MTV's 1st Mobile Series: Sway's Hip-Hop Owner's Manual

The NY Times Magazine has an extended piece by Randy Kennedy on MTV's mobile activities featuring Sway's Hip-Hop Owner's Manual.  Yes, Sway Calloway and hip hop content are leading MTV's mobile initiative with their first series shot for cellphones.  Up till now they've been focusing on clips from tv shows and other repurposed content.

Sway's Hip-Hop Owner's Manual is described as a "documentary- style show that deciphers the ever-changing lexicon of rap", so I guess that's more competition for the Hip Hoptionary, a mobile app from Mobile Lingo for which ProHipHop provides news and related services.

Here's why MTV went with hip hop for their first mobile series:
Sirulnick and some other MTV executives decided to focus on hip-hop for their first foray into wireless, an idea that Calloway encouraged. "Kids are on their cellphones all the time now," he told me, "in the club, at the bar, in the cab, in the bathroom — I mean everywhere." . . In many ways, the hip-hop show was a safe bet: rely on a known personality; do it on a tight budget; stick to music and focus on rap, which had sales of $1.6 billion last year.

As with most future thinking mobile projects, there was a lot MTV didn't know for sure, but:
What it did know was that the earliest adopters of wireless video, according to cellular companies, were young men, especially those in the 18-to-24-year-old bracket, hip-hop's prime audience. MTV executives reasoned that if they could score a minor hit with this group and get a buzz going, it would be a way of announcing that the network was serious about cell programming. "You aim for the cred kids, and everyone else follows," says Ocean MacAdams, the vice president of MTV's news division, which is overseeing the hip-hop show.

And there you go.  While the fact that hip hop may not be the solution to all programming concerns seems to puzzle those who can only understand being in first place all the time, hip hop is still seen as a core force in developing American mobile operations.  In the States, hip hop powers ringtones, one of the few truly successful mobile content offerings in the U.S., and hip hop could well power consumer response to mobile video offerings.

I should also note, there's a bit about shooting a segment with Sway and E-40 that's kind of interesting, though the points about the difference in shooting footage for tv and mobile is a reminder that an organization like MTV is full of technically proficient individuals whose absorption into a certain way of doing things can create roadblocks when trying to do something new.

I remember a theater lighting designer telling me years ago how difficult it was to explain to tv studio producers and camera people that, yes, he really did want to see actual shadows in a scene and was making lighting decisions with that in mind.  Tunnel vision, even through really expensive cameras, is a painful limit and the article's description of "filming to the phone" emphasizes limits and what can't be done.  Such thinking is why current shifts seem revolutionary to those working from within such industries when the concepts aren't really radical at all to those of us who have been seeking alternatives all along.

Right near the end of the article with no real warning, the author attempts to set up Heavy.com as the antithesis of MTV as a way of opposing old school broadcast media and what is now often termed user generated content.  That's a topic well worth considering but there's absolutely nothing to stop MTV from creating series based on user generated content, especially since they purchased IFILM.

Though that's not the author's only point in introducing Heavy.com, it illustrates the binary thinking that currently permeates discussions of the changes now occuring in media and marketing.  In particular, some of the more cutting edge folks that I follow and appreciate seem to feel that we're entering a period when all media activity will become an experience of sharing human created content in a community setting that transcends space and time without the existence of traditional stars or hits.

While I appreciate such utopian visions and have actually experienced such states of being from time to time (all these concepts predated the Internet, the Internets and the World Wide Web and affected the development of such technology rather than vice versa), in all likelihood we'll see overlaps of traditional stars and hits with new stars and hits plus lots more locally made content that can now go global on the Web.  What we won't see is a total destruction of the old replaced by something totally new.  That bankrupt modernist vision is what helped get us into this mess in the first place.

Comments

[Clyde Smith]

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