It's an interesting trend in the evolution of media: the better the technology gets, the harder it is to make high-quality content.
I just bought a big fancy HD TV. My old one was tiny, analogue and crap. You can get away with a lot when you're producing content for a medium like that, basically because the human brain is pretty optimistic when it's filling in missing details. It reminds me of this random quote from a book I read years ago:
“A girl I didn't know passed me on the second-floor landing, a pimply, ugly girl wearing big horn-rimmed glasses and carrying a clutch of secretarial-type books. On impulse I turned around and looked after her. Yes; yes. From the back she might have been Miss America. It was wonderful.”
As HD becomes mainstream, the old tricks stop working. If you've ever seen pancake makeup on a big TV you know what I mean – I had no idea how bad the presenters actually look! That guy on “One Week at a Time” used to look fantastic on my old TV – now I’m worried he has some sort of terminal illness.
Studies from the States show that producing HDTV content is about 10-15% more expensive than the standard definition equivalent. Sky TV (pdf) thinks it might be more like 20%. As the medium matures, TV shows are getting more expensive to make.
A similar thing has been happening with video games. Nothing moves faster than games technology. PCs and consoles have been getting faster ever since they came into existence. Games developers are running into a similar problem to their TV counterparts, but on a much larger scale. As graphics improve, you need to spend more time making more detailed 3D models, more time making textures to map on to them. Better audio technology means more time recording higher quality sound, speech and music. The average video game production is getting as large and complex as the average Hollywood movie.
Game developers are worried that at some point the potential of the technology will exceed our ability to make content for it.
How does this relate to the good old internet? Right now, video is pretty affordable online. This is largely because people are used to really poor quality. YouTube looks awful. Worse than awful. So if you want to use video on your site, no problem – get out the handycam.
But people’s connections are getting faster (even in countries like poor old Australia which are lagging behind the rest of the world). So pretty soon production values are going to increase.
TV’s been around for about 50 years (in Australia). The video games industry has only really existed in anything like the form we now know for about 30 years. The internet’s sitting on about 15 years (depending on when you start measuring).
This means we’re much closer to the beginning than the end of this stuff. Who knows what kind of content we’ll be looking at in a few more years. But I do know one thing – it’s going to get more expensive to make.