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.’

F**king Ben Affleck

100 million views according to Variety and bigger than the fat kid with the light saber according to Jimmy Kimmel.

The Blogging Crew

‘Of all the directors you’d think would want to blog about the creation of their new film, hands up who would have thought of Pedro Almodóvar? Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Brian Singer, Eli Roth: fine. But Almodóvar?

The director of ‘Volver’, ‘Talk to Me’ and countless other Spanish classics over the last 20 years has decided to let the ‘blogosphere’ in on all the on-set shenanigans that occur during the production of his forthcoming film, ‘Broken Hugs’ starring Penelope Cruz.

The blog, which can be seen at www.PedroAlmodovar.es, can be viewed in Spanish, French and English and will apparently serve up a mixture of pictures, videos and snippets as well, no doubt, as the director’s wry commentary on the ups-and downs of making the film.’ (via Time Out)

4.5%

Only 4.5% of mobile subscribers tune in to Mobile TV. But that doesn’t stop this bevvy of mobile TV news coming at you from the CTIA show in Las Vegas:

NBC’s Chief Digital Officer George Kliavkoff had a bunch of things to say: NBC will create live video in support of the upcoming Olympics; it has inked a multicarrier deal to give AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Research in Motion subscribers access to more than 60 WAP sites including NBC, USA and Bravo; and may be interested in creating a Hulu-like service for mobile.

In the wake of MTV’s announcement Monday that it has secured a deal to put content up on Mywaves, sibling network VH-1 said it will offer a service that lets users chat with one another during broadcast shows via their mobile handsets.

Droplet Technology, meanwhile, says it has developed an all-software solution that lets users “create, edit, upload, stream and share original video content at full VGA/30 fps directly from their mobile handsets.”

Verizon says it’s added a bevy of new content, signing on with Univision Movil for Spanish language programming, News Over Wireless to deliver local news, CondeNet for video from sites like Epicurious and Wired, and gossip show TMZ for…well, gossip.

Fox Mobile Entertainment launched the aptly-named Fox Entertainment Mobile Network, which will feature content from hit shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy, Nip/Tuck and The Dog Whisperer. (via newteevee)

I attended a conference on Mobile TV 3 years ago and sat through a lecture hailing Bad Girls on your mobile as a great leap in content delivery and entertainment. Heady times on the UK tech scene.

But on closer inspection this a market with huge growth potential, so far stifled by the networks reluctance to let any outside developers onto their portal/platform and a lack of decent content. When the pinnacle of content is football highlights, you know the content commissioners need a holiday.

The mobile consumer is prepared to pay for premium content unlike their web counterpart, the mobile consumer has a simple means of payment, by adding the cost onto their phone bill, one click commerce, unlike their web counterpart. The mobile consumer does not want to be served ads, unlike their web counterpart who is blind to them but understands they make the content free.

Not all mobile users are casual game users, nor wish to transform their smart phones into games consoles. Some of us want to be pushed highly filtered short form content that isn’t based on what our estranged wife’s cat had for dinner and our current location waiting for our surfboard at Heathrow Terminal 5 (I hasten to add that is not my life).

4.5% should be read as an opportunity.

iPhone Talent

Where oh where do I find an iPhone developer with SDK approval? I’ve hunted in all the usual places to no avail and only managed to uncover disgruntled devs in receipt of ‘we’re busy in our beta period now’ missives from the great Apple Empire.

Whilst I wait, I take heart in reading that us iPhone users are a really rather sophisticated bunch of arrogant geek chics.

The C-Spot

(via newteevee)

‘Where to begin with The C-Spot, a new “multiplatform comedy channel” distributed by Sony Pictures? Let’s set aside the fact that the online comedy space is already overcrowded. The biggest problem for this new comedy “platform” is that the “C” seems to stand for “cliché.”

The C-Spot is a collection of short-form comedy series created by Sony and distributed through Crackle (which Sony owns), YouTube, AOL, Hulu, Verizon Wireless and Internet-connected Sony Bravia TVs. There are five shows in the package, four of which are new.

But let’s start with the name, “The C-Spot.” Oh, I get it. It’s a play on G-spot. You know, because it’s edgy. Yawn. Trust me: It doesn’t get any better from there.’

I was mildly diverted by some bad ass guinea pigs driving a winnebago, but that’s about the measure of it.

Gifted Drones

Fred Wilson, a VC at Union Square Ventures recently wrote an insightful post about his thoughts on online video, which to summarise boils down to ‘VC’s can’t quite see the business model yet and we’ve been burnt before‘.

I found myself digesting the 59 lengthy comments all of which merit 10 minutes of your time, but Rob Long’s stood out in particular:

‘I think the key, for the next few years, anyway, is going to be managing to do 2 things at once: build powerful sifting engines that create personal channels that deliver and anticipate what you want to watch, through friend recommendations, etc.; but also on the content side, building audience behavior (remember: the 2 hour movie or 1/2 hour sitcom are pretty recent developments in human entertainment) by among other things replicating Wallstrip all over the place, in a thousand different niche areas. A Wallstrip for lacrosse. A Wallstrip for cars. A Wallstrip for country music….

Most of them will fail. Most of them will be awful. But that’s sort of the way it goes. Most things don’t work. But some will pop. And two or three years from now, the audience will be used to getting their news this way.

I think pure entertainment web video will work the same way: sure, some of it right now is lame, but somebody’s going to get a hit, somehow. And it will be because the product was good, consistent, tightly focused, and especially lucky, and because they used new tools to get the product in front of a targeted niche audience, which then was encouraged (compensated, even?) to share it and share it and share it.’

Finding relevant video, actually scrap that, finding new video you want to watch is the biggest challenge facing online video distribution. Last.fm are reportedly working on a video scrobbler, but surely that entails reading the videos on our hard drive and the so they’ll end up scrobbling our home movies and downloads from file sharing sites, which we simply don’t have!

So my friends get to see I like watching cats fighting Sesame Street toys and Superbad with Korean subtitles. Yee ha.

I don’t want an algorithm suggesting what I might like to watch, I want a human editor(s), a trusted voice, I want an army of comedically gifted drones reporting to a virtual foreman on their video finds and I want the results delivered to wherever I am, be it Facebook, my mobile or my desktop for later consumption.

Finding quality video is increasingly difficult, particularly original web UK comedy.

Are We Giving Robots Too Much Power?

The Onion, web comedy stalwart and vendor of apparel with slogans such as ‘Owls Are Assholes’ and ‘Kittens Think of Nothing But Murder’.

Smell the Fibre Optics

South Park fans will soon be able to watch any episode of the seminal animated show free online, thanks to a deal between show creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone and Comedy Central’s parent company, Viacom.According to Comedy Central reps, Parker and Stone are the driving force behind South Park Studios, the series’ new online HQ offering free viewing of all 12 seasons of South Park. Currently in its beta format, the site and its episodes are ad-supported, but require no additional fees to view as many episodes as a fan’s heart desires.

In an appropriately glib statement, Parker and Stone said they were inspired to start the site when they got “really sick of having to download our own show illegally all the time. So we gave ourselves a legal alternative.” (via Wired)

(they’re no allowing you to embed the video in your own site, which is dud move)

Premium content creators are slowly starting to see the benefits of controlling the free distribution of their shows. The business model is ‘fight the pirates at their own game’, why download a suspect torrent when you can watch the show elsewhere for free and build ad revenue around it. Those media moguls who decry ‘what about the DVD sales?’ need to wake up and smell the fibre optics, people want your premium content on their own terms, give it to them or they’ll just take it.

I hear this argument a lot about illegal file sharing hitting cinema takings and DVD sales. It’s false. Cinema visits in the UK rose 3.7% in 2007 to 162.4 million. Increasingly films are being produced that warrant the big screen experience, it adds value to the product, in the same way DVD’s have long since ceased to be merely a facsimile of the screen print, by offering ‘extras’ and ‘director’s cuts’.

So here’s a thought, make the film freely available to download at the same time you release it in the cinemas and on DVD. Digital distribution using the bittorrent protocol is next to nothing. Get a forward thinking brand on board to ad fund the digital distribution, create added value around the product online. The brand pays per download. The brand can alter according to geography, BMW in Britain, Tatra in India, Kia in South Korea. You sell brand area distribution rights.

People that want to make an event of going to the cinema to pay £8 entry and £5 for some toxic cheese nachos served by some mute youth will still go, if only for the Nandos feast after your chosen feature. Chicken in a pitta and the latest blockbuster, an inspired idea. It’s what Friday nights with a pregnant wife are all about.