The Subscription Age

You ever get a magazine subscription – and sometimes read it?  You still renew it you know . . . just in case.

Or maybe you get comics in a pull at a comic store.  You buy them, and might even read them.

Or a book club.

Or . . .

Well you get the idea.  We all have experience with subscriptions one way or another.  However in an age of eMedia, DLC games, and the iPad-ness, think about what kind of subscriptions you're going to see.

I think we're going to see a lot more subscriptions in the future.  Your business models, your publishing models, and your estimates on profitability are going to need to keep this in mind.  If you're writer, an ePublisher, a game developer, this will be a factor.

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Backlog and The End of Backlog

So the iPad is here to deliver our media, tablets are on their way to challenge the iPad, smartphones are there when we don't have tablets . . .

There's going to be a lot of way to get our content in the future.

Of course, not all that content is going to be new content.   Past games will be recompiled or emulated.  Comics wlll be scanned, books digitized or re-digitized.  New content is going to compete with old content.

I've speculated before about this competition – simply delivering old content in many ways is faster and cheaper, and represents a huge backlog of easy-to-deploy content.  For those of us in the content/media business, a truly geeky area, that's important as it will affect what we do and what we produce.  We need to observe this competition.

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Superheroes and the Unlimited Power

Why Superheroes?

They're in our movies.  Every few years there's a rush of superhero films (and apparently a big rush as of this writing).

They're on television.  We've been having superhero stories for quite a few years now.  We've also had "superheroesque" shows like Buffy and Supernatural, which are superhero stories with other trappings.

They're in games, despite the fact that superhero games have a dismal history with a few shining gems.

They are, of course, in comics.  Comics may expand their themes in North America, but it keeps coming back to superheroes.

So, why superheroes?  Why are they everywhere, and even when they fade, why do they come back?

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