MIPCOM 2010 review: The digital storm hits Cannes

Those of you who followed the volcanic interruptions to the MIPTV experience in April this year will know that there were enough Acts of God to win Him an Oscar (I would love to see His palm imprints on Hollywood Boulevard for most prolific actor).

This year, as I sat in the Heathrow Terminal 5 Lounge in the UK after the long-haul flight from Sydney waiting to travel to France again for this year's MIPCOM, I glanced at the Sky News headline that a terrorism advisory warning was being issued for travelers going from the UK to France.

I looked around the Lounge furtively for potential terrorism suspects with BA boarding cards.I caught sight of an unshaven nervous looking bloke with a misaligned collar.I rapidly turned away before releasing with relief that the nervous looking person is me in a mirror looking nervous. I fix my collar and walk down to the chemist to buy a razor and freshen up for MIP 2010.

Day One:The explosive flashes and bangs rocking Cannes are thankfully weather, not terrorism, generated.The normally paper-flat Cannes bay is surfable.The wind and waves have all but removed the beach, which is unfortunate for those companies that have booked beach marquees.Hoardings have been flattened and the large BBC banners have been blown away.

Rather than dampen spirits, I feel the storm has concentrated the energy inside the Palais.All the meetings we have are expansive, imaginative and lead to briefs for new transmedia shows.

Perhaps it is predictable given our country's scale, but all of the interest is coming from European and US networks and production companies, not from Australia.

While there may be a tyranny of distance, and US dollar parity, there is a vibrant creativity and unique flavour that Australian content producers can bring to the world market. Blue skies and bronzed bodies will always go down well as escapist reality into the UK market.

The NAFC (North Atlantic Financial Crisis) is still driving the desire for happy observational reality and light sci-fi.It is "looks like we are almost through the rough times" programming.

Day Two:This is the big one.This year, MIPCOM is running Spotlight On Australia, a focus on why we are brilliant.The front cover of the daily magazine has a kilometre signpost to Australia which feeds the tyranny argument, but is balanced by some great and high profile coverage of a number of Australia entertainment companies.

The day opens with the keynote launching the Smashcut.com website that Gregor Jordan and The Project Factory have been working on.The auditorium is close to packed, and a quick survey from the stage shows less than 50% of the audience is from Australia.The questions to Gregor and I are insightful and open up conversations afterwards with content owners wanting to use Smashcut as an additional distribution channel for their TV and movie content.

Next up was a focus on how companies have created new revenue streams from multi-platform strategies.Mike Conway, the MD of The Wiggles showed quite how broad the activities of The Wiggles are - something which I have deep personal knowledge of as father of a two year old son.On the other end of the scale, the producer of Beached Az, Jarod Green described their revenue goal as having enough cash to have a money fight in their office.The Beached Az merchandise strategy is driven by the new capabilities in print on demand to get cups, pens, t-shirts and hopefully large beach balls to customers without having to stock a single item in a warehouse. Ross Crowley talked about the new FOXTEL multiplatform production Slide, which is a bold and ambitious multiplatform drama at over $1m per episode.Slide will be on air next year and will be closely watched by all of us in digital media who are willing this to succeed as a showcase of how to develop transmedia shows.

Ian Hogg, CEO of Freemantle and Kim Dalton, Head of TV, ABC both said that "if there isanother mass media platform coming down the road, we haven't seen it yet".Kim made this point with a slide that the internet was consuming over 21% of viewer's attention (!).It would be interesting to see how fast this figure has grown in the past four years.I would argue that the mass media platform has pretty much arrived and if you can't see it coming then you're facing the wrong way.

Nascent media platforms were covered by Andrew Lambert detailing the technology and content offering on Telstra's IPTV play, T-Box.Lauren McLaughlin from Fetch TV countered with their offering.There are two organizations with very deep pockets here, and both of them operating IPTV content as Trojan horses for other products: Telstra with broadband connections and Fetch testing their product in Australia before rolling it out into the larger Malaysian marketplace.

Day Three:There is great coverage of the Australian day in the MIP magazines. In my world, the story of the day is The Project Factory's signing of the transmedia crime show Crime Plays.The show was pitched to us barely ten days ago from Metroscreen students in Sydney.My co-Director, Jennifer Wilson, loved the show and we signed it up.The team was expecting a nice long weekend and usual working week in Australia, but those calm plans were shattered and they packed an admirable number of outfits and hopped on a plane over to Cannes."From Canberra to Cannes" was the press angle in the MIP coverage.The team pitched like demons and got instant and deep levels of interest from the hardened professionals who picked up on their creativity, enthusiasm and energy.

YouTube and Facebook have keynote slots here, and there is a progressive wave of interest throughout producers about the opportunities that YouTube presents.This is a complex rights field, and producers will need to be smart and more committed to digital media than they have been in the past to make this work.In the week before MIP, I read two separate profiles of groups of individuals making over $100,000 a year from their YouTube channels.I would wager we will see the first YouTube millionaire in a matter of months, not years.

Day Four:The toll on vocal chords is beginning to show.Squeaky-voices males are sounding like Barry White, as are many of the female as well. France brings out the latent bon vivants and turns teetotal marathon runners into chain-smoking booze hounds.

As the maelstrom of the first few days recedes, the broader trends start to emerge.Transmedia "is a word I have to say five times a day here to be taken seriously" says David Lancefield at the Pricewaterhouse Coopers briefing.Directly afterwards, Gregor and I are pitched a "transmedia consumer engagement experience".I am confused and want to grab the man by his lapels and shake some sensible English out of him.He shows us a print out of a website with some video on it and I feel jargon nauseous.

The organizers of MIPCOM are well-practised in reading the trends of the media industry and tailoring their shows accordingly.The headline news today was the announcement that MIPTV next April will create a joint event with the largest mobile content conference, 3GSM.This is a considerable step towards the acknowledgement that the future of entertainment content is not just about video and television, but about creating entertainment for all platforms because this is how audiences want their content.

In the 2006 book Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins quotes a Hollywood script-writer as saying: "When I first started, you would pitch a story because without a good story you didn't really have a film.Later, once sequels started to take-off, you pitched a character because a good character could support multiple stories.And now, you pitch a world because a world can support multiple characters and multiple stories across multiple media."

In the past, changes to media such as the introduction of home video and DVDs occurred sequentially over the period of time.The difference between then and now is that the new creative and commercial opportunities that are being opened are occurring almost simultaneously.This is the reason why the digital media appears so chaotic: everything seems to be changing at once.

Over the last three years at MIP, I have seen digital change from being seen as a far off storm cloud, to being a an overhead storm.That storm is still overhead.For traditional media companies it is exciting, worrying, challenging and dangerous.The response we saw this month to the deeply interactive formats that we took to market was much more positive than I have seen before.With the GSM/MIPTV event in April, context will be given to interactive projects growing into a mainstream entertainment industry.

[This article was first published in ScreenHub]