The publication of this report coincides with Discop, the trade show being held right now in Johannesburg, billed as “the world’s number one destination to acquire and co-produce content 'Made in Africa' and sell international film, television and digital content, adaptation rights and packaged TV channels into Sub-Saharan Africa.”
But what do we know about the media and technology landscape in Africa? Probably not a lot, which is a big part of why these reports were commissioned. Let’s start by taking a closer look at some key issues related to infrastructure and demographics in Africa:
The African continent is the fastest-growing market in the world for mobile phones, and though most on the continent use mobile devices to access the internet, rates of internet penetration vary greatly from one country to the next.
Is Africa and ‘internet first’ market? Yes and No.
Internet penetration on the continent ranges from about 80% for Kenya to around 50% for Morocco and Nigeria and 2 to 5% for countries such as Burundi, Niger, and Sierra Leone
Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal report mobile internet penetration of over 100%, meaning there are more phones than people
But before we get too carried thinking mobile connectivity will bring the 1.2 billion people of Africa into the world of digital content, it’s worth noting that over 600 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa alone lack access to electricity, making the present, not the future, extremely unevenly distributed on
this continent expected to double in size to 2.5 billion by 2040.
Two dozen African countries have English as one of their official languages.
Over a dozen countries in Africa have French as one of their official languages, which represents about half of the world’s French speaking population of 200 million
But here's the big startling statistic: It is estimated that number of French speakers in the world will reach 700 million 2050, of which 80% are anticipated to be in Africa.
In terms of broadcast media, TV content in most African countries is a mix of programming produced regionally, foreign movies, and localized versions of reality TV franchises known around the world. Switch on a TV in Africa and chances are you’ll find shows such as Big Brother Africa and The Voice Africa in prime time alongside an assortment of regionally produced soap operas and talk shows.
To read the full report on Africa's media and entertainment landscape in 2017 click here.
The country of 50 million is a high tech haven, for everything from the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile devices to leading edge virtual reality and augmented reality to what’s known as Hallyu, or the Korean Wave of popular culture. These Korean TV shows, films, and pop music first swept across Asia in the 1990s and in more recent years became part of the country's export cargo to the rest of the world. For most of us it came to our attention with Gangnam Style in 2012 but there’s a lot more to it than that.
South Korea is also a top exporter to the world of television formats such as Genius Game
...and twists on conventional cooking shows that combine elements of talk shows, drama, game shows, or travel shows are also a popular genre in Korea, and are often licensed for localization abroad. In other words there’s a good chance that your favourite crazy cooking competition show
originated in Seoul.
Perhaps most bizarre, to us Westerners at least, is the phenomenon known as Mukbang, or eating videos. These half hour videos feature people, usually in their bedroom or kitchen, grilling and eating things like meat dishes, soups, noodles, and dumplings. Doesn’t sound particularly exciting? I hear you. Yet videos like this one regularly net millions of views. Why? Because Internet.
South Korea’s dramas are also enormously popular outside of the country’s own borders. Descendants of the Sun, a romantic drama available in China on the iQiyi video streaming platform, pulled in close to 2 billion views as of early 2017.
The exporting of popular culture, not unlike the country’s heavy investments in R&D programs and its technology infrastructure, has been carefully planned and promoted by the South Korean government for the last 20 years or so. Billions in public funds have been put into the country’s media and entertainment industries as part of the the official Hallyuprogram. And how has that worked out? By one estimate South Korea’s annual revenues from pop culture exports now exceed $5 billion.
For the full report on the media and entertainment industries in South Korea in 2017 click here.
Okay maybe you didn't ask, but I'll tell you anyway. Why? Because I spent my summer, and quite happily I might add, working on a series of reports on the media and entertainment industries of seven different international markets. Two have been released so far: South Africa and South America, and five more are coming this fall: China, India, South Korea, Mexico, and Select English and French Markets in Africa. (Ed. Note: If only frequent flyer points were part of the deal)
Despite being a pretty digital person I still usually take my interview notes by hand
A few highlights from the reports. First South Africa. You may know it for dramatic wildlife documentaries or the place that the mystery of 60s protest singer Sixto Rodriguez was solved in the 2012 documentary Searching for Sugarman. But today there's a booming film and TV industry there, even though they didn't have TV until the 1970s and never had cable. Now South Africa is home to studio facilities that rival those of North America and Europe, which brings international media production to cities such as Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town. A recent one is the mini-series The Indian Detective, starring Canadian comedian Russell Peters, produced for broadcast in Canada and to be shown on Netflix in South Africa.
And what about South America on the world stage? Perhaps nothing speaks more to the global appeal of Latin American culture than the recent crowning of Despacito as the most watched video on YouTube, and the first to reach 3 billion views. (Let's see if we can add a few more to its current 3.8 billion views by embedding it below).
And yes, I realize that the song is the work of Puerto Rican artist Luis Fonsi, who is obviously not from South America, but it's the jam that started the Latin music revolution currently underway, largely thanks to on demand listening and viewing on Spotify and YouTube. This summer Billboard reported that right after Despacito broke the record for most viewed video on YouTube there were four Spanish language videos in its Top 10 and 27 in its top 100. The latest Latin American sonic explosion Mi Gente is approaching 900 million views at the time of this writing by the way.
But back to the South American report. It focuses on four countries -- Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia -- which together represent approximately ¾ of the South American continent’s population and the majority of its economic activity. In terms of the media industries a lot of that economy activity came from telenovelas, those melodramatic TV serials reportedly enjoyed by viewers from 8 to 80. Thanks to the globalizing power of Netflix classic telenovelas such as Rebelde, La Usurpadora, and La Reina del Sur have become part of the binge viewing fare of audiences around the world, and have led to a new generation of telenovela-inspired shows such as Narcos, Club de Cuervos, and Ingobernable.
To learn more about the state of the media and entertainment industries in South Africa and South America you can access the full reports online. Click here for the report on South Africa and here for the report on South America.
It was one of those places I’d walked past at least a
hundred times en route to my favourite tragic east end mall (which just happens to have one of
the best dollar stores going). It was called Rayman’s Variety, and according to the sign it specialized in West
Indian and African groceries and cosmetic products.It was stuffed to the
rafters with boxes and bottles and, well, how do I put this, from the looks of
things inventory didn’t exactly turn over quickly. Then one day I looked in and things had changed. But only kind of. The sign was still there, the rusty bars on the windows were still there, but about 98% of the stock had been removed. The tired old walls and floors had been ripped out, but it wasn’t exactly clear what was going on, though something clearly was. Or more like unclearly.
In the weeks that followed I noticed some handwritten signage.
It said ‘940 Variety’. 940 was the address on Gerrard Street East and ‘variety’
suggested it was continuing in its convenience store tradition, but in what
appeared to be a more customer friendly incarnation.
Earlier this week I was walking by and noticed that the door
was open so I walked in. Inside I truly found variety: chips, cold drinks, used
records and books, a rack with new clothes, and coffee being sold for $1 a cup.
But this wasn’t just one more example of an old place being hipsterized. It
wasn’t that straightforward.
There was only one person in the store, and he wasn’t a
customer. He was a guy in the midst of some store-related carpentry. I said hi
and complimented him on the renewed interior. He seemed like a friendly guy who
was open to some conversation so I went with that. I asked him how things were
going at the store. He said things were a work in progress. He pointed at the
racks of chips and said that they weren’t really making their money on those. Not
a big surprise there. He pointed to the opposite wall and said they’d recently
added used records and books to their wares.
This was a guy who clearly goes with a flow, as opposed to a
plan. And I mean that in the best possible way. He then told me about his idea to do a version of the Tiny Desk concerts, which are exactly what they sound like; i.e. concerts done
behind a tiny desk that feature artists ranging from up and comers to stars
such as Chance The Rapper and Adele.
His would be tiny counter concerts instead, and he showed me
where the singer would be and then pointed to another area where the rest of
the band would be located.I asked him about the back area he was pointing to, as it
was still being worked on. He told me about some of his plans for fixing it up.
He said they had already done a few shows and social events on the premises --
with the appropriate liquor licenses and approvals of course – and said that
maybe that would be the way forward for 940.
I was reminded of one of the coolest places I’d ever seen,
which was a secret high end sneaker shop in downtown Boston. But this one
didn’t advertise, or even have a sign. You had to know where it was, because it
was hidden behind an unmarked storefront that was stocked with faded paper
towel packages and cleaning supplies. One
of those places you would only pick up in your peripheral vision, if at all. But if you knew someone who was in the know you could find
out where this place was. But that wasn’t enough. You then had to know where
the magical door was, the one that led you to a secret world of sneakerhead riches.
I told the proprietor of 940 about it and he seemed
sincerely intrigued. He even had a bit of a twinkle in his eye as he mulled the
possibilities. What struck me was how open he was to possibilities. I mean, how
many people sign a lease on a retail space and then essentially run a series of
experiments, to see what works. It may
sound crazy, but it’s the brick and mortar version of the pivot of the startup world.
When something doesn’t work in the tech world it’s not seen as a failure, but
as an opportunity to correct one’s course. Provided that the pivot is executed quickly enough. It’s all part of the break things, fail fast
mindset of entrepreneurs. Failing fast, as has been pointed out, isn’t about the big issues, it’s about the little ones. It
acknowledges that there are many dials in front of you and that you will be
tweaking them for a while before things click into gear.
Before leaving 940 Variety I asked the proprietor-carpenter
it would be okay if I took a few pictures and he said by all means (those are
the ones you see here). Then I told him that the next time I’m there I fully
expect to be able to press on the cold beverage case at the back and marvel as
it becomes the portal to an as of yet not figured out universe. Or something
else entirely.
“We started doing this because too many people thought
Toronto hip hop started with Drake”. The ‘this’ in the preceding sentence is the “Views Before the 6” podcast, and the ‘we’ are Big Tweeze aka Anthony Corsi and Thrust aka
Chris France, a rapper perhaps best known, to Canadian hip hop historians at
least, for his shouted out role in the ‘Northern Touch’ video.
Tweeze and Thrust were part of a panel called The Business of Podcasting, held recently at Toronto’s Ryerson University. They were among the podcasters talking that night about
plying their trade online and seeing where it goes. Despite the title of the
event, podcasting is a business for very few. Yes, there is an increasingly brisk business in podcasting in the genre of sponsored, or branded content, but this blog post is looking at the experience of podcasting from the point of view of individual creators not directly affiliated with individual brands.
Podcast panel participants L to R:
Gina Kennedy, Anthony Corsi, Thrust, Lindsay Bess
Those assembled for the panel talked with great passion
and enthusiasm for their podcast projects. When asked about how many downloads
they get no one was coy. The answers
were illuminating: from a few dozen to a few hundred. But it's still pretty early days for these creators. At this level it's obviously not a business, but as panelist Gina Kennedy, host of the Radio Somewhere podcast put it: "it's not a job, it's a lifestyle". Still, the trick with so
many digital content efforts is to find, and to speak to, the underserved niche
audience and see how far you can take things. (Ed. Note: Though there's variation across genres and topics, a rule of thumb is that advertisers like to see about 20,000 monthly downloads per episode in order to consider putting money into your podcast.)
As pointed out during the panel, in many cities radio never picked up
on hip hop, even though the audience grew and grew. As a genre, hip hop is
anything but ‘brand safe’, i.e. where major advertisers want to be, so the match between hip hop and mass media
like radio and TV was destined to be weak. And this is why, from outside the
traditional industries, YouTube channels, blogs, and podcasts emerged to serve
the hundreds of millions of hip hop fans around the globe, a number of which are operating as profitable businesses. The audience and the demand was too big to be ignored, and in a reversal of the usual processes of 'getting on the air', the creators made the shows, posted them online without the involvement or approval of the usual gatekeepers, the audiences followed and told their friends, and the advertisers came in at the end of the cycle.
Even though as a technology, podcasting has been around for over
14 years, as detailed in this blog post, it is still early days in terms of the development of
podcasting as an industry. We tend to think that once a technology is
introduced and gets popular then dollars start to flow. The truth of the matter
is that it takes a whole lot of infrastructure development until that starts to
happen; from reliable metrics, to user-friendly apps to content networks and advertising networks...and we’re only now starting to get there.
So how big is podcasting as both a medium and a market? Last year there were about 30 million minutes of podcasting produced, and as a market it is currently valued at about $200 million. This value is determined by the amount of advertising dollars
the medium attracted. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? But a number is only big or
small compared to other numbers, so let’s look at another number, in this case
the value of the radio market in 2017. Over $32 billion. But podcasting’s piece of the pie is only going to get bigger, and radio’s is going to get smaller. It will take several years, and a bunch of new software and hardware developments, like making it easier to listen to podcasts in cars, but it will happen.
For more on the State of Podcasting in 2017, see this Fact Sheet from the good people at Pew Research.
And for a statistically-based take on the question "Will radio kill the internet star?" click here.
One way of thinking about the Internet is as a giant
matching machine. You have a question, it finds you an answer. You want a
flight, it finds you a good deal. You want a date, it can find that for you
too. Lots of them in fact.
But is this the whole story? Not exactly.
A fairly simple problem/solution scenario is how things
worked in the days of Web 1.0, a pre-data collection web that hadn’t yet
developed, let alone mastered, micro-targeting by such attributes as
demographics, psychographics, and location. And before you cry “surveillance!”
bear in mind that it is the advertising-supported, data slicing and dicing web
that brings so much to all of us each day in the form of news, entertainment,
and productivity tools. Not to mention that the systems that optimize marketing
done online also help filter out that which could be called ‘noise’; i.e. if I
don’t have kids I won’t get daycare ads on Facebook, if I don’t have a dog or a
cat I won’t get coupons for kibble popping up alongside YouTube videos I watch.
Is this all for the better? As with many things, it depends
how you look at it, and it depends who you ask. If you ask mathematician Cathy O’Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction,
the answer would be no.
At a recent talk held at Microsoft Research O’Neil began by describing what an algorithm is. “It’s
something we build to make a prediction about the future…and it assumes that
things that happened in the past will happen again in the future.” O’Neil explained that algorithms use things
such as decision trees, which contain if/then and yes/no statements and then
use historical information, pattern matching, and machine learning to build models that can make thousands to millions of
predictions, and can do so in a fraction of the time of a human being with a
calculator and a scratch pad.
So what’s not to like? The problem is, according
to O’Neil, that the agenda of the algorithm is decided by the builder of the
algorithm. What goes into the algorithm is, necessarily ‘curated’, and when
some variables are selected while others are left out, then a value system is
embedded in the algorithm.
These value systems in turn can affect decisions now made by
machines that used to be made by humans, such as hiring, credit worthiness,
professional evaluation, and insurance eligibility. Researchers, including O'Neil herself, have attempted to find out the rules that inhabit some of these algorithms, using Freedom of Information requests, but according to O'Neil many such requests have not been successful. Furthermore, many of the data-driven systems responsible for making millions of decisions are built on proprietary, or 'black box' software architectures, that are extremely difficult to reverse engineer.
But let's bring things back to how data interfaces with you in your daily life. If you’ve ever wondered, for example, why
you often spend a half hour on hold when you call customer support and your
friends say they get through right away the explanation may be more than “we’re
experiencing larger than normal call volumes.” Maybe they are, but maybe, as O’Neil points out, it's something else. She cites the example of how it is a common practice for customer service lines to pre-determine if
you’re a high value customer or a low value customer based on the purchase and credit information
cross-referenced with your phone number. And, well, you can figure out who gets
put through to a real live human operator and who has to listen to extended
musical accompaniments of flutes and vibraphones.
O’Neil calls such processes “systematic filtering”, and is
concerned that machine learning, a key component of artificial intelligence --
which is said to be the next revolution in computing -- “automates the status
quo” and in turn creates “pernicious feedback loops” that not only trap people in the biases of the past but also magnify those biases as machine learning is itself based on recursive loops and neural networks.
This was not and is not the intention of any such systems of
course. The point of deploying data, at scale, is to build models at a speed
and complexity that far exceeds the capability of humans. As with any technological innovation, there exist unintended consequences, and the decisions made by data-driven systems are no different.
For an overview of Cathy O'Neil's book "Weapons of Math Destruction" click here.
Anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote on the concepts of purity and danger in the mid 1960s, creating a framework through which various cultures arrive at categorizations of things that belong and things that do not, of things that are deemed to be dangerous, and things that some think of as 'taboo', while others do not. In other words, one person's threat is another person's meh/not so much.
Douglas' idea that dirt can be best understood as matter out of place, or, something relative to one's environment and attitude about it, is also helpful when thinking about the viral videos which cascade upon us daily in our Facebook newsfeed and our Twitter tweet streams. A monkey in the jungle, not a surprise. A monkey in a shearling coat in an Ikea, well, pretty alarming.
When our expectations are defied in such a manner we now have a way to express our emotional responses -- delight, shock, horror -- whatever they may be, by hitting the forward, share, retweet, or post buttons on social media platforms.
Last month at Toronto's Pearson airport there was another 'matter out of place' incident that caught the attention of the Internet: the airport raccoon.
The initial video (note that many unauthorized versions of the video have popped up on YouTube, some of which have been taken down, and some of which haven't) was taken by an accounting professor who, being analytically minded, was interested not just in a misplaced raccoon but in the mechanisms of how things spread online. I got in touch with Prof. Graham to deconstruct his experience of somewhere between 24 and 48 hours of Internet stardom and the full story can be found here.
