Well, technically it’s not really a new decade. The new decade is supposed to be starting on the 1st of January 2011. Year One, plus 2010 or so years since the last time a man who could walk on water was allegedly born. There is no such thing as “Year Zero”.

“Ground Zero” maybe, but that’s only a remnant of what was perhaps the single most influencial event of the ending decade. Which ends here after all, since the turn of a whole new millenium was officially celebrated exactly ten years ago. So, maybe it wouldn’t be such a great idea to prolong the time-span of the ’00s for an eleventh year. Enough is enough.

And in other words:

Best wishes to everybody for a happy new year!

And also for an even happier new decade, whenever you feel like it to start.

For quite some time now, the vast open spaces of the World Wide Web have become a virtual Eldorado, representing the land of opportunity for anyone who intends to keep making and distributing films in the international market. In theory, even the most sophisticated art-house documentary can find its niche audience through the internet and make some profit. In practice, even the most popular and elaborate multimedia project will have a hard time covering only a small fraction of its budget from web originated revenues.

The main reason for that is the dominant mentality that users around the globe have adopted when dealing with internet content. If it’s free, it’s OK to stream it, download it, embed it or link to it. Otherwise, you must be out of your mind not to ignore it. At the end of the day, the chances are you can find any film for free in Bit Torrent or Rapidshare (not to mention your old fashioned TV set, satellite dish and local video store). So why bother trusting your credit card details to something called Video on Demand? Because it’s only fair that filmmakers and media corporations get what they deserve? Because they are in need? Well, hungry children in the Third World are also in need, and you can’t really compete with them when it comes to online charity, can you?

Whether we like to call it piracy or not, free streaming and downloading of audiovisual content is here to stay. Regardless of what the legal framework might be for any specific region, there is no point hoping that governments will find a way to implement strict rules and manage to cut the flow. Furthermore, it’s technically impossible to come up with an impenetrable system and it costs a fortune to develop one that will even prove to be a decent challenge for the international hacking community. In a sense, ripping, copying and sharing web content has become a grass roots revolution, like earning the right to vote. Nobody can take that away from us, especially when we know there are hundreds of millions of people who are doing exactly the same on a daily basis.

An alternative way of securing funds for a cross media project is by distributing free content and counting on advertising money. But there is a catch here also. So far, the internet has proven to be a fertile ground for marketing purposes, a useful tool for building up the necessary steam to push forward a film project towards mainstream means of financing and distribution. All you have to do is upload a trailer, spend hours of networking in social media and hope that viral marketing will do the job. Apart from that, web advertising as a means of direct income pays little, and will probably continue to do so for any multimedia platform that does not attract visitors by the millions. Even then, all those popular mega sites tend to offer a huge amount of diverse content to their users; which means that the revenue share left for each filmmaker and producer is less than marginal.

What other options are left then?

State and institutional funding can never cover the full cost for creating, uploading and keeping a major cross media project running. Website member subscriptions will always be fewer (and cheaper) than needed and donations can help only if there is a really good cause involved. In which case, most of the money should never reach the filmmakers and distributors anyway…

The most audacious and honest approach so far is the Radiohead example. A couple of years ago, the band released their latest album in the internet free of charge, allowing the users to decide if and how much it’s worth paying for being able to download it. Their experiment did much better than expected, at the same time erasing the middle-man from the picture. If you are already a world famous artist and activist, perhaps it’s worth taking the same risk. If you’re not, you better give it a second thought before trying it out.

So, is the New Media hype yet another philosophical stone? Is it pointless to expect film funding to emerge through web based platforms? Is there nothing more to New Media than being an expensive playground for filmmakers to experiment with their ideas?

In my opinion, the answer is that it all depends on how one perceives the internet as a whole. It’s a huge mistake to think that the World Wide Web is just another form of broadcasting. It never was and it never will be. And there is a very simple explanation to that.

When dealing with traditional media, it’s perfectly rational to calculate the total number of potential viewers for a specific region; and therefore the estimated value they represent for a broader market in one way or another. In the web world though, there are no such things as “specific region” and “estimated value”, let alone “perfectly rational”. Perhaps because there is no such thing as “viewers”, at least not in the sense we are already used to taking them into account. “Unique visitors” maybe, “users” probably, the only thing certain is that we can’t treat them anymore as spectators or audience. Not to mention consumers… These people have a voice, and they like to be given a stand to express it.

That’s why when it comes to dealing with the web crowd, I personally prefer the term “participants”. You can’t fool them that clicking on a few fancy buttons makes a project interactive, unless you really get them to be a part of it. And being a part in something involves letting people share their creative input, shape their opinions in public, team up with others in order to make things happen. Hardly the case in most “cross media” platforms I’ve visited.

We have to realize that even if it’s still the same people on the other end of the line, their behavior differs drastically to the one they have adopted when watching a television or cinema screen. Facing the computer monitor, the web participants already know how to create content by themselves. Not that professional maybe and certainly not that expensive, nevertheless content that can be innovative, controversial and sometimes much more popular than any documentary filmmaker could ever dream for his/her own film to become. The rapid expansion of social media like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter has helped significantly in that direction, on some occasions turning viral video promotion to a worldwide video pandemic.

The irony is that even if your online masterpiece gets ten million views on YouTube, it makes no real difference for your bank account. And the moment the web crowd can download any movie they want for free in HD quality, if you ask them to pay money in order to watch a creative documentary you’ll never get ten million views. Chances are you won’t even get a thousand, regardless of how good your film is or how well known is your internet host.

Unless of course you can find a way to persuade people become co-authors of the content. That changes everything. And that is the direction we should be spending our money and effort towards; either by accumulating, refining and exploiting user generated content or by encouraging people to provide us with tons of creative feedback. And sometimes even a bit of money.

Content which is open to users’ comments is a start, since it allows communities of aficionados to be formed and discuss the issues tackled by the films on show. A further step would be allowing them to criticize and even alter scripts and proposals in development, a privilege certainly worth paying for. Even more ambitious is trying to educate the participants on how to create their own audiovisual material, as well as inspiring them to share it in public through tailor-made online platforms. Instead of getting scattered around the web, their videos will now have the opportunity to be pieces of a large puzzle. And in order to produce meaning out of such a chaos, a team of professional filmmakers and web specialists will be guiding the whole selection and uploading process.

In case the participants fear they lack talent, they can always contribute financially to the project; buying a small share and hoping for some profit, which sounds far more thrilling than simply acquiring an already finished film they can get elsewhere for free. Depending on the method and amount of contribution, each participant earns points, at the same time connecting to others in a manner that forms yet another online community. At full growth, such a working model can resemble a living organism that almost automatically produces high quality and high quantity 100% interactive and original audiovisual content.

This is a collective process, where the line between the expert and the uninitiated eventually becomes blurred. And it sure won’t be easy to juggle all that many aspiring documentary videographers and persuade them to collaborate with each other on an open-source basis. Nevertheless, by keeping a sort of gravitational center controlling the creative workflow, there is a strong possibility that such a self-sustainable system can actually work. Providing there will always be enough participants backing projects they feel equally theirs as they will be ours.

In other words, it’s still filmmaking all right, but not as we know it.

To sum it up, when dealing with the web world, it seems we have to start exploring the endless possibilities of multiple authorship and leave behind notions of auteur filmmakers and corporate broadcasters. The content provider/content consumer model doesn’t apply anymore, and any investment that tries to make it work in the internet appears to be a waste of money; unless considered from a purely scientific perspective, in which case it’s always worth supporting pioneers to research and map the strange new world that still awaits to be conquered.