Nokia and Spike Lee Target UGC, What about Indie Producers?
With the announcement that Nokia has teamed with Spike Lee to create a series of shorts for the UGC community is certainly a positive step for the handset maker seeking to extend into more diverse markets.
Certainly, UGC is huge and the goal of converting millions of eyeballs into dollars has been Holy Grail for YouTube and a slew of smaller companies. That Nokia is using their platforms; I gather the N95 along with a name director is certainly a good marketing strategy. Certainly, this is not the first company to seek to work from the top down.
© The New York Times
According to Mr. Lee who has admitted to being technologically challenged said, "I'm interested because it's a great collaborative effort," Mr. Lee said. "Within five years, new movies will be made with devices like these."
I agree, but made by whom? A couple of years back Nokia had what I thought a killer platform for production, namely the N93 that unfortunately did not gain traction as was discontinued. While not consumer friendly enough, an updated version of the N93 would make a great little platform for Indie Producers for shorts, or even perhaps as Second unit camera for some projects.
Nokia N93 Camera demo
According to the New York Times article today, John Stratton, the chief marketing officer of Verizon Communications who works closely with media companies to offer content to customers, said he did not expect films shot on phones to become their own genre. "But the notion of shared media is powerful," he said.
Mr. Stratton should become acquainted with Fun Little Movies which has for the past several years done just that, created and distributed shorts for the worldwide mobile handset market featuring accomplished actors such as Peter Dinklage.
There is also an Elephant in the room that nobody is addressing, namely that U.S. cellular carriers restrict the amount of video content a user can upload to a site and in the case of AT&T, and it is 300kb per clip. If the goal of such collaborations between Nokia and Mr. Lee is to leverage the immediacy of mobile devices as more then simply smaller versions of existing camera's then the bandwidth will have to be opened to make it a more useful and rich user experience.
While this is a good strategy for Nokia and Mr. Lee, what about Indie Producers? Talented Producer's like Tiffany Shlain and accomplished shows like Alive in Baghdad would benefit greatly if they could strike deals with companies like Nokia or better yet gain traction with selling their content online?
A concern that many of us have with ITV in its current form is namely that it will become the platform for established media outlets and name Directors to pitch their wares at the expense of smaller Producers of varied backgrounds.
