinionated free cable TV with some small perks for the most prolific (and a couple of lottery-winning super-influencers to keep everyone else motivated as they work every waking hour while mostly not making minimum wage).
But ignoring the money (and I know one indie production company making £2k/month from YouTube for their back-catalogue, so it’s obvs not all bad) – one specific thing is worse than before the web came along…
Entities that controlled IP and audiences in the old media world were known as vertically integrated studios: they could shoot films on their own facilities, from a library of IP they own, then release on their TV channels, video stores and cinema chains (and theme parks, retail stores, etc). But alongside sat an independent sector that controlled only one side of the equation: IP (the indie producer or distributor) or audiences (the arthouse cinema, TV channel or video store). And the indie and studio sectors crossed over – they weren’t separated in their own bubble. Producers had access to public market data on success and failures so financiers, commissioners and development execs could make informed decisions about what to fund next, and share in (rare) profits.Independently financed film could get an audience and pay back its investors (or satisfy its public funders) enough to get the next film made.
But none of that really exists online for video: there’s only vertically integrated studios controlling IP and audiences: be it shorter-form ad-funded (TikTok/YouTube/Instagram/etc) or longer-form subscription funded (Netflix/Prime/Apple/Now/Max/YTPremium/etc). That studio/indie structure from last century doesn’t exist for TV, film or micro-budget influencer video. Platforms control IP and audiences, there’s no way around that – and – it really wasn’t meant to be like this. At every step of Netribution’s first act I was convinced it wouldn’t end up like this, until 2008 – struck by the dominance not of Netflix, but of Facebook – it became clear that film has a monopoly problem online.
However there’s an exception to this: media spaces online that have thriving indie and mainstream sectors separate from each other: Blogging – powered by RSS; and Podcasts – also powered by RSS. Both have lots of indie platforms, players, apps, tools and service – and people make their living blogging and podcasting, mostly without being tied to one platform.
Without jumping into a technical discussion, there’s lots of smart people working hard to try to bring the decentralised simplicity of RSS (which stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’) to everything online – social media, video, music, chat-rooms, commenting – everything. In these developer’s visions of the web you could follow your YouTube subscriptions from your Instagram App, and post your content on your own website but get it seen on all the platforms.
They want web-based media to be less like one tech baron’s soapbox, and more like email – which like RSS is based on a protocol, and so isn’t controlled by a single corporation, app, site or service. They’ve been working on this for many years, and I only realised how advanced they were four years ago because as they’re not funded by the big tech giants they don’t spend on marketing. I won’t say it gives me hope, as 25 years online has left me seeing most hopeful new web tech enshitified, killed or ignored. But it’s still one of the more hopeful web things I’ve seen in these 25 years, and it’s been a part of my focus for most of Netribution’s third act.
But it’s not interesting enough to bring out a year-long special edition of Netribution. It only made sense to try to bring out a new issue when I started talking with Tom. Tom – currently spending winter on the Greek island of Paros – is one of the best conversationalists I know. This makes him both a brilliant interviewer, friend and coach. He’s interested in opening conversations with the people we interviewed and worked alongside 25 years ago, to find out where they are now, and what they’ve done or learnt or wish to share. What could they have told their younger selves? Some might not remember us – others may want to forget the gap between their ambitions and reality – but it feels quite compelling in a world where AI, war and climate crisis are forcing us to reflect on the future – to instead pause and consider the recent past: the web before smart phones, social media and mass video streaming.
So that’s the plan… will keep updating here, or you can join our no-more-than-once-a-month email list. Or – better, say hello to 25th@netribution.co.uk.
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