Four Yorkshiremen

Pre-Python genius for those of us who hail from the Northern Reaches.

MySpaceTV/ShineReveille

Elizabeth Murdoch’s hugely successful premium production outfit ShineReveille partners with Murdoch Senior’s uber network MySpace to create something really very clever:

(via Mashable)

Does the name ShineReveille ring a bell? I suspect that for most it does not. Ah well, it is nonetheless making news today, following the announcement of its global partnership with the News Corp-owned social network MySpace. The deal between both parties will allow for “original content series” broadcast on the burgeoning website MySpaceTV to be distributed through channels established internationally by ShineReveille, including Financial details have not been disclosed.

ShineReveille International is a member of the Shine Group, a cohesion of production and content distribution companies which presently serves some “150 million territories worldwide.” What MySpaceTV gains from this deal is considerable exposure across the globe for original material trialed on its website. This will include international television broadcasting as well as DVD sales and the like. Travis Katz, MySpace International’s managing director, made the announcement in Cannes, France at the MIPTV conference, which the companies senior vice president, Jamie Kantrowitz, commented was a “natural fit.”

Katz described his network’s role thusly: “MySpace provides the creative community with a launch pad to virally test and distribute content to the world’s largest focus group. MySpaceTV has quickly become Hollywood’s digital playground and our relationship with ShineReveille opens up the globe to MySpace’s international content creators.”

In addition to adding more offerings to its list of productions doled to consumers over the air or by way of tangible media, ShineReveille benefits from the distribution deal through close interaction with an immensely popular Web-based network. If the company finds particular programming broadcast via MySpaceTV catches on to large degree with particular segments of the site’s membership, it will move to serve interested regions with more completely-packaged offerings, allowing it the advantage of first-hand access to new media that has been tested and vetted by a pool of more than 100 million potential viewers.

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Omaha - the future of story making

This is via PSFK:

‘Although this clip has been around for a few months ago, we feel compelled to post it after a talk Mark Harrison, Head of Multiplatform Productions at the BBC, gave last week at a small PSFK gathering. The clip shows the making of a short film that recreates the storming of Omaha beach on D-Day during WWII. He said that during a single weekend 4 BBC staff (in their spare time) shot and starred in a scene which the makers of Saving Private Ryan had to use 1000 extras for.’

‘Mark explained that the everyday technologies used in making the final film (below) and the visual vocabulary gives the BBC an insight into the production and delivery of future story-making.’

Sorry England

I can’t watch South Park episodes on my laptop like up right Americans can, not yet, but at least they took the trouble to think of a witty ‘coming soon’.

Warners Won’t Jump Through Hulu Hoop

(via Movie Marketing Madness)

‘In a conversation with AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher, Warner Bros. SVP Jim Wuthrich said his studio would not be providing movies to Hulu.com any time soon despite the appearance of WB television programming there.

TV is one thing, Wuthrich says, and the site is great for showing off some shows and hopefully getting people to buy DVD sets. But it’s “too early” he says for people to be accepting of ad-supported movies.

I see his point in that ad-supported movies are far from the norm and, indeed, trying out such a model for movies has really only begun. But that doesn’t mean they can’t try. What have they got to lose? Especially if the ads weren’t interrupting the movie but instead consisted of pre- and post-roll spots along with banners and other formats surrounding the player.

Wuthrich’s comments come on the heel of numbers showing a significant portion of the online audience is anxious for online availability of movies and other long-form video content.

There’s certainly nothing saying online video ad models have to replicate those of television and other existing media. Indeed just about everything out there shows traditional models are just apt to honk people off when used online and are less effective.

It’s up to Warner and other studios to try this stuff out for themselves but I’m a fan of testing the viability of something new before dismissing it out of hand based on one person’s feeling of what the market will or won’t support.’

Hulu

(via Screen Daily)

‘Hulu.com CEO Jason Kilar made a stop at MipTV on Tuesday to talk up his company’s ambition to bring global content to America and the rest of the world.

Hulu is a joint-venture between News Corp and NBC Universal which allows users to watch full-length episodes of TV series and full-length feature films as well as clips. The content is free with revenue coming from advertisements.

After a Beta demo period, the site went live on March 12 and has also signed content deals with other outlets such as Warner Bros, Lionsgate, and the National Hockey and Basketball Leagues.

In total, there are currently 250 TV series and over 100 feature length films available. But, that availability for the moment is only in the United States.

Certainly, getting through the rights quagmire is a big hurdle before being able to bring the service to other parts of the world. When asked when he thought Hulu would do so, Kilar joked, “Oh, Wednesday.”

That comment drew a big laugh in the crowded auditorium, but Kilar indeed spoke of bringing global content to US users and local content to foreign users.

“We have an ambition to be global and bring the world’s content into local markets. We’ll have to assemble the rights on a market by market basis and that takes time but we’re hard at work on that,” he said.

Hulu’s strategy involves being on the offensive and not the defensive, said Kilar. “Unauthorized versions of content are generating zero dollars,” he warned the audience. “People will find it with or without you and you can get a fine return that can even be better than prime time.”

Kilar also spoke of providing a strong user experience, “People don’t need media to survive; it’s an impulse buy and we need to make it easy for them.”

Regarding the potential difficulty in working for two such notoriously strong-willed bosses as NBC Universal’s Jeffrey Zucker and News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch, Kilar said they had been very supportive and remained involved more so at the board level. If one were to visit Hulu’s offices in California, they would think they were at a Silicon Valley start up, he noted.’

I’m struggling to get excited about this when it’s only available in the US. Give me my Simpsons!

Raiders of the Lost Widget Trailer

Widgets, gadgets, wadgets… you’d be forgiven for not really knowing what they are. But in reality most people have encountered them, You Tube video’s are simple widgets, you can grab the code and embed the video in your site, people visiting your site can then grab the code and embed it in there’s etc etc. They’re viral wallpaper for your blog or social network.

Now the studios are ‘counting on the small, portable applications that can be posted on blogs and social networks to maximize the exposure for its trailers.’ (via Hollywood Reporter )

(I had hoped to add widget in here, but it doesn’t work!)

The forthcoming Indiana Jones movie adds a competition element to the now de facto trailers and extras. The two fans who manage to distribute the widget the most win trips to the premier and no doubt a crack of that iconic whip, which they’ll record on their mobile phones and upload to You Tube where it will become a widget. The widget sphere isn’t some fragile ecosystem where portals are dependent on bringing an audience to them, they can exist and thrive in the wild and represent, to my mind, the future of distribution and brand advertising on the web. The key is to make the widget so compelling to the embedder that they benefit from having it sit pride of place in their virtual real estate.

What if you could embed a widget frame on your blog, profile, desktop etc. The frame’s purpose is to stream movie trailers, so it’s not just one movie trailer it’s a movie trailer micro channel. The widget frame could be tailored to the trailer, so for one you could have a competition, for another exclusive behind the scenes footage, for another the chance to talk directly with the stars. So far, so mildly enticing, but why would I want to embed an advert for a studio film on my blog? As the virtual real estate owner I need to be incentivized, the chance of a free t-shirt and posing a question to Jessica Alba ain’t enough.

Gimme the movie. I add the widget, I help promote your movie, gimme the movie to watch and I don’t mean free tickets to the local multiplex I mean streamed to my computer. Use Joost, so their’s no actual download, no fear of piracy and unless you’ve got Apple TV, you’re going to be watching the movie on your computer, so you’re not exactly broadcasting it to everyone you know. Gimme the movie, let me add value to the widget, let me evangelise about the movie. If that scares the studios, which it will, another approach would be to make the movie available to me for a fee.

Seems like a win win situation, we promote and distribute your movie and you get paid. The major obstacle to this are the distributors. Fearful of what they don’t understand, ie ‘the web’ they’ll see this method of digital distribution as impacting on their respective territory sales. But recent research has shown that despite films finding themselves onto bittorrent hours after they are released and sometimes even before, that ease of access to a print does not mean people are not going to the cinema. Cinema attendance is up, what studios need to do are feed the distribution and promotion channels and give movie goers options, options befitting the increasing needs of the digital natives.

What’s wrong with the film industry - Part 1

Arin Crumley has an inkling.

Beware this video contains an indie director puking on a news broadcast to promote his movie.

Future of Movie Distribution

“… the average cost of negative and marketing for a studio film hit $106.6 million dollars, almost five percent more than a year ago. But that’s the majors, you say. Thank god for the indie distributors. Leaving out the question of what indie distributors, the column goes on to note:

News at the studios’ specialty divisions was no better, with the cost of a specialty unit title jumping 54% to $74.8 million.

Sit back and soak that figure in ladies and germs — the average specialty film cost nearly $75,000,000 film to make and market. It’s no wonder that the indie films at this year’s Sundance could barely be distinguished from the studio films (except for the word “tentpole”). If you want your film to have a chance at theatrical distribution on more than three screens, you have to make a film that can earn back way more than $75 million bucks.

That’s why people like myself are praying that we can come up with an independent model for publicizing Web-based films. It’s why we’re hoping that indies can find distribution and publicity on places like iTunes, Amazon, Facebook, MySpace and the like. Indies are never going to get their films seen by $75 million dollars worth of people unless they are indie in self-proclaimed name only.

None of the major studios (nor their indie arms) can think of spending the time and energy to market a film cheaply. They think in terms of national ad buys which cost gazillions. And, when you combine that with Kilday’s statistic, and you get a marketplace in which there is very little room for a film that needs to sit for a while in the theaters. I don’t see many theater owners willing to do that either.” (via here)

This is depressing stuff, but it needn’t be. This is an opportunity, when something is going so badly wrong and costing so much the market will be forced to adapt and look at how it can harness the web to market and distribute movies. ‘Tent pole’ movies usually based on comic books, will always draw the chemical cheese nacho brigade eager to sit back, wonder who let the hoodies in, realising it was the electronic ticket tout and then feel a little used after paying £8 for a lot of spandex clad nonsense.

Pirates will always pirate and somewhere in the middle is family guy, happy to watch a movie on his laptop and only venturing to the cinema for ’spectacle’ films, you know David Lean sweeping vistas, John Barry soundtrack etc etc. Family guy, doesn’t pirate because he thinks the knock off dvd’s he can buy in the pet shop are bad quality and he doesn’t know what bittorrent is and if he does, it scares him, viruses and the like. So family guy is stuck with Sky Box Office which is less video on demand and more we demand you watch this. Love Film is good, but surely it’s days are numbered just like the video store. When did we last get excited about anything posted?

I don’t have an answer, but this is a theme I’ll be returning to. The future of film distribution is yet to be written and whilst the old one bloats and dies so must a new one strive to make it’s mark.

Paper v Fibre Optic

Read/Write has a great article about Penguin’s recent foray into making books relevant to the digital native audience:

‘…Penguin is carrying out an experiment that takes six books from six different authors and distributes them through new media channels over six weeks. Called We Tell Stories, some people say the campaign is pure evil and others are hailing it as a sign of the future.’

The whole article and comments are worth a read.

I find myself agreeing with Marshall’s conclusion:

‘Most publishers would probably do well focusing for now on making their transition to a largely digital world truly good enough, if not great, and focus on making money afterwords. That might sound crazy, but it’s not as crazy as reading a novel on Twitter a week after it was published.’