I can’t remember when I first heard the expression ‘content is king’.

It’s entirely possible that the moment came while listening to an interview with outgoing Disney CEO Bob Iger, who has been spouting this rather vacuous mantra for years – indeed, it seems (from my distant vantage point) to be the foundational insight behind the decision to create new streaming service Disney+, which will arrive in the UK in just a few weeks’ time.

But is content really still king?

There is, after all, rather a lot of so-called ‘content’.

I’ve already written lately about the over-saturation of podcasts. In addition to this, every week I’m now given at least five new recommendations for TV shows I need to watch – on Netflix, Prime, Sky Atlantic, the BBC, YouTube, Crunchyroll and the like. I have no doubt that these shows are very good. Most TV seems to be pretty good these days, providing you don’t accidentally switch Channel 4 on. But while the bar has been collectively raised, there is nowhere near enough time to watch everything, forcing me to adopt a policy of temporary abstinence, whereby I wait five years before even contemplating watching a new show, and then see whether anyone is still talking about it.

A friend and former colleague of mine has started talking about a condition he calls ‘Netflixia’ – a state of genuine anxiety brought on by knowing you want to watch something but being totally overwhelmed by the extent of the choice before you.

What we’re witnessing is a content overload. And I can’t see how it can be sustained.

I’m not saying that Disney+ won’t succeed; after all, having good content is definitely better than having bad content, and Disney has plenty of good content. But equally, it’s getting harder to ignore the dissenting industry voices when they predict a day of reckoning for the video subscription companies – the point at which content becomes so dispersed that people start culling their multiple subscriptions or simply start pirating more. Not all content is king, and not everyone’s content can be king. It’s only a matter of time before a Game of Thrones-esque content bloodbath ensues.

I recently heard the boss of Sky explaining that, because it has 100s of channels, the company remains well-placed to compete in today’s crowded media market. This sounds like a grievous act of corporate self-delusion to me. People don’t want 100s of channels of content. They want to access the television, sports and movies they enjoy. Mainly the sports, in the case of Sky. And a person that describes sports as ‘content’ is the sort of person who doesn’t really understand sports.

Football is not content. It is football. If Sky loses more of its football coverage rights to BT or Amazon, there is a greater chance that I will switch my loyalty to BT and Amazon, irrespective of how much Formula 1, golf or darts Sky tries to throw at me.

This is the basic problem with the term ‘content’: it represents literally anything and everything, right up until the point that you ask an audience to choose between one unit of content versus another, at which point you realise that the term itself means absolutely nothing.

As audiences, we care about how we spend our time and the choices we make – the books and articles we read, the websites we visit, the TV shows we binge-watch and YouTube channels we subscribe to, the sports we follow, the films we go to the cinema to enjoy, the radio or podcasts we listen to, the computer games and apps we escape into, and so on. Every person has their own hobbies, interests, passions and pursuits, all of which play out an ongoing battle for their attention. The only individuals I’ve come across who have cited ‘content’ as a passion have been dubious characters straight out of the (under-appreciated) world of Nathan Barley.

Is the Oscar-winning picture ‘Parasite’ content? No, it’s a great film that is introducing many UK cinema-goers to the magic of South Korean cinema. So what is content? All too often it’s the stuff that falls into the gaps between what actually interests us; the stuff that engages us only because we have failed to invest sufficient time into finding something more worthy of engagement. Or worse still, the stuff that was never even designed to engage anyone in the first place – the dead air cynically created by the content vultures.

The company blog that no one reads because it’s been set up purely for the purposes of SEO. The mid-morning programming on a TV channel that doesn’t have enough decent show rights secured but wants to sell the advertising space irrespective. The clickbait – news that is not news; stories that are not stories; must-see pictures that literally no one needs to see. Some of our national newspapers now peddle this content and, lo and behold, their readership is collapsing.

So maybe, if we want to avoid the content bloodbath, we should think less about volume and maximising the amount of attention we’re able to capture (at all costs), and more about how we can create things that will add real value to people’s lives. The term ‘content’ may have to stick around, but it’s time for the ‘content is king’ mantra to die.

Photo credit: Simone Daino