Well to the suits at ESPN, HBO, Netflix, and YouTube, those video files are indeed content. They are the contents of their platform.
But if you're in a conversation with an a filmmaker, a musician, a novelist, or a painter, and you try to call their artistic output "content," they might take some offense, because you're kind of reducing their work to a mere consumable product.
Yes, art can be packaged up and put on a platform and distributed and profited off of, or bought and sold on an online store like toasters and dish soap, but that's not the reason it exists - it's form of human expression.
Just as not all digital content is art (e.g. NBA games), and not all digital art is content.
> if you're in a conversation with an a filmmaker, a musician, a novelist, or a painter, and you try to call their artistic output "content," they might take some offense
This. And when I hear creative types use the word "content" to refer to their own work, I feel pity for them. And am much less inclined to check their work out, because it it seems that their mindset is to produce a product rather than art.
Especially if they refer to their audience as "consuming" their "content".
But if you're in a conversation with an a filmmaker, a musician, a novelist, or a painter, and you try to call their artistic output "content," they might take some offense, because you're kind of reducing their work to a mere consumable product.
Yes, art can be packaged up and put on a platform and distributed and profited off of, or bought and sold on an online store like toasters and dish soap, but that's not the reason it exists - it's form of human expression.
Just as not all digital content is art (e.g. NBA games), and not all digital art is content.