News yesterday that the FCC is to look into product placement policies (via Grant McCracken) couldn't have come at a worse time for TV content creators.
That digital fragments media should not be news to us by now - just as iTunes (etc) shifted buying behaviour from albums to tracks, and Digg (etc) shifted newsreading behaviour from bundled newspapers to individual articles, YouTube and DVRs (but far more importantly BitTorrent) shifted viewing behaviour from scheduled, ad-supported broadcast programming to individual, ad-free programmes.
TV content creators are tying up monetisation deals with the new distribution platforms, sure. There's episodes of Lost on iTunes as well as on PirateBay. While England's Football Association fatuously sues a pub owner who circumvented their fancifully exclusive UK distribution deal with Sky by buying Premier League games cheaply from Greece, Chelsea FC has got on and signed a distribution deal with YouTube.
Superficially these look like steps in the right direction for rights-owners and content creators. In the context none of them matter. The music industry has been a pretty reliable barometer of where the TV industry is heading for at least five years, and Mathew Ingram deftly summarises Warner's latest results as "we're totally screwed". At TechCrunchUK (increasingly a better and more insightful site than the US original) Mike Butcher writes up the latest improved YouTube interface from Northamptonshire's 3rd Eye Solutions, iDesktop.tv, and points to some of the consequences of YouTube's current best front-end having been built and hosted by a third-party:
"there are of course also some tricky implications. Interfaces like this
rob YouTube of advertising impressions while sucking up bandwidth,
although in theory pre-roll and post-roll adverts wouldn’t be affected.
And don’t even ask about the licensing issues for the videos concerned,
but it just goes to show that if you want to put content out there you
need to make sure the video itself contains any necessary branding or
copyright information." (my italics)
Of course, it isn't just the copyright and branding that needs to be inherent in the content. With digital fragmentation, the commercial upside needs to be inherent to the content too. If you make content, the existence of the web means you're putting it out there. Pretending it's sensible to control how your content is going to be distributed by threatening your customers with lawyers is naivete bordering on insanity.
And so back to the FCC and its new-found fascination with regulating product placement. Product placement is what will pay for the next generation of TV content. (Who understands this already? Katemodern. LonelyGirl15. Bebo. MySpace, kind of. Not YouTube. You can already see how this is going to pan out. Incidentally, whoever is first to come up with an elegant way of getting new products into old TV content will be a billionaire.) When the commercial upside is genuinely inherent in your content, every distribution mechanism is your friend and your commercial problem becomes the relatively trivial technical challenge of measuring how many people engage with your message and getting your "advertisers" to pay for it.
So it probably doesn't matter what the FCC decides to do about product placement on TV. There's a sense in which it's not very interesting to see what one bunch of guys who doesn't get it will do to another bunch of guys who don't get it either. But there's a certain morbid fascination in watching the FCC try to hasten the death of the thing they regulate, and move us all that little bit faster into a better new world they're evidently powerless to understand.
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