And a child would lead them...

Anyone who has young boys knows that there is a phenomenon happening on Youtube and gaming that in my view is rewriting the  rules of content production and delivery. My boys Josh, 9 and Jamie, 7 are Youtube addicts but they are not watching cats play piano or anything like that. They are addicted to a series of videos produced as far as I can tell by a couple of guys in their basement. What these guys do is narrate their game play on a game called Minecraft. Josh and Jamie don't actually have the game they just watch these two guys play narrate,  joke and sometimes swear. I had a talk with my boys about that when I heard it.

They no longer watch television unless they use the Youtube app on my Samsung to watch Minecraft on the big screen. One day I thought I am going to sit down with my guys and find out what this is all about. Within about two minutes I was bored silly but that's not the point. The point is these video are getting hundreds of thousands of hits and they are redefining what we consider to be "entertainment".

And this entertainment is happening online and growing right under our collective noses. Why bother any more jumping through flaming hoops to get a movie made. Just find an audience online and deliver them what they want - production values be damned.

Now this of course has been coming for a very long time and I believe we have reached the tipping point with online video consumption. DVDs died a very sudden death in 2008 and they ain't coming back. I could see that in the royalties payments for my films they sank like a stone. And even my newer films and the one that is getting the most notice and publicity, The Wereth Eleven, has not moved the units it could have ten years, even five years ago. No we are definitely in the streaming age and thank goodness.

Watching a DVD disc in my house has become a frustrating ordeal. First you will find the empty box and then you will locate the heavily scratched silver disc under the couch and hope you can clean it enough to play. Most times it won't.

Cable is for all intent and purposes is dead. It is cheaply produced content and unfortunately disposable. This is to be expected as the audience has shrunk drastically. The ad revenue is simply not there to support producing the content/ Streaming, watching Minecraft and other gameplay on Youtube this is what is growing and this is where the future is now. In fact is probably already old news.

If you want to explore more Minecraft content I recommend checking out The Top 15+ Minecraft Mods over at Lyncconf.