A Conversation with Marc Canter, Part I: "I took the 90's off..."

Originally published February 11, 2003 in Amateur Hour: the “me” in media on Corante.

In the mid-90s I started bumping into Marc Canter when the CD-ROM development group I’d built at CNN Interactive first began experimenting with interactive TV and the nascent Web. As many know, Marc was multimedia before multimedia was cool — he’d worked at Bally/Midway at the tail end of the coin-op video game explosion and founded MacroMind, which became Macromedia, in 1984 with the lofty goal of enabling artists to use the computer as a new medium.

MacroMind eventually created Director, the engine that would launch a thousand multimedia ships and put Marc at ground zero of the multimedia revolution. Later, in the early 1990s, and after leaving Macromedia, Marc started Canter Technology where he worked to create interactive content that could scale from CD-ROM up to full-blown interactive TV.

This conversation, which comes in two installments, is an attempt to coalesce a series of wide-ranging emails we exchanged recently over the course of a week or so — in which he discusses the past, present and bright future of user-created content, as well as Broadband Mechanics, his new venture.

Macromedia and the Rise of Flash

Jonathan: You started MacroMind with an eye towards enabling artists to create multimedia content. Does Broadband Mechanics differ in that fundamental goal?

Marc: Yes. The base set of multimedia tools have been invented and Macromedia and Adobe supply that market pretty nicely and we don’t wanna reinvent the wheel. But while interactive content is an end-game goal there’s a new paradigm shift in what tools are. That needs to be addressed first — before we can start to enable the masses to create what you call multimedia content, which I call hypermedia.

Artists now learn the tricks and voodoo, spending the production dollars to create multimedia today. But how can we get more “normal” people — people who wanna be artists or musicians, community leaders, teachers or designers? Learning Flash is just too much of a leap of faith for them.

To summarize: is it about enabling artists to create multimedia, or is it about turning everyday people into artists? We have chosen the latter.

Jonathan: That almost sounds like something you could boil down as a company vision statement. “Finding the artist in everyone.”

Marc: Believe it or not — that company was called MacroMind. But then the VCs showed up and asked: “how many creative people are there and how much will they pay?” I kept saying: “No! It’s the creativity inside of everyone!” And then they’d point at the Director timeline and say: “Huh?”

Jonathan: What do you think of Flash — did it lower the bar for multimedia authoring?

Marc: Flash is fundamentally Director — dumbed down, vector based — which now is attempting to catch up and add back a lot of what was taken out of Director to make Flash. So they’ve come full circle. The “straw sipping” mentality of the web forced them to put out Flash — but now that broadband is here there’s no reason to worry about keeping things so small anymore.

Flash didn’t lower the bar — it just lowered the size of the files. And got people away from bitmaps and back into vectors — another backwards step.

Jonathan: So Flash succeeded in a broader way because of smaller files and lower product cost?

Marc: No, not lower product cost — though we argued for days about splitting up the product between a high-end $2,500 version, pro $800 and student $250.

I think you could summarize Flash’s success as: smaller file size and shorter download; vector artwork — less ambitious, easier to produce because it’s less content and work; ubiquitous player — which became a self-fulfilling prophecy, once they purposefully started de-emphasizing Shockwave (the player for Director).

So it was Macromedia’s internal de-emphasis of Director that helped Flash. We saw that happening as early as ‘95–‘96, as soon as Flash appeared.

The Death of Interactive Television

Jonathan: What happened with interactive TV? Why did we fail in what we wanted to create?

Marc: Five years ago the interactive TV industry standardized on set-top boxes with 8MB of memory — which were, at that time, already five years old. So when 20 million boxes finally got out to the market they were delivering an experience that was almost ten years behind customer expectation. OpenTV and Liberate were stuck trying to get these boxes to do something interesting — good luck!

Just to make things run completely afoul, Microsoft bought WebTV and eventually put out the Ultimate TV box — both of which should have been set-top boxes, but weren’t. “I know — let’s put out crippled boxes, with limited functionality, that look, feel and taste like set-top boxes — but aren’t.” That’s gonna solidify a burgeoning industry!

Finally I think the nail that seals the fate of sucky experiences is the so-called “walled garden.” To get anything to work in an 8MB box, they came up with this concept that all interactivity and information display would happen in this “safe zone” area of screen display.

I never thought I’d have to say this: “different kinds of content and services should actually have different kinds of interactivity.” Doh!

Empowering the Digital Amateur

Jonathan: So by failing to launch interactive television, we accidentally enabled individuals to be contributors instead of consumers — something that was never going to happen in multi-billion-dollar interactive TV production processes.

Marc: Yes. The vision of an infrastructure that delivers VOD, services and other kinds of content via the TV set is dead on arrival. DOA.

Now using the cable modem line or DSL or whatever — to get data into the home and then displaying some of that stuff on TV sets, stereos, stored on PVRs, attached to devices — that IS the answer! But don’t trust the current broadcast industry to do that. It’s not that the broadcast business is going to distribute our content — it’s whether or not the broadcast business is going to enable, help, prevent, fund, or stand in the way of self-published content.

Jonathan: When did you discover blogs?

Marc: I mentioned to Dave Winer that a site could be a tool. He had content management and a web site framework with Frontier and we were discussing scalable content. He said: “gee I can just put up a web page — like this…”

I said: “cool, but what about media?”

He went on to create editthispage, and I’ve been watching ever since. That was in 1996. I’m still waiting for the media.

Jonathan: I played with editthispage when it came out, but I already had a server and professional web development tools, so it didn’t excite me. Blogger’s ease of posting was revolutionary. I started blogging in September ‘99 as an easy way to share information with my other product concept team members at BellSouth.

Marc: Funny how a simple interface to a hosted service changed everything — huh?

Part II: The Power of Open Standards, The Microsoft Response, and Why Blogging Matters →