Mobile Creator (noun): Any person who creates content on mobile devices or for consumption on mobile devices.
As a new site dedicated to serving mobile creators, it occurred to me it might be useful to clearly define our audience, for both ourselves and our readers. I mean … we know who they are. Don’t we?
Maybe we don’t. Maybe we cannot describe the audience, at least not definitively.
Photographers? Check. Filmmakers? Check. Writers? Check.
Game developers? Huh? Live streamers? Hmm? AR/VR/MR designers? What? Machine learning experts? Really?
Starting to see the conundrum?
In 2007, I was a remote correspondent for TWiT.tv, covering the launch of the first iPhone from the Las Vegas Apple Store. In just 13 years, smartphones have gone from an oddity which was laughed at by the industry to a ubiquitous tool that has disrupted or will disrupt every single marketplace on the planet.
The consumer camera market? Gone. The consumer camcorder market? Gone. The prosumer markets for those devices? Dying.
Televisions? Undergoing a sea change to replace movie theaters. Gaming consoles? Still alive but mobile devices have placed a shot across the bow as XR (extended reality) takes hold, soon to be further advanced by LIDAR in the new Apple iPad.
The list goes on and on. And, it will only grow.
Photography and filmmaking are the low-hanging fruit of the mobile media revolution. This fact does not diminish either discipline. Rather, it establishes them as critical entry points to a much, much wider reality of what mobile creators can and will be.
It is an exciting time to be a creator.
Need further proof? Have a look at this:
This demo footage is running on the still to be released PlayStation 5, so it is not technically a mobile creation. But the Unreal and Unity engines are also used to build mobile games and, increasingly, to tell visual stories beyond games.
Think about how you want to define yourself over the next 3-5 years of your career. What skills do you need to build? What relationships do you need to establish? How will you get there?
As we grow, Focus on Mobile plans to help you grow as well.
Buckle up. It’s going to be a wild ride.
Image Credits: Thúy Lâm.