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Originally Posted by You Are Gay
So in conclusion i see the future as a much more interactive place. I appreciate that i've not backed up my opinions with data. It's just the way i see things going.
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My predictions.
1. There will be more private support for the arts in direct subsidies. This will either be in the form of private patronage (once you're bored with football teams, why not patronise a studio or two?). Even outside of billionaires, if you could buy a sports-car or help fund half a ultra low budget art house movie then....well, it'd depend on you. Either would probably help you pick up chicks at any rate.
How the donation/subscription model works with the rest of the population depends on how affluent people remain. In theory, micro-payments will continue to become more established and transaciton costs will slowly be driven down. If I donated the change in my pocket to whichever band I was listening to most in a day, then I wouldn't notice much effect on my standard of living, but I'd be transferring at least £500 a year (compared to the one CD I've bought in the last x years). But right now it's not convenient to transfer my money magically to VNV Nation or NOFX or whomever. So it goes to the first homeless person who asks for it. Fair dues.
But this presumes people have the money to give. If people's incomes are reduced in the long run in real terms by rising health care costs of housing costs or taxation (insert your social costs here) then perhaps it will only be the very affluent who could affort to give on a sizable level?
2. The costs of movie making will continue to fragment. Technology exerts a downward pressure on a lot of costs - and I can't imagine that decent voice synchronisation is more than a couple of decades away. Once that occurs, if you combined it with a flexible game engine type environment then you'd practically reduce the barrier to entry for film-making to nil (or rather free-time and a computer). This would mean 99.99% of everything produced on this medium would be dross, but that's not far off the average of other production methods. Of course, there will be enormous bias against such "amateur" efforts, and much like even today animated TV shows are seen in some circles as still inferior, you'll get a lot of elitist faggotry for a while.
3. Corporations will increase their support of the arts as indirect marketing. I don't mean simply by making advertising, but by (say) funding a series of short-movies. Corporate censorship is a potential risk, but ignoring that, imagine how much it would cost to make, say, 10 short very low budget movies? Well, Vodafone probably spend that a day on 10 second TV spots. And for large sections of the population, advertising is increasingly ineffective - much better to fund things which people like. Orange's association with movies is a good example of this. I can only see this growing especially when one considers how expensive traditional advertising space is.
4. The big hype movies will still exist, but they will reliant on multiple revenue streams (which in turn will rely on more hype). For example, a friend of mine must have at least three hundred pounds worth of Lord of the Rings tat. Of course there's the box set (sorry, box
sets) but that's actually only a small minority of the expenditure. There's models, accompanying books, paintings, jewellery and so on. And yes, he downloaded LOTR on bit-torrent as soon as it came out, but since it simply served as a long advertising for him, why would anyone object?