» Posts Tagged ‘onlinevideo’
Netflix Streaming Loses 2000 Titles as Universal & MGM Licenses Expire
While the phenomenon of title evaporation is nothing new to Netflix, one of the service’s most significant catalog losses will come with the expiration of licensing agreements with Warner Bros., Universal, and MGM. Starting today and continuing over the course of May, InstantWatcher tracks 1,794 previously available films that will no longer be streamed on Netflix. This news piggy-backs that of Warner Archive Instant, an offering that — very literal title notwithstanding — should be quite familiar to Netflix viewers. Click below for details on what perennial picks will be removed from the Netflix catalog, some additional info on Warner’s Archive Instant, plus what Netflix itself has to say about all this as well. More »
Reelhouse Paves the Way for the Future of Self-Distribution
Each new day that passes it seems the world of distribution for filmmakers is being turned on its head. With so many new content destinations popping up all the time, it’s hard to know what’s what. Reelhouse is a company who seems to be breaking through the mold, as a recent partnership with Sundance would suggest. Reelhouse is planning a big launch on April 22nd — read on for our interview with Bill Mainguy, CEO and Founder of Reelhouse and get to know the platform: More »
There’s no doubt that things can get a bit confusing regarding non-integer frame rates — a decimal-specific frames-per-second count isn’t exactly an intuitive aspect of video. Of course, beginners can’t learn such distinctions if they’re going unspecified — a fact Vimeo has recently (and finally) addressed in updating their compression guidelines. Even more importantly, Vimeo is slowly but surely raising the quality ceiling in its encoding of your media — albeit in audio-only, in this case. More »
Q
uite a few services have tried to get in on the direct-to-audience movie sale, with choices of streaming and download to a number of devices and smart TVs. Redux is an aggregator of online video, and it attempts to find videos for you based on user interests and social sharing mechanisms. The company is pushing hard into the connected TV space with their own app, and they’re trying to recreate the experience of watching regular television programming with aggregated online video. One of Redux’s newest additions, Redux for Artists, is a distribution channel where filmmakers can sell their videos directly to consumers. More »
Prescreen is Suspending Operations, but Plenty of Options Still Exist for Indie Filmmakers
It seems like only yesterday (8 months, actually) that the curated rental website Prescreen appeared as one of the many new startups competing for eyeballs in the growing digital distribution world for independent films. Prescreen (technically still in beta) sent a message to users that it would be suspending operations for the foreseeable future and would notify members of future plans with the site. Just because Prescreen is shutting down, however, does not mean all hope is lost for independent film. There are plenty of other services still going strong. More »
I’ve been keeping tabs on HTML5 video for my future transmedia project 3rd Rail, as HTML5 will almost certainly replace Flash video as the primary method of consuming online video… eventually. However, where we are right now is that Adobe is sunsetting Flash video but HTML5 is still in its infancy. Long Tail Video has released a very useful “state of HTML5″ report, and it’s very enlightening for anyone wondering what you can and can’t do with HTML5 video today. Let’s also embed some HTML5 videos right here and see if they work correctly in your browser: More »
I know the rest of the internet is already clogged with news about the new iPhone 4S — which looks the same as the previous iteration, the iPhone 4 — but there are some video-specific features worth noting. The 4S ships with an 8 megapixel backlit CMOS sensor that records 1080p video at 30 FPS. With an f/2.4 aperture and a gyro for video stabilization, those movies shot on iPhones should start looking a bit better. Per usual with Apple promo videos, the new iPhone spot is rife with “amazing,” “incredible,” and every other hyperbolic term in the dictionary, so here it is starting with the part focused on its photo/video capabilities: More »
Prescreen and FilmDIY are New Players in the Independent Digital Distribution Space
If VOD is the future of film distribution and Netflix isn’t paying indies much, we’d all better hope for some new — and successful — players in the digital film distribution space. Dynamo Player was one of the first out of the gate, and Distrify looks great. Amazon VOD and YouTube Rentals are also players, or you could always try to build your own VOD portal. Now there are two more options; here are the video pitches from newcomers FilmDIY and Prescreen: More »
For its future as a streaming only service, Netflix is reliant on deals with content owners, a situation which has the service being described aptly as a castle on quicksand. As evidence of its constantly-changing library, Netflix recently lost Starz content but today added Dreamworks Animation films to their library. However, Amazon also doubled their Prime library today (which at $79/year — including an unlimited free two-day shipping tie-in — compares favorably to Netflix’s $96 annual fee). Competition is heating up, but I can’t help but note one other thing about Netflix: the design of their website and most of their apps is, and always has been, mediocre at best. Which is to say nothing of the connection between the service’s benefit to consumers and its detriment to content creators. More »
When I was 19 I was awarded grand prize in an online video contest put on by a now-defunct site named FirstEye. My music video entry (shot on a Sony VX1000, before HD, 24P, DSLRs, and After Effects made this video look primitive) won me a professional Sony video camera, which I used to shoot several successive projects — before selling it and buying a newer camera (which I’ve since done several times). Winning that contest gave me more confidence to keep pursuing film as a bona fide career, and every project I’ve shot since has been with that camera or its successors — including The West Side. In my own experience, contests offer a great opportunity to jump start a career. With this in mind, the following is a guest post by David Hinds, from video hosting platform Vzaar. They recently announced this year’s video festival winners. More »
Vimeo Launches Vimeo PRO. Is Something Missing?
Filmmaker-friendly video sharing service Vimeo just launched Vimeo PRO, a service designed for small businesses looking for high-quality, branding-free video hosting. Vimeo PRO runs $199/year for 50GB of storage and includes up to 250,000 plays; another $199 will expand the offering by an additional 100,000 plays or 50GB of storage. While this new offering will work well for many small businesses — especially in a portfolio context — I have a number of questions about it, and I think there’s something missing from Vimeo’s slate of offerings. More »
YouTube has released a 70-page Creator Playbook aimed at helping video creators build their audiences online. This is exactly the kind of thing that would come in handy for actors looking to build their own career, in addition to filmmakers. The digital download, which YouTube says will be updated regularly, looks to be an excellent resource on building an audience (not just with YouTube, but by using Facebook and Twitter as well). Here’s the release: More »
I heard recently from an NYC-based actor friend who is undergoing an internal debate common to his profession. Should he move to LA to pursue an acting career (uprooting himself in hopes of getting cast in a major TV show or film), or stay where he is and do what he can outside of Hollywood? As someone who runs a web site focused on DIY/independent careers, I thought I’d write him an open letter explaining why I think 21st-century performing artists should forget about putting their careers in the hands of others, and instead take the reins — and responsibility — themselves. Here is that letter: More »
Starting about three years ago I began brainstorming ideas for an internet-centric way of distributing independent films (as opposed to festivals, theaters, and DVDs). However, given I already run one web site, instead of pursuing these ideas in earnest I’ve spent the ensuing years working on getting a transmedia project and/or first feature off the ground (more on the latter soon — depending on your definition of “soon”). A year ago when taking a look at Dynamo Player, we saw the beginnings of what an independent video distribution widget would look like, and now newcomer Distrify has launched what looks to be a more feature-rich player. Several ideas I’ve kicked around (including an affiliate program) are implemented in Distrify: More »
There’s a growing number of video producers that enjoy creative and financial freedoms today whose job description didn’t exist a few years ago. I’m talking about YouTube channel producers, who employ a skill set that is often very different from what they teach in film schools. We’ve covered some audience-building tactics in the past, but here’s some advice on building a successful YouTube channel directly from YouTube exec Bing Chen, via Daisy Whitney’s interview on New Media Minute: More »
“Once we create a legitimate place for our viewers to view the content, the piracy goes down”
Why are TV networks still placing restrictions on online viewing of their shows (often posting only the most recent episodes in full), when all of the episodes are just a BitTorrent click away? CBS learned recently with their online strategy for college basketball’s March Madness: “making all the games available online was the best way to go – they made a ton of advertising revenue.” Availability = revenue? Imagine that.
Link: Mashable – Why Much of Your Favorite TV Content Still Isn’t Online
This video has 150 million views. Online video that’s high-quality by visual or narrative standards often struggles to find an audience in our era, yet if you film a baby biting another baby’s finger, you might just give rise to the most-viewed video on YouTube — of all time. More »
Filmmaker Magazine asked a number of Independent Film Week participants to guest blog on their website; I started writing a post but it ballooned into a verbose treatise on the future of digital distribution, so it ended up on their site as a Web Exclusive. It’s cross-posted here for no good reason.
Along with Zachary Lieberman (co-creator of The West Side), I spoke on Monday’s panel “Your Film Online,” and I wanted to expand here on some thoughts I shared during that panel — mostly in response to the prevailing wisdom that “the sky is falling” on independent film.
I’m a New Face of independent film, not an Industry Veteran, so maybe it’s naiveté that leads me to have a very different outlook on distribution than The Film Department CEO Mark Gill, whose comments in June were still on everyone’s lips at IFW. After proclaiming, “as it relates to independent film, the sky really is falling,” Gill’s solution was for the indie film world to make “fewer, better” movies. Unfortunately, that’s not actually a productive piece of advice. After he spoke, did most of the audience pack it up and leave to pursue a different career? No. Everyone’s already trying to make the best film they can, and telling financiers or filmmakers to try harder isn’t going to materially affect the market.
While Gill obviously gave the right speech at the right time and touched nerves across the industry, if we take a step back from the shake-up currently going on, the future is very clearly brighter than ever for independent productions; we just need to embrace a number of fundamental changes in distribution. Ten years ago, to get someone to pay to see your indie film, you had to mobilize a local crowd in dozens of markets in order to get butts into art house seats. Now we’ve got a global interconnected audience of millions of online movie watchers and the answer is to make less movies? No. The audience is larger than ever; we don’t need to make fewer movies. The answer is we need to make it easier to watch movies.
The way independent film distribution currently works is self-defeating. Let’s say I’m reading the current issue of Filmmaker and I find out about a film that opened at Sundance. I want to see it… but I can’t. The film showed at the festival, a distributor bought the rights to it, and now it won’t come to a theater for six to nine months and won’t be on DVD for a full year. Here I am with my interest piqued, the title of the film foremost in my head, but in order for that movie to earn a dime from me — an interested, paying customer — they’re going to have to count on me remembering the film several months later. They have to count on me actually becoming aware of its release through an advertisement or a listing of showtimes during the theatrical window, they have to count on me being in town and having some free time during that brief period, they have to count on me being able to interest someone else in the film as well (like most people I prefer not to go to the theater alone), and on top of all of that, they have to count on me actually remembering the article I read nine months ago and connecting that to the title of the film currently listed on the marquee next to several other titles.
What kind of consumer-facing product is intentionally made this elusive? In the above situation, if I do eventually realize I wanted to see the film, I’ll add it to my Netflix queue at position 336, which is not a great value proposition to the distributor or filmmaker. Even worse, after reading the Filmmaker article, I might never hear about the film again, and, like so many other movies I was interested in at one point, it might fall through the cracks and I’ll never see (or pay for) it.
It doesn’t make sense: if your film has someone’s interest piqued, they need to be able to plunk down a few bucks and watch it NOW. Not tomorrow, not next month, certainly not a full year from now.
The way I see it, there are two main problems with distribution as it stands today: one, release windows, and two, online experience.
In terms of release windows, I understand the arguments behind finding an audience and building hype. But the marketing costs that a movie incurs in order to achieve some sort of penetration into the collective cultural conscience is not befitting of an indie film. Besides, in the indie world, advance hype for something that hasn’t come out yet is more expensive and less effective than a simple recommendation from a friend for something that’s currently available. Regardless, if you’re going to spend money building an audience for a film, why not build that audience while the film is actually available for purchase, instead of during an “advertising-only” window?
The supporters of staggered theatrical windows and expensive ad campaigns have a reason to want to stick to their guns: their jobs depend on it. Distributors are the ones whose companies are in trouble, so they’re the ones most likely to cry apocalypse. On Wednesday’s panel “The State of Independent Distribution,” Scott Kirsner of Cinematech asked Sony Pictures Classics co-president Tom Bernard about the wisdom of continuing to use release windows in the face of piracy. Why not make a film available for paying customers if it’s already available for free via illicit channels? Bernard’s response: “Because people are used to windows.” Well, people were used to snail mail before e-mail came along, and most of us have managed to adapt (with the exception of a certain Presidential candidate). I doubt many of us would want to go back to waiting three days for cross-country written communication, just as one day I doubt any of us will want to go back to waiting for film reels to be shipped across the country for an exclusive theatrical window.
If release windows are completely done away with and we put every film online day-and-date, wouldn’t that put many theaters out of business? Probably, but for most major releases nowadays, the film is already online day-and-date. It’s on Bittorrent, it’s on Kazaa or whatever file-sharing service they use on college campuses these days, it’s available via any number of illicit online distribution channels. These pirated copies are popular for two main reasons: price (free!) and convenience (now!). It’s hard to beat the pirates on the price issue, but as it stands, the illegal option is also more convenient than the legit option, and that’s a problem. Not only is it more convenient, but it’s also often of higher quality: if you look around on Bittorrent, the community cares deeply about the quality of the films they’re downloading; they rip a movie from an HDTV broadcast if possible, they make it available with subtitles in several different languages, and in general a downloader can watch a better quality movie for free than if they actually ponied up the cash to watch it through an authorized download or streaming service. Ultimately, when piracy is offering a more convenient, higher-quality experience in addition to a cheaper one, we’re failing at digital distribution.
There are existing online distribution options — including nascent day-and-date release plans like IFC’s VOD program — but the currently available choices offer limited viewing options and no sense of ownership. Using myself as an example, at home I have several legal means to watch movies online: one is my Netflix subscription, with its Watch Instantly feature, but it offers an extremely limited selection (less than 10% of Netflix’s titles are available to watch online), and it doesn’t work at all on my Mac. So I turn to iTunes, Amazon, or my Playstation, all of which tout online video stores; each has a different catalog, however, so you never know if the content you’re looking for will be available on that particular store. Additionally, each store has a different pricing structure and different viewing limitations thanks to their Digital Rights Management. Only my Playstation is hooked up to my TV, so content bought at Amazon or iTunes is only viewable on my laptop. Whereas if I download a movie illegally I can play it on the screen of my choice, if I “buy” a movie from an online store the DRM often won’t let me transfer the film to other devices. And limited transferability is only part of the problem with DRM; mainly, the issue is the consumer’s ephemeral ownership of a product they paid real money for. I don’t have any faith that a movie I purchase online today will be watchable three years from now; I might have an entirely new computer that it won’t transfer to, or I might forget the password to an account I have to “refresh” my licenses with. Imagine if you bought a DVD at the store and it expired after a few days unless you logged into a server; no one would buy such a disc. They actually tried that with DIVX ten years ago… and no one bought it. Yet DRM today is essentially the same as the failed DIVX experiment.
After years of hemorrhaging money, the music industry is finally offering decent options for online music consumption: iTunes and Amazon (and Rhapsody, I should note, since I currently work there) are finally selling MP3s, which are DRM-free and thus work on any device. That sounds like actual ownership. That sounds like an experience finally equal to that of… what’s already available online via pirated means, for free.
And that’s where watching movies online becomes viable. If I want to buy something, give it to me free of restrictions and I’ll gladly pay money for it and start building a library. Indeed, if people are buying millions of unprotected MP3s from online stores — instead of just one person on the planet buying the album and emailing the files to everyone — I’m pretty sure consumers will buy a DRM-free movie, load it onto any device they own, and enjoy it however they want. They’re much less likely to email around a 2GB movie file than a 4MB music file anyway. As a final point, does anyone think that selling a protected file to the paying customer is going to prevent piracy when there are a million unprotected, pirated copies of that same song or movie already available online? All DRM does is screw the person who actually paid for it.
Consumers don’t expect to pay as much for a digital file as they would for a physical product that was manufactured and shipped across the country, and rightfully so. But as filmmakers we’ll sell a whole lot more copies of our movie at a lower price point, and we’ll end up making more money this way anyway (the same thing happened with DVD when it undercut the price point of rental tapes — the drastic increase in number of units sold more than outweighed the drop in per-unit revenue). Today, a $20 DVD nets the filmmaker how much after the physical production, distribution, and company overhead? $2? Environmentally it’s not a great time to be shrinkwrapping a disc and freighting it all around the country, anyway. If we sell it through an online store for $10 we’ll keep significantly more than $2 of that sale; if we sell it on our own site, we’ll keep the whole $10.
And that’s another point about the bright future of indie film: direct sales. Gary Hustwit (dir., Helvetica) talked on Wednesday’s panel “The Digital Download” about the revenue streams he was able to generate directly from fans; when asked how much they added up to, he tellingly responded, “a lot.” And thus ended the panel. Some of these revenue streams were just rounded up by Peter Broderick in a two-part post at IndieWire, “Welcome to the New World of distribution” (part 1, part 2). As with countless business innovations over the years, cutting out the middleman, or at least reducing his role, is of paramount importance for independent productions. Getting back to Gill’s speech, he predicted, “it will feel like we just survived a medieval plague. The carnage and the stench will be overwhelming.” He’s right, but the carcasses he speaks of will be the bodies of distribution companies and theater owners, not filmmakers.
The future of independent film is instant, digital gratification. As filmmakers, we’ve already brought down production costs down by shooting digitally; now we need distribution costs brought down by distributing digitally as well. Cut out the P&A — the 35mm blowup, the trucks across the country, the bloated ad campaign — and put our films in digital theaters and online, simultaneously. Make our films available anytime, anywhere: on our computers, on our iPhones, iPods, Playstations, TVs, etc. — all with the guarantee that if you buy it, it’s DRM-free. People will pay for something if they actually own what they’re paying for. In addition to hundreds of digital theater screens, we also now have hundreds of millions of computers with internet connections as our venues. That’s a lot of screens. I’m pretty sure the sky is not falling.
sjk: didn't read the article .. but ... no thanks. How to Get Free Music for Your Film from Moby
Pascal: Thanks for the link. I was just looking a round the web and couldn't find … Learn How Successful Screenwriters Use Action to Define Characters in 'On …
MattN.: Great inside joke by Zemeckis and Gale: "We'll leave the title to Sid, he'… When You're Steven Spielberg, This is How People Celebrate Your Birthday
African Mango review: What a information of un-ambiguity and preserveness of precious experience… Blackmagic Cinema Camera, RED EPIC, and Arri Alexa RAW Camera Test Part 3:…
Samuel H: Indeed. But it is still awesome, and many people don't know about it. T… How to Get Free Music for Your Film from Moby