M+E Daily

CULVER CITY, Calif. — Seth Shapiro, founder and managing partner of Digital Asset Advisors and chairman of the National Association of Broadcasters’ (NAB) Web 3 Advisory Council, sees a pattern when it comes to Hollywood and technology. Every time new, transformative technology has emerged — TV, the internet, etc. — the established entertainment players have pushed back, instead of embracing it.

“There’s a tremendous amount of resistance in Hollywood,” Shapiro said, speaking May 23 during the presentation “The Inevitability of Web 3.0: An Analysis of Macro Cycles in Tech and Media” at the Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit (HITS) at The Culver Theater. “There’s always a trial of disillusionment.”

That’s where Hollywood is right now with Web 3.0: after all the promises of decentralization, built-on-blockchain, bottom-up opportunities with meaningful attached data, the industry is currently down on things like Web 3.0 and the metaverse, when inflated expectations failed to deliver much substance.

But just like with past advancements in information technology that have followed a recurring, multi-decade cycle, a predictable pattern may be emerging, Shapiro said, once that could mean an emerging, trillion-dollar opportunity for early movers, if the last two iterations of the internet were any indication.

“People predicted the internet itself would be a fad, people didn’t think Netflix was a threat to traditional content models,” Shapiro said. Hollywood would be wrong to make the same mistake again with Web 3.0. Shapiro sees massive opportunities on the horizon in the form of deeper, content-driven simulations, direct to consumer economies, and a data-first way of operating everything.

That last part is where Hollywood could learn from the tremendous growth of the FAANG tech companies (Facebook/Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google/Alphabet), which enjoyed a combined 10X-plus growth compared to the major studios in the past decade. “Hollywood hasn’t been great about data-first, and Web 3 will see that change,” Shapiro said. “FAANG did a good job of anticipating that if you own the customer, you win. Hollywood tends to react. Some in the industry are catching up.”

Web 3.0’s promise of everything from non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to the metaverse to the use and availability of widespread artificial intelligence shouldn’t be discounted due to a slow start, he added.

The Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit event was produced by MESA in association with the Hollywood IT Society (HITS) and presented by Amazon Studios Technology, with sponsorship by Fortinet, Genpact, Prime Focus Technologies, Signiant, Softtek, Convergent, Gracenote, Altman Solon, AppTek, Ascendion, Coresite, EPAM, MicroStrategy, Veritone, CDSA, EIDR and PDG Consulting.