All Hail the Creators

Traditional media continues to slide into mediocrity and obscurity. Large scale operations and multi-tiered productions are rapidly being overtaken by competition from small independent content creators. Music production, distribution, and promotion have been successful for independent artists for years. Today’s technology has put professional quality media creation into the hands of many content creators.
Bloggers, Podcasters, and Vloggers can produce professional quality content with affordable “consumer” or “prosumer” rated equipment. The amount of content produced by individuals or small production teams is truly amazing if you compare such productions to major studios of the past. Social media outlets, YouTube, iTunes, and Amazon make it possible for creators to get their content out to the masses. Not all produced content is great, but some is.
There is a lot of interesting content available from aspiring musicians songwriters, travel bloggers and vloggers, preppers, gamers, conspiracy theorists , extreme couponing, alternative news reporters, humorists, tech reviews, food aficionados, fitness trainers, traditional and natural medical info……the list goes on and on.
There’s a lot of content that isn’t prepackaged and manufactured by large conglomerates, and there’s some that probably is. This may explain why we see large media companies that would at one time have been the major or only content providers for mass media markets (radio, TV, film) slim their operations down or even disappear altogether. Crazy as it might seem, not all content is driven by commercial or political intentions. It’s a wide open field now, and getting bigger as the rest of the world’s content providers find their way to your media consumption devices.
Of course the big players want to get in on the action, even leveraging AI to create content for them. Advertising (relative to the subject matter) through sponsorship of some creative content providers appears to be working out for some high traffic sites/channels/downloads.
One interesting trend seems to be people traveling around producing videos, audio files, and writing while living in a van or travel trailer.
(I didn’t realize so many people were living in travel trailers until I started reading some interesting blogs a few years ago – shortly after the financial crisis of 2008)
For these productions, there’s no mega studio, just a couple of HD cameras, a good mic, and a laptop – and a lot of ingenuity. This is their studio.
The world is their studio. Some even produce the majority or all of the content with their iPad or smart phone.
If you are tired of the major news shows asking their pundits (or expert panels) to explain to you what you should think, try the independent alternate content providers…..soon to be the main stream media’s amazing replacement.
I’d happily watch the latest Linux Distro reviews, PewDiePie’s “Pew News”, or see what Traveling Robert is up to as he travels around the country in his RV, than watch “actors” jabber on for 24 hours about nothing.
Sadly enough when a news agency or reality show is using content already old on the Internet, you know the world is changing – hopefully in a good way. By the people, for the people, what a novel concept.
It is amazing to see how modern technology inspires people’s creativity and allows communication and educational opportunities for anyone willing to put a little effort behind their vision.
Much of the content may seem effortless, but a lot of time and effort is usually behind some of the best examples. If you look even deeper you start to see unique ways of leveraging solar power and budget friendly support schemes to make more efficient use of energy to cut costs for some self reliant enterprises.

I can see where Open Source applications and Linux distributions could play an integral role in some of this content creation, if only for budgetary constraints.
Ubuntu Studio comes to mind immediately, but there are many flavors of Linux with useful applications available in their repository for all types of media creation. For my own personal opinion, I simply have much respect and admiration of all who create such fascinating content.

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