Hollywood's visionary outcast

by J.D. Lasica

Warren Lieberfarb, the hard-charging former head of Warner Home Video, almost single-handedly invented the DVD. So what does he see for the future of television? Surprisingly, it's a distributed, on-demand, grassroots model that Hollywood, so far, has shown little interest in. But Hollywood's digital future is inevitable.

The following is excerpted from chapter 8 (Personal broadcasting) of J.D. Lasica's Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation.

Warren Lieberfarb, the former head of Warner Home Video who was the driving force behind the creation of the DVD, leans across a polished table in his sun-splashed Brentwood office, club tie slightly askew, and sizes up the forces now sweeping through the media world.

"I see a very, very, very big transformation that's going to change the balance of power in media," he says, choosing his words with care. "It will step away from the broadcast and cable networks to specialized niche programming that will be accessible through on-demand services. That is the revolution. And nothing is going to stop this."

Lieberfarb is that rarest of birds: a longtime major player in Hollywood who has joined the tradition-smashing, innovation-addicted tech world. As a key consultant to the Microsoft team working on home entertainment technologies, he is putting together program ideas for an Internet that will become an increasing source of secure, full-motion, full-screen video procured from a wide range of new, independent voices.

"All this is going to bypass the broadcast and cable networks," he says. "The whole notion that you sit at a television at a designated time and you tune in to watch what they say you watch-it's over. It's going to take a while, but it's over."

Just as the Internet and the proliferation of low-cost digital tools have reshaped other media, the new technologies will transform our notion of television. A few years from now, when you say "television," it may no longer be synonymous with the box in your living room because you will also be watching it on your handheld mobile device or tablet PC. "What's on TV" may no longer be synonymous with network and cable programming because you'll be able to access video feeds from a wide range of new content providers. When you do watch television in your living room, you'll still wield a remote control, but you'll be watching it on a standalone digital box or one that's hooked up to a media-center device or wirelessly connected to a PC, giving you the power to pull niche content from a gushing fire hose of sources.

"People are going to discover that content doesn't have to be produced by the major media companies," Lieberfarb says.

Who will provide this new wealth of programming? In many cases, ordinary individuals. Servers-powerful computers that transmit data-were once confined to big businesses, but they're now reaching the consumer market. Even PCs connected to peer-to-peer networks are now fast enough to process large video files, especially with compression technologies like DivX. This portends a major shift in the media ecosystem. It means individuals are gaining power over media at the expense of the corporations that have traditionally controlled the distribution gateways. And it means we need to rethink our metaphors. Channels, after all, are an artificial creation. What we really want are not more channels but more choice. Anyone who runs a file sharing service out of his house has essentially turned into a broadcast station or movie distributor.

Lieberfarb is not saying the old order of big media programming will be overthrown by a cabal of camcorder-wielding young turks. But he is saying the major media companies will no longer exercise exclusive control over what Americans watch on television. "There is this attitude in the media industry that we're the ones that make the big-time media that people want. Yet it's always been dark horses that the establishment didn't see that have created the changes in the media landscape. HBO was a dark horse. CNN was a dark horse. ESPN was a dark horse. So were VCRs. And the technophobia in the media industry, the resistance to changing business models, the gut instant to use their monopoly power to extract financial benefits-all this will not serve the media companies well in the coming era."

Formidable business interests will oppose a mass rollout of easily accessible on-demand media for the public because it threatens their existing business models, Lieberfarb says. In the years ahead, vertically integrated media companies will use their marketplace dominance and their clout in Congress, the regulatory agencies, and the courts in an effort to maintain their role as exclusive intermediaries, as gatekeepers of information and entertainment.

"That's why I think audiovisual media, available online on demand, will take place from the edge"-here he holds his hands wide apart-"and not from the center of the media industry. Change is not going to come from the media conglomerates that have too much at stake in protecting the status quo."

As the proliferation of digital video recorders brings true time shifting to the masses and further fractionalizes linear media, we'll increasingly turn toward the edges of the media ecosystem to supplement our visual diets.


It's no coincidence that amateur video and digital creativity are exploding at the same time that big media is facing dislocation and fragmentation. Traditional television is broken. At minimum, it is experiencing a historic churn. Ratings continue to slide as millions of people-especially the young-peel away from the tube to make cool stuff and to engage with other media: video games, weblogs, Flash animations, DVDs, mobile devices. As network executives lose their jobs and prime-time schedules get retooled, it never occurs to the media barons that the fundamental problem may lie not in the programming-the shows on the broadcast networks and cable have rarely been of higher quality-but in the platform, the medium.

For decades television served as the prototypical mass medium, a soothing electronic temple that offered a simple Faustian bargain: mass entertainment in return for a consumer culture built on mass consumption. But we are increasingly becoming a world of splintered tribes, a niche society where individual culture has replaced the illusion of mass culture. As we fragment, in our tastes, habits, and lifestyles, so too does our most popular medium.

How to put television's pieces back together? We need to arrive at a new place of user participation and interaction. The tools are at hand: a converged cable TV and Internet gateway that lets subscribers pay a monthly fee (80 percent of Americans already pay for cable TV or satellite) in return for a high-speed freeway ramp connecting us to thousands of niche video channels created by entrepreneurs, amateurs, and independent professionals.

Will the companies controlling the pipes into our houses also control what comes through it? Will they continue to be our visual content gatekeepers? "No," Lieberfarb tells me firmly. "People will be able to access any web sites delivering movies and video." When cable was created in the early 1970s, he reminds me, the government set up an oversight regime with the objective of creating diversity in programming. "If we believe in freedom of speech, a corollary to that is program diversity," he adds with a flourish. Cable took us part of the way. Digital technology and the Internet will take us the rest.

(From Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation. You may copy excerpts from this entry to comment on or critique the work or to otherwise engage in fair use.)