Monetizing While Protecting Youth in an Asynchronus World: Delivering Quality Without the Dreck

No sooner had I written a (very) long post on IPTV and its potential ramifications for the entrenched creators and distributors of media than I picked up Joe Morgenstern's interesting piece in today's Wall Street Journal titled YouTube Youth. It really got me thinking about what the Internet has been saying about the paradigm shift towards an asychronous, on-demand world, and what this means for how Big Media and others approach the youth market. What are the concerns that we parents have when thinking about the explosion of new content, messages and media from every direction that is bombarding our children (mine included)? To list just a few:

1. Is the content educational?
2. Is the content enriching?
3. Is the content engaging?
4. Is the content bundled with off-topic messages or advertising?
5. Can the content be consumed when my child wants it and where they want it?

There are many more but these are the five off the top of my head. Let me share a few of the thoughts Joe wrote about in today's article:

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Kids are ditching traditional forms of entertainment -- especially theatrical films -- in favor of digital media, and they've got Hollywood scared stiff.

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But techie tots, if that's what our children are becoming, pose a conundrum that Variety's article never quite articulated: No one has a handle on how they think. Not only how they think about toys, as expressed in what the toy trade calls play patterns, but how these junior multitaskers are taking in the world around them.

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Video iPods and other dazzling gizmos are here to stay. So are videogames, which can be engaging and challenging as well as benumbing. And the enemy is not the Web, per se, where oases of creativity coexist with vast reaches of trash and gibberish...The enemy, in whatever medium, is incoherence along with its partner in crime, indiscriminateness. In this fevered media environment, kids need not only to be restricted in their access to commercial junk, but exposed to what will delight and nourish them -- first to children's literature, and then to our endlessly rich heritage of motion pictures.

Exposing them is all we can do; what happens next must be an article of faith. I'm certainly a congregant, though. I believe the same lures that hooked me on movies as a kid -- the spectacle, the mystery, the roiling emotions and the suspense about what happens next -- can hold their own against whatever enticements the new media may serve up. First, though, our techie tots must see the flickering light.

This is deep, profound stuff. I respect Joe's perspective - the issue isn't how to roll back the clock to a simpler, more straight-forward time, but to figure out how to harness the power of today's technology and media to tap in to the inner creativity and capacity our children have for consuming quality content. And while this is certainly a challenging and elemental question for movie studios and others producing kid-focused content, it is equally if not more important for parents who care about what their children see and listen to. It really does seem to play into the mega-trend about which I've been writing quite a bit lately - that of the asynchronus, on-demand world.

It is incumbent upon the studios and content developers to figure out what will turn kids on while addressing concerns over appropriateness, educational content and advertising, all in a way that doesn't bust their economic model. Notwithstanding stunning advances in technology, the cost of producing feature films continues to rise, upping the ante of not really understanding your audience and having your costly project debut with a thud. What about a model that depends less on hits and more of a steady stream of less costly, easier-to-produce, more targeted content that segments the youth audience in a more granular manner? This doesn't necessarily mean the end of the feature film, it just means getting closer to the audience and really getting a handle on the intersection of attention and interest. And I've got to think that keeping a consistent finger on the pulse of the multi-facted, fragmented and fickle youth market has got to increase the likelihood of successful feature film productions.

I know this is not necessarily in Hollywood's DNA, but I think they might need to undergo a little genetic therapy in an effort to become more adaptive in the asynchronus, attention-challenged, taste-shifting youth market. Otherwise, it'll be boom-and-bust until that one big bust ends the game and more forward-looking, flexible and cost-efficient content developers step up to meet the challenge. A highly profitable, yet formidable challenge.