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TEDx Talks
Published: 2016-11-02
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1XibEzp6K0
a couple years ago Monty and I sat down to watch house of cards on Netflix we run our favorite couch I turned off the lights and we started the show the first episode a house of cards starts with screeching tires collision and then the sound of a whimpering dog at this point Kevin spacey's character Frank Underwood comes out of this house approaches the injured animal now
Monty was clearly upset by all this he was huddled all the way over at the other end of the couch sort of looking kind of uncomfortable but I think everything's gonna be fine right Frank Underwood as the lead characters goods would lead characters always to when they're introduced to the audience he's gonna do something noble and courageous like protect and save the injured animal but then
Frank Underwood did something totally unexpected he bent down spoke directly to the camera and strangled the dog right so this was too much I did turn off the show turned back on the lights so I wouldn't permanently scar my friend mark to %HESITATION why might this be bad for entertainment afterall ever since we've had televisions people have been turning them off for all sorts of grease
the reason this might be bad for entertainment is a today Netflix knows exactly when Monty and I turned the television and the fear of some in the industry the Netflix is gonna combine that information with information about millions of other viewers and then start to use data and algorithms to make creative to see the past ten years my colleague a whole too long and I have
conducted research at Carnegie Mellon university's Heinz college working with a major publishing houses major record labels and major studios to use data and analytics to understand how technology is changing their business a couple years ago we decided to write a book it's called streaming sharing stealing big data in the future of entertainment and if it were trying to summarize what we've discovered in our research we
learned an awful lot about when we when we were writing the book the first thing we learned is writing a book is really hard as academics were used to writing thirty page research papers so when we sat down with our editor at MIT press and she said that the book should be met two hundred maybe two hundred and fifty pages long we looked at each other
did the math and said sounds like we write seven thirty page research papers we ought to be done how hard could that be and the answer is you're an idiot reading a book is nothing like reading seven different papers the reason is different is that the publisher expects you tell a story story telling is and credibly how painful realization for just how difficult storytelling is give
us a new appreciation for the many powerful and wonderful story tellers in the publishing music and movie business and how much we all benefit from the wonderful work they do and it also gave us a renewed passion for understanding whether technology might be damaging their opportunities to bring great stories to the audience and many of our friends in the industry are worried that it is in
television and movies alone we've seen an explosion in new creative output much of it from Silicon Valley not Hollywood think are just a new black transparent or my personal favorite stranger things I think things in this industry are just getting stranger in the past year Netflix announced it was tripling its output of original programming Amazon announced plans for twelve original movies per year on its platform
and Google announced you to bread with plans plans for ten original movies of its own Carlton Cuse the Emmy Award winning show runner used a sports analogy describe why this might be bad for entertainment this explosion in output in his view similar to what would happen if the NFL suddenly explain and expanded to have ninety team you have a whole lot more football available to you
but the overall quality of it would be diluted but if dictators hurting entertainment then why are the big data firms winning so many awards for their original shows Netflix's received a hundred and thirty three Emmy nominations including fifty four Emmy nominations this year alone and at last year's golden globes Amazon and Netflix receive more nominations than the top four broadcast networks combined and it's not just
critics who are happy with the out put of Silicon Valley Kevin Spacey himself called his experience making house of cards with Netflix the most fun and most creatively rewarding experience I've ever had in front of the kingdom creativity it would seem is actually thriving in the hands of the new data driven companies and I understand why let's take the advice of senator Frank Underwood in take
a step back look at the let's start with the fear that Netflix might be using data and algorithms to make creative diss this is a perfectly reasonable concern given the established practices in the industry prior to Netflix companies may green lighting decisions in a room full of industry veterans these experts use their years of experience to estimate how many people were likely to watch a show
then they use their beliefs about audience behavior to give the creators notes telling them which scenes should be cut so as to retain the audience and make the best use of the scarce broadcast live given how prevalent these practices are in the industry it's natural to assume that Netflix would simply use its data to replicate these process taking a step back it's clear that Netflix isn't
using it's data to replicate existing industry process instead they're using their data to create a whole new set of process the sooner the green lighting process many in the industry of concluded that Netflix was able to see the potential for house of cards before anyone else in the industry because he was able to look into its data and discover that there were many fans of Kevin
spacey's acting David Fincher is directing and many fans of the BBC's house but that can't possibly be would not give Netflix an advantage in green leading house of cards can after all everybody in the three RD knew that Kevin Spacey in David Fincher had huge followings in that the BBC's house of cards was a huge hit Netflix advantage didn't come from knowing how many fans of
Kevin Spacey existed in the audience Netflix advantage come came from doing something that no traditional broadcast network could copy it came from knowing exactly who those fans were and its ability to promote content to them directly based on their individual preference Netflix platform also changed how content is made let's go back to the first scene a house of cards that I described earlier the two thousand
fourteen aspen ideas festival head writer beau Willimon said that this scene was extremely controversial among many of the TV veterans on his creative team they said you can't kill the dog you lose half your viewership in the first thirty seconds so Willman went went to David Fincher and said Hey manner are you worried that we're gonna lose half our viewership if we include the scene and
Fincher said Anacapa shit and woman said I don't either so they left the scene in that level of creative freedom would have been almost on thing global initiative will broadcast and the same aspen ideas panel Disney veteran Michael Eisner said that if he had tried to include a similarly violent scene in the episode a broadcast television the head of the network would call me the president
the company would call me I'd be out in ten minutes why did the scene work for Netflix but not for broadcast television first Netflix wasn't pursuing an advertising driven business model so it didn't have to worry about offending advertisers by including a potential controversial scene second and maybe more important Netflix doesn't face the same scarcity in broadcast capacity that the traditional networks to in a traditional
network you can only broadcast one show at a time so that show has to appeal to as many viewers as possible but a Netflix subscriber who was offended by Kevin spacey's actions was able to choose from hundreds and thousands of other shows on Netflix and a fact by seeing how people responded to the scene Netflix was able to gather important information about the preferences Monty and
I don't like it when dogs get strangled and apparently due to and and that's okay I'm not judging freak and this brings us back to the other concern about data driven program that too much content could actually be bad for the quality of entertainment in the same way that too many NFL teams could be bad for the quality of football again this is a perfectly reasonable
analogy given how the business is always worked right in a world of scarce broadcast slots the winner is the show with the most viewers and everybody who subscribes to Nielsen's ratings knows the score but Netflix is playing a completely different game to win Netflix doesn't have to find more viewers for its individual shows Netflix wins by finding more shows that have the unique characteristics to meet
the unique interests of their individual viewers in the end Frank Underwood was right power is a lot like real estate closer you are to the source the higher your property values problems for our friends in the entertainment industry the technology has shifted the source of power in their industry and reduce the value of many of their existing properties for the last hundred years the source of
power in the entertainment industry has been the ability to control how content was created and distributed a problem today is neither of those scarce resources are scarce as they once were scarce resource today is audience attention and the new source of power in the business is the ability to control the data necessarily them necessary to manage that attention and also control over the platform necessary to
collect that data so that's our insight the question is how to share it here's where things get really difficult see the hardest part about writing this book wasn't the story telling it was knowing that this site insight would actually be deeply offensive to many of our friends in the industry no one likes to hear that their business might be in danger or that the strategies they've
always used to say seed might need to change at many points while writing this book Rahul and I looked at each other and said are we really sure we want to say this would it be easier just to keep our mouths shut minder on business and continue doing the academic research we love doing what the whole and I discovered is that the key to this brings
us back to the theme of tonight's conference insite insight how do you take an insight you might have been used to bring about change in someone else's life we discovered while writing the book is that the key to that two things having the courage to tell the truth doing it the compassion comes from a singular desire to see the other person's Indian big data isn't killing
