Matt McIrvin's Freaky Alternate Reality

Some trouble in the entertainment industry over the past decade stems from a misunderstanding of the fantasies people have when they enjoy home entertainment. (Not those fantasies. Keep reading.)

The big guys are good at the immersive experience: get people to come into a darkened room and blow their minds for a couple of hours. This is a practice that has existed in some form for hundreds of years, and it still works pretty well, though home entertainment does give competition. The assumption is that is that audiences want to invite the giant showmen in and recreate that passive experience in their own homes. But they don't.

When entertainment companies think about making entertainment more "interactive," the focus is always on bringing the audience into the story: you can be a character in the show! Maybe that is what some gamers want, but I don't think that character identification is what most people like to imagine at all when they show a movie or play a record in their own homes. The fantasy is that the person with the remote is the showman: a kind of master of ceremonies, in an imaginary vaudeville world where the master of ceremonies really controls everything. You know, Kermit the Frog on the old Muppet Show. The entertainment companies don't get this because, being heirs to a tradition of showmanship, they see themselves as the showmen, not as people who resell showman status to rank amateurs.

This is why customers don't stand for business models for home entertainment in which they lose a lot of control. This is why people will rent or buy expensive DVDs even if they'll only watch them once, but DivX (the original DivX, I mean) failed. It's why pay-per-view never dominates the movie rental scene except in certain very special niche markets. This is why TiVo users get so obsessive. It's also why people like MP3 players even if they're only going to rip CDs that they already own. If it's in my home, I want to be the MC. It's part of the fun.