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While we're studying trends

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there are a lot of trends to look at.

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Currently the cost of disc drives is plummeting

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and has been plummeting at a truly ludicrous rate.

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However the speed of internet connections hasn't been growing anywhere near as fast.

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To the point where drives have been getting cheaper

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but not bigger as fast as you might expect

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simply because people can't fill them.

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They can't download enough stuff to fill them.

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At some point you can download anything instantly.

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However, for starters you can move up to HD quality video

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for everything that you watch

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which people are definitely going to want to do.

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And that gets you a couple more years of net connections

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not being anywhere near fast enough.

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And you can possibly go up higher than that.

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There are a number of other trends going on.

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The costs of production of all kinds of things are definitely going down

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The costs of production of audio have already pretty much bottomed-out,

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in that the equipment costs so little it's ridiculous

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And mostly when you're recording something your primary concern

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is getting a decent sound-proof room

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and most people have one of those in their house already

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and the toilet doesn't really distort the sound too much.

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So the recording industry is having this problem now

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that new artists know that they don't want to get signed.

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And they've read the various essays talking

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about what an incredibly bad deal getting signed can really wind up being.

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And they have their music themselves and they're distributing it online

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which is pretty good for them, not so good for the people who are traditionally resellers.

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They have a problem. 

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So, in the case of... now that doesn't mean that music isn't getting produced --

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quite the contrary, tonnes of music is getting produced

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and lots of people who would otherwise have trouble reaching an audience

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via their music can because in the past you were completely beholden

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to what you could possibly get played on the radio

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and now you can just

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put your stuff online and lots and lots

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of bands are getting followings that way, however

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the traditional industry of how music is distributed

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is having to reorganize.

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Now in the case of video, costs are definitely going down

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not as much as in the case of audio

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but things are shuffling around in interesting ways.

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Right now reality television is getting very popular.

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I personally am rather fond of just about the trashiest

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reality television you could possibly find

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Now this sort of seems like it's a great innovation in narrative form,

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which, it more or less is.

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However there is something else going on here

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which is that the cost of film is getting very very cheap.

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So in the past, film was so incredibly expensive, inherently

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that you would never dream of having people literally goof off

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in front of it in the hopes that they did something interesting.

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And now it's gotten so cheap

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that you can do exactually that.

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And all of a sudden the big problem is editing this mass of garbage

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down into something compelling.

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So that hasn't actually made overall costs of production

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that much cheaper

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but it's definitely shuffled things around quite a bit

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We've also seen some other interesting trends

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that product placement is getting much much more prominent

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than it has been in the past

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It's not at the point yet of... with some exceptions

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but for the most part it's not at the point of literally

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making something just for the product placement,

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but it might very well get there.

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It sure looks like it's close with some of the things I've seen lately.

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Now, in the case of games that's very interesting

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because games basically has it all figured out.

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In games whatever client software runs, by and large

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you can just download and run.

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The problem is, for a consumer, software doesn't do much unless it's talking

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to the central service.

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If it's not connected to the service it's not much of a game.

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There's no interaction with other people.

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There's no getting critical information about what is happening to you

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as you're playing. You basically can't play, and the whole entire games industry

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was traditionally based off of people writing all this stuff

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and having a few really big hits and most of them are failures.

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And it's mostly continued to be the very same thing.

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 It's run off of a few really big hits.

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And most of them are failures 

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and the main shift has been there's an online play component

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which has been very compelling

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Users love it, it adds a whole new dimension to the experience

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but it also makes it straight forward to have scarcity in it.

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It makes it easy to charge people to play the game.

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And interestingly the thing that people are afraid of happening

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to video has had the exact opposite thing happen in games

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in that people are worried about not being able to get together the money

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to have the sorts of productions we've had in the past for video.

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Now it's not like that's unprecedented.

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Live performances had budgets in the past which

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just will never happen again.

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But if games are any indication the
exact opposite thing might happen

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and there are games that cost over a hundred million dollars now

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which is phenomenal, it's just astounding.

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In the past when I was a kid a game was two people 

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for 6 months. And they make a game.

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The change is not necessarily all good

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Games look a lot better, they look a lot more polished, they have a lot more 

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production values but the amount of innovation in game engines has just plummeted,

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there's very very little left because if you're going to

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spend tens of millions of dollars making a game

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you're not going to use some experimental game engine

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which might or might not work

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you're going to use something which you know works.

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And with a few notable exceptions that's by and large what everybody does.