I went to MIPCOM for the first time this week, and felt like the Walking Dead – who followed me around the convention floor as part of an AMC activation – as I passed booth after booth with companies offering tens of thousands of hours of “content” for sale to numerous broadcasters, streamers, library aggregators, translators, AI training companies, brands, and whoever the hell else happened to walk b(u)y. The fact that we live in an age of abundance was made redundantly clear, if even clearer was the sense of panic in the air from these purveyors of said content, as they see the cracks in the dam ripping open with creators, brands, and AI generated content flowing through in a deluge that will soon overwhelm all of them.
I’ll have plenty of hopeful stuff in here, but there is also some gloom in the mix – which mind you, is pretty f-n hard to think about when you’re in the beautiful environs of the South of France, jumping into the still warm Mediterranean, swimming with the fishes, drinking free spritzes at various booths, or paying dearly for them at the bar of the Majestic. And I don’t have a bad word to say about MIPCOM itself – the organizers did a great job and are trying to adapt to all these changes, and the folks I went with, BrandStorytelling, put on an excellent show. This is about the world we live in, not a report on how these events were produced (with aplomb). But seeing this much content, and hearing so many crazy things in just three days had me with my thoughts in a storm.
When I say tens of thousands of hours of “content” for sale, I mean that much at each of the thousand plus booths offering TV series, animation, kids programming, streaming hits and never been seen before, and a smattering of films – but places like Radial (the conglomeration of Shout, FilmRise, Gravitas, etc.) offering over 70K film titles themselves. My company currently reps the rights of a dozen or so episodic series and film titles but trying to get a meeting if you rep less than 1000 hours was tough in this town (though that wasn’t my objective here).
There was a lot going on, and when you put it in the context of what’s happening in our world, the mind can spin. Some trends seemed to be as follows (in no particular order).
FAST channels continue to explode, with some consolidation. Everyone was launching a FAST channel, or had done so, or wanted to know if my clients had enough programming to launch one. Others are buying them all up and merging them together – hoping more pennies add up to more dollars. What’s more, we had ambient FAST channels, as a big thing, where people license 1500+ hours of boats floating, or trees swaying, or tigers pouncing, or whatever and pair them with ambient music to play in the background at a bar or nail salon, or while someone does something else on their laptop. But when you start to think about how easy it will be for an AI agent to replace the licensing of all this stuff, you get the sense the layoffs at Radial are just the beginning of what’s next here. Heck, 99% of the content needed for a good ambient channel can also be made with AI, so how does that remain a revenue stream for rights-holders who are also licensing this stuff to train the AI now (see below).
It was apparent here as elsewhere that creators are the new studios. We all knew this already, but it was a new development here. And every major conglomerate was announcing some new creator partnership. Or having creators remake old classics from their libraries. Anything to try to stay relevant. The fear of the rise of the creator class was also very evident. Every announcement felt like they were screaming – hey, we’re not dead yet. But with a flood of more content coming from creators, who have a direct and deep connection to their audience, why would someone tune into your other thousands of channels, or watch your hours of content, that has no connection to their lives, and your company has no connection to its fans? And just one of these creators can now prompt an AI to do all of this work for them pretty soon (already?).
I keep mentioning AI, well, that was a big focus at MIPCOM in multiple ways. There were booths and presentations for many different AI companies, of course, and it was the topic of many a keynote and panel. But the biggest trend seemed to be licensing one’s library of content to AI data companies who are using it to train their models in multiple ways. One friend was licensing for an “ethical” model which was ingesting our videos not to make more content, but to teach robots how to do things in the real world – see a million videos of someone picking up a cup, or piloting a plane, and the robot can do that soon. Others just want to learn, and others will be making new content in ways not yet expected. Most of the rights-holders I met with weren’t too concerned with what comes next, they were just seeing this as a new revenue stream for their libraries, which it is… for about six months.
And then, the AI produced content flood starts to hit us. It’s already happening with Sora, but that was just two weeks ago, maybe? All of the content at MIPCOM, not to mention all of that being presented earlier this year at the Cannes Film Fest and Cannes Lions, is just a drop in the ocean of content about to flood our already saturated attention economy. Casey Neistat has a nice video out this past week saying we are all doomed because of the “slop” coming for us from AI soon (he’s mainly talking about Sora there). But it’s not just slop. Some of it will be great, and remember, just good enough is usually good enough for most viewers, and they’re already watching as much of that, or more of it, than they are of auteur filmmaking, or even of Real Housewives.
But most of it doesn’t even have any real meaning. It’s everyone promoting themselves for a minute, because that’s what you get when you “succeed” in this new world. At best, you become a meme and float through my attention for a minute or three. As Doug Shapiro tells us, maybe all media is marketing now. He argues that everything you make will now be to sell something else – like music on Spotify drives concert revenue, Disney movies send you to the theme park. But it’s not just happening with film and video. Every LinkedIn post is now someone talking about how visiting their mother taught them something about B2B marketing. Every post is someone marketing themselves, as it every Substack article pushing me to share it with my friends. I’m doing it here with this post…guilty as charged, I guess. And as reports tell us, people aren’t even posting much text anymore, it’s all becoming video, and most of that video is marketing something.
I’ve always argued that the NYT Op-Docs are just marketing for the NYT as a great source of news adjacent content. Now, as governments pull back on funding for culture (this is happening everywhere, or will be soon), and conglomerates like Netflix and (soon to be) ParaMax focus on the eyeballs needed for CPM rates, meaning they lean into reality TV and soon AI-ality TV, and less into substantive entertainment, producers are begging for brands to fill the gap. Meaning… more marketing. I do this for a living, and even when the films/series are great, there’s no product placement, and it’s just values-aligned, at the end of the day, all brand funded entertainment is a type of marketing.
Of course, soon all of this will be made by bots. And as other folks build the bots that can clip, remix, comment on and share this same content…for marketing purposes… we’ll have other bots who can remix, share it, comment on it and share it again. It will be bots talking to bots, while all the rest of us have lost our jobs, which is the main/only goal of all of this AI stuff anyway (think not? Read the WSJ and any CEO speaking about it on any earnings call). Pretty soon, the only companies left will be major conglomerates tied to physical retail, events, amusement parks or all of the above; and being run by one ceo and a team of prompt engineers, raking in all of the profits.
Meanwhile no one wants anything serious and thoughtful. As mentioned above, Netflix/Hulu/Max don’t want it anymore, or not as much of it. Some audiences might want it, as we see them showing up at film festivals for serious social impact docs, as well as seriously good entertainment. But for the most part, we’ve moved to pure sensation and entertainment. And who can blame anyone in today's polarized world – I get home and I want some mindless entertainment as well.
But we’ve simultaneously lost our literacy – no one reads or thinks deeply, or analytically, anymore. I was at a party with a smart start-up founder who was asked whether he’d read “Important Book X?” Oh, yes, he replied, “no, of course not, I listened to the audio book, who has time to read?” he asked. Listening is a step up for many, what with so much time being spent on TikTok, Reels, Sora and the next thing. We’re a visual culture now, not a literate one. Derek Thompson thinks we’ve slipped back from a literate culture to an oral one again (following from Walter Ong’s “Orality and Literacy.” I disagree – we’re in something new, that isn’t quite the future step Greg Ulmer envisioned as “electracy,” but it isn’t a “backwards” step. Yes, we’ve lost the reason and analysis and deeper meaning brought by literate society. But oral culture had its plusses. We seemed to have not regained those- instead of community, we have new tribalism; instead of shared oral storytelling, we have memes.
All that matters now is surface. It’s presentation; or how you present to others. Trump is all show, and a master of it. Mamdani, by the way, has mastered the political meme as well – whether he follows through on the substance of his proposals doesn’t matter as much as how he presents them in a meme. That’s not a dig on either actually, but a note for anyone who wants to succeed politically or as an influencer. As Thompson also points out, young folks’ biggest dream now is to become an influencer. That is now the definition of success, and that will be presented in visual form, maybe by your agentic AI on your behalf.
Meanwhile, the smartest people I know, and probably the smartest on the planet in general, are reading, are disconnecting from this rat race and are often lost in deeper analytical thoughts. But most of them are being scooped up by AI companies to vibe code the AI that will entertain us to death while taking our jobs. Or they’re writing essays to one another in academic journals, not entering the cultural conversation. That has value in and of itself – by not being of value to commerce – but our public discourse is weakened and/or coarsened. We used to have public intellectuals, and the average person wanted to showcase their part in that public discourse – it was considered normal, even.
Ahh, but I digress. That’s what jetlag and Mediterranean sun will do to one’s brain as you leave a content confab by the Sea. Back to the hopeful stuff, post haste. And there is a lot of that, too. You don’t have to look far to find that there’s a lot of people starting to reject the flood of content. There’s a backlash even, especially amongst younger audiences who are buying vinyl, and flip-phones, and hosting unplug parties. There’s an entire movement of getting outdoors and into nature and experiencing things over consuming them (often while documenting them on social, but let’s keep it positive here).
As I’ve written elsewhere, theaters are reporting young audiences showing up in droves to watch cinema, especially repertoire. Film fest attendance is coming back, as people yearn for the communal experience. And when people are online, they’re also often seeking deeper connections. They want participatory experiences. They want to be part of fandoms and go deeper with the artists and content that they love (Doug Shapiro also talked about this recently here, as did Ben Odell in an analysis of A24 and Paramount here).
That all of this is mixed in with all of the things I mentioned above doesn’t make it any less meaningful. In fact, it’s the signal in the noise. As the world becomes more artificial, large subsets of people will want things that are more real. We may have bifurcated into groups who can find no connection on what “real” means anymore, but we can find the others with that same definition in mind, and go deeper on the things we care about (go too far/deep, and it becomes a problem, as always). And this is also when people start to want curators who can help them find their way through this stuff. Yeah, you, me and everyone else has been heralding the need for curators since the web began, but their value is only growing. But when anyone can be a curator, and is today, what matters are the ones with taste. That becomes more important than ever. It might be different for everyone, but we each know just a handful of people who’ve really got it – taste – and those are the people we value and envy, and hope to emulate, the most.
Artists who lean into this will find the path to success in this age of excess. So will brands. So will companies - new and old - and collectives. Each of those, who can build their own brand – around taste, and thoughtful curation and production – will be one step closer to success. That gives me hope for us finding our way through this morass. As I’ve said before, the history of the internet has been search, it’s future is find. And we find the future through guides, and they’ll be needed more than ever during this ongoing age of abundance.
