Who Trashed the Pizazz?

Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

Both are infamous pieces of history that have been mass produced to the extent of becoming an optional background for your credit card. Millions and millions of copies worldwide of these historical masterpieces exist, none of which measure up to the original; and the intrinsic value of them decreases consistently.

Originality is rare - and today’s media content is following the same pattern of recycled creativity as all of the world’s historical outlets. So let’s assume that we want to stand apart from the crowd, and attempt to find some of the original works of today’s creative masterminds (of media content, of course). Where would we even begin?

Over the course of a week, I surveyed about 20 people, asking them a simple question: “Where do you find original media content online?” After hearing “why?” or “word of mouth” from everyone surveyed, I turned to social media’s current head honcho, Twitter, in hopes for a miracle reply. I received a couple of ad link results from my favorite self-proclaimed social media gurus, but still nothing substantial. I then searched a few variations of the words “original,” “media,” and “content” before finding the gold I was looking for within the melting pot of Twitter.

As it turns out, the “word of mouth” explanation for the discovery of original media content online was all I was going to get. However, the tech-savvy online term is called “social bookmarking.” Sites such as StumbleUpon and Delicious allow internet users to bookmark pages they found interesting, and add keywords and intriguing headlines to their posts, for other users to scroll through. A search engine-like feature suggests those bookmarked pages to you based on interests you select, and allows for a detail-specific search approach as well.

These sites gather an array of websites (as you could imagine) from around 7 million online users daily. The content is original (mostly—with some mainstream pages slipping in), as popular sites are not usually considered “stumbled upon.”

Similar sites exist specifically for news and television shows.

TrueSlant, a news site based entirely on user-created content, is one of the most popularly “tweeted” online media outlets there is—continuously increasing in popularity due to its global range of events coverage and broad spectrum of background opinion in news. Koldcast.tv is an online television network broadcasting original content shows, and has both paid and free distribution of non-FCC regulated creativity available via stream 24 hours a day.

Both of these websites were brought to my attention through the above social bookmarking services. In realizing the existence of “social bookmarking,” I admittedly learned that finding media content may not be the rocket science I had assumed. So why aren’t more people doing it? Why do we stick to re-runs and continuously allow content theft on the internet?

The reality still stands that the majority of people aren’t going to parooz through the latest tweets or bookmarks to chance their entertainment on original media.

So the question remains—why (and how) did the demand for originality lose its pizzazz with viewing audiences?

Perhaps the real question we need to ask ourselves in the industry is how we get it back…

By Christina Morgan
Revolution IPTV

morgan@revolutioniptv.com
www.revolutioniptv.com