I don’t overstate things - I’m always even keeled and guarded with my enthusiasm in making predictions.

With that said, I declare that the television show Skyland represents the true shape of future media.

This is not an endorsement of Skyland itself. I’ve only watched the first episode, freely available as a download from iTunes, so I’m unqualified to say whether the show in its entirety is any good. The first episode was pretty flat though. Flat is the polite way of saying not good.

I’ll caveat that - Skyland looked great, but even so why would I declare an at best marginal show the future of media? It’s what lies beneath the show that makes this a big deal. This video doesn’t show the full story, but it shows a clue. It is obvious that motion capture is being used to drive the Computer Generated Images (CGI) as well as other technologies such as cell shading to give the show a traditional, hand-animated appearance. There’s also mention of key frame animation in their documentation - key frame animation in the CGI context allows the computer to take a lot of the effort out of the animation process by filling in spaces between “key frames”, a process known as “tweening”, such that animators have lots less animating work to do.

Anyway, all this builds a pretty compelling visual experience, even if the show creators can’t write dialogue or craft a scene to save their lives. But so what? I believe that Skyland shows the way forward for low-budget studios to produce epic programming without breaking the bank. Being able to produce compelling content on the cheap is going to be the major feature of the IPTV revolution as I see it.

The technology industry has several well known metrics that demonstrate how rapid the growth and development of the sector is. Moore’s Law is the most famous and goes to show that what is expensive and time consuming in current computing will likely not be, given a few years maturation. Extending this concept we can assert that the technologies that underpin Skyland - motion capture-driven CGI, cell-shading routines, effeciencies gained through key-frame techniques - will all work to make content in the style of Skyland relatively cheap to produce.

And that gives epic story telling an opportunity to become a leading form of content on the Internet. I can’t wait.