My second day of ETech started off with Mike Walsh’s “Futuretainment: The Asian Media Revolution” presentation. Mike presented a view of how young people in Asia consume media and how their experiences differ vastly from what kids in America and western Europe experience.

Mike set the stage by explaining that lots of the kids in China were born in the post Mao boom and that their view of the world is a lot more global than in other countries around the world. Most of these kids have never experienced media as a fixed product — they don’t go to a store to buy CDs. Far from it, most kids consume media from their mobile devices.

Mike presented a number of attributes that describe the asian media revolution:

  • Fun: TV in China sucks bad. Even with many channels, available shows often repeat between the different channels. Kids have tuned out TV and opted to turn to the Internet for entertainment. It turns out that most people use the net for entertainment in Asia — so far that only about 50% of people use the net for email.
  • Mobility: More people use their mobile devices than desktops. Mobile devices even include two tuners; one for voice/data communication and one for digital TV access. Even the GPS devices in cars have digital TV tuners. (Can you imagine the lawsuits if that was allowed in the US?)
  • Identity: The notion of identity in Asia is: “We are who we pretend to be”. You can see this in action with QQ, the predominant IM service in China, where kids will create a whole range of identities that are used for various purposes. QQ identifies accounts with 6 digit numbers (Mike says that Chinese kids are much more adept at remembering numbers than western kids are) and kids will often create new accounts for special purposes, assuming different identities for different purposes.
  • Togetherness: Group functions present a much integral part of Asian cultures than in western cultures. Its common for people to participate in group buying to negotiate for discounts on products — an approach that was tried and has failed a number of times in the US. And the preferred medium for arranging group buys? BBS’es — they never went away in Asia.
  • Hi tech/low tech: Asian cultures blend low tech solutions with hi tech solutions seamlessly. For instance, while nearly everyone has a mobile phone in their pocket, bamboo is still used to build scaffolding for buildings. The ancient and the new co-exist peacefully. Its is even possible to send a gift via a mobile device by sending them a product gift barcode. Imagine sending roses to someone who does not wish to be embarrassed at their place of work. Send the barcode instead and the person can go pick up the roses on their own terms.
  • Status: Status continues to plays an important role in the modern asian societies, but the concept is being transplanted into the online world. People gain status by answering questions online to reach a coveted “honorary intellectual” status.
  • Complexity: Asian consumers are faced with a lot greater density of information — picture the average street scene in Tokyo where every conceivable surface is covered by signs or adverts. This translates to people being able to consume much greater amounts of information presented on one page. For instance, someone studied the eye movements of people doing web searches. In the west people will examine the top two search results, where in Asia people scan much further down the page. Asians can readily consume complex pages of data.
  • Fame: In Asia net personas and even virtual characters can land sponsorship deals to endorse products. And recently the people of Hong Kong took to the streets to protest the Police’s actions in the Edison Chen scandal where racy photos of the performer were leaked onto the net.
  • Now: Media consumption in Asia focuses on instant gratification, which plays a large role in the fact that China hosts so much copyrighted content. Hosting this content allows China to circumvent region coding and provide immediate access to the media.

Wow! Its clear that things have progressed much more rapidly in Asia than here in the US. The iPhone is the hottest phone on the market, even though it has no 3G capabilities whereas teenagers in Korea routinely watch TV on their mobile phones. While Mike’s presentation opened my eyes, I have tons of questions on how we arrived here. How does the size of the countries involved matter? Its a lot easier to bring advanced services to a smaller nation like South Korea. But China? Are these services ubiquitous in China? What is the coverage like? How come the US lags so far behind? Is it regulations? Are the western societal values inherently different that gives the US and western Europe a disadvantage?

If you have any insights, please post a comment! Thanks to Mike for the great presentation!