Category Archives: Coming Soon

Netflix to spend $8 billion on content in 2018

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Two stories about Netflix and content this week:

According to Mike Fleming Jr on Deadline Hollywood Netflix is bankrolling the Shaft reboot in exchange for international rights.

“Netflix will pay more than half the film’s high $30 million budget, in exchange for international rights and the ability to put the film on its streaming outside the U.S. two weeks after New Line releases theatrically in the United States. The film will begin production in December. New Line and Netflix were not commenting, but sources said the film will follow a traditional domestic roll out from theatrical to SVOD and DVD through the Warner Bros machine.”

Brandon Katz reports on the Observer that Netflix is planning on spending $8 billion next year.

“Netflix dropped a cool $6 billion on content in 2017 alone and is planning to shell out a whopping $8 billion next year, $1 billion more than previously planned. While the company’s long-term forecast is a bit cloudy with a growing $20 billion debt looming over its head, the short-term prognosis is bright and sunny. The streaming giant added 5.3 million new subscribers in the last quarter, crushing its own internal goal and raising its worldwide total north of 104 million.”

See the investor relations shareholder letter for details.

My take: these stories are interesting because Netflix now has more paid international subscribers than paid US subscribers and demonstrates its commitment to producing more and more original content. There’s no denying internet television is the future.

OC4: Zuck promotes first standalone VR headset

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At the recent Oculus Connect 4 Keynote presentation in San Jose, Mark Zuckerberg promised a new VR headset that straddles the space between Mobile VR that uses your smartphone and Computer VR that uses your high-end computer: the standalone Oculus Go.

Shipping in early 2018, Oculus Go will cost $199 USD and features:

  • Crystal-clear optics
  • 2560 x 1440 resolution
  • Integrated spatial audio
  • Designed with breathable fabrics and adjustable straps

Lance Ulanoff writing in Mashable has an interesting take on the price:

“Why is $199 such a good price? It’s not super cheap, but believe it or not, it appears to trigger a response in consumers. Ask them to pay $300 or more for cutting-edge technology, especially something as unproven as virtual reality that still needs more expensive hardware to work, and they balk (Oculus sold just 355,000 Oculus units in 2016). But set a sub-$200 price, even just a dollar below that threshold, and consumers are ready to take the leap. Apple wasn’t even the first to discover this magical price point. Back in 2002, the very first iRobot Roomba robotic vacuums were priced at $199.95. Even though they’ve since gotten a lot more expensive, that initial magic price point helped launch a robot vacuum industry.”

My take: I think this will be a game changer. It’s perfect for everyone who wants to get into VR but doesn’t want to buy a Samsung phone or a PC computer.

Computational Video Editing may replace Assistant Editors

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Eric Escobar writes on Film Independent about his trip to Siggraph 2017 and the one technology that blew his mind: Computational Video Editing.

Three researchers from Stanford University and one from Adobe demonstrated a system that:

“automatically selects the most appropriate clip from one of the input takes, for each line of dialogue, based on a user-specified set of film-editing idioms. Our system starts by segmenting the input script into lines of dialogue and then splitting each input take into a sequence of clips time-aligned with each line. Next it labels the script and the clips with high-level structural information (e.g., emotional sentiment of dialogue, camera framing of clip, etc.). After this pre-process, our interface offers a set of basic idioms that users can combine in a variety of ways to build custom editing styles. Our system encodes each basic idiom as a Hidden Markov Model that relates editing decisions to the labels extracted in the pre-process. For short scenes (< 2 minutes, 8-16 takes, 6-27 lines of dialogue) applying the user-specified combination of idioms to the pre-processed inputs generates an edited sequence in 2-3 seconds.”

That’s right. Three seconds. For a 90 second scene. Versus 90 minutes for a human. If my math is correct, that makes this system 180,000% faster!

The idioms, from the research notes:

  • Avoid jump cuts
  • Change zoom gradually
  • Emphasize character
  • Intensify emotion
  • Mirror position
  • Peaks and valleys
  • Performance fast/slow
  • Performance loud/quiet
  • Short lines
  • Speaker visible
  • Start wide
  • Zoom consistent
  • Zoom in/out

Editors combine a number of these idioms and weight them to generate different assemblies of the rushes, automatically.

Of course, editors will then proceed to polish these rough cuts, tweaking the edits and finessing the sound.

My take: This promises to take out all the tedium in editing and let editors focus on truly being creative. Eric envisions a client-side version of this in which every viewer’s version of a film is custom-generated for them, based on their favourite editing style. That may be going a little too far but what I find fascinating about this system is that it starts with the script, once again highlighting how crucial it is.

Netflix just invited itself to your child’s next birthday party!

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Streaming juggernaut Netflix wants to sing your child Happy Birthday.

From their September 14, 2017, media release:

“With this new hack, parents can simply press play and kids’ favorite characters will sing them a special birthday greeting – made just for them (or so they’ll think).”

Some of the Birthdays On-Demand animated characters:

  • All Hail King Julien
  • Barbie
  • Beat Bugs
  • Dinotrux
  • Las Leyendas
  • LEGO Friends
  • LEGO Ninjago
  • Luna Petunia
  • My Little Pony
  • Pokemon
  • Project Mc2
  • Skylanders Academy
  • Trollhunters
  • Word Party

Just search for ‘birthday songs’ to find all.

(Netflix also did something similar for New Year’s Eve last year.)

My take: this is brilliant! Netflix has combined a targeted audience (children) with an annual event (birthdays) and created media that has huge long-tail appeal. This could only be better with some customization. And more characters. I’m thinking on the adult side, where accounts (in our home) are named. How difficult would it be to have Walter White or Frank Underwood spell out (or even say) my name? (Birthday is coming up soon! Hint, hint.)

OPA chips may one day replace optical lenses

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Caltech researchers have created an optical phased array chip that can capture images.

The technological breakthrough has the potential to revolutionize photography.

Ali Hajimiri, Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at Caltech, claims:

We’ve created a single thin layer of integrated silicon photonics that emulates the lens and sensor of a digital camera, reducing the thickness and cost of digital cameras. It can mimic a regular lens, but can switch from a fish-eye to a telephoto lens instantaneously — with just a simple adjustment in the way the array receives light.

He continues:

“The ability to control all the optical properties of a camera electronically using a paper-thin layer of low-cost silicon photonics without any mechanical movement, lenses, or mirrors, opens a new world of imagers that could look like wallpaper, blinds, or even wearable fabric.”

Read the PDF.

My take: This is the perhaps unseen conclusion of digitization. First film. Soon lenses. Both usurped by ones and zeroes. I wonder what the future of visual storytelling will look like when almost anything flat — walls, windows, ceilings — can become image capturing tools.

“TV” shows coming to social media platforms

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Harold Stark, writing on Forbes, believes that Snapchat and Facebook are Going to Change Television Forever.

He’s wondering about the data social networks gather on their users and how it could inform media programming:

“Social media platforms such as Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and Vimeo already invest billions of dollars each year in order to gather data on their users. Just imagine what would happen if all these social media organizations were to implement their stacks of user-sensitive data to create the perfect television shows that users loved?”

And it’s already happening.

Facebook has begun Watch for shows “made up of episodes — live or recorded — [that] follow a theme or storyline.” They envision that:

“Over time, creators will be able to monetize their shows through Ad Breaks. We’ve been testing Ad Breaks over the past few months, and we will be slowly opening up availability to more creators to ensure we’re providing a good experience for the community. Creators can also create sponsored shows using our branded content tag.”

Sounds like TV and TV commercials, no?

In the wings are Instagram, Snap and Vimeo. Plus, Apple.

My take: Television, be scared, be very scared.

Hunger Games and Twilight Theme Park to Open

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Lionsgate is partnering to open a South Korean theme park based on its film properties.

“Lionsgate Movie World, spanning approximately 1.3 million square feet (approximately 122,000 square meters) and centered around multiple renowned Lionsgate film properties, is Lionsgate’s first branded outdoor theme park and the latest milestone in the continued ramp up of Lionsgate’s location-based entertainment business around the world. The project will be developed into seven movie zones, each themed around blockbuster Lionsgate properties which have collectively grossed nearly $9 billion at the global box office. These include ‘The Hunger Games’, ‘The Twilight Saga’ and ‘Now You See Me’ as well as the eagerly-anticipated March 2018 release ‘Robin Hood’.”

This joins their project in Dubai.

According to The Economist:

“Newfound enthusiasm for theme parks partly reflects upheaval in the media industry. As it has become harder to reap riches in television and film, companies are eager to spin gold from both their vast content libraries and to attract attention to their new offerings. Disney and Comcast have enjoyed considerable success doing this through their parks businesses, which have chugged along as reliable profit engines. Universal Studios has contributed more to Comcast’s profits over the past five years than either the broadcast network NBC or the Universal Pictures film studio, its corporate siblings. At Disney, the company’s theme-park division has generated a better return on assets than its film studio in four of the past five years.”

My take: I believe Disneyland was the first media-related theme park, and I’ve been there! Not quite transmedia, media-related theme parks are an experiential form of IP merchandizing and a way to extend film franchises into the real world.

Brand Programming

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In a new series of videos, Zacuto Producer/Director Steve Weiss looks into the future and sees a new funding model emerging (skip ahead to 3:00 if you’re short on time):

“I think that when cable dies, which is going to happen in the next five or six years, that companies—Ford will have their own shows, Target will have their own shows. Amazon has their own shows!”

I think he’s on to something.

We can all agree making movies costs money. The question is, “Who’s paying?”

There are really only two ways to pay for the media you watch. Either you pay directly (through ticket purchases or Cable TV subscriptions, etc.), or someone else pays. And that someone else is usually Advertisers.

The problem is that Google and Facebook have disrupted the Ad Business and now take the lion’s share of the global ad spend.

The recent, pre-Internet televison model was that TV Networks (the Gatekeepers) would contract producers to make shows. How did the Gatekeepers get paid? By selling ads. This situation supported Ad Agencies and lots of Professionals to make and place those ads.

The Brand’s message was intermediated by the Ad Agency and then the TV Networks. And the shows were somewhat entertaining, if you just ignored the commercials.

The Digital Revolution (which lowered production costs and correspondingly increased content) now allows the direct delivery of both content and advertising to viewers, bypassing the Gatekeepers.

I think the real problem remains: people hate commercials that too often interrupt or otherwise annoy them.

So what if Brands worked directly with Professionals on Programming, not Advertising?

This is what Weiss is getting at, I think.

Cases in point: Red Bull TV and BMW Films. The key is to align the brand with the content: for Red Bull it’s youth and adrenaline, for BMW it’s cars, class and action.

I think this is a new frontier: local businesses working with local filmmakers to produce mutually thematic content. Shout out to Justus Lowry who is doing something very similar in a documentary vein for culinary culture here in Victoria, BC.

I hate to call this Sponsored Content. Even Brand TV misses out on the synergy I envision. Brand Programming? Can you think of a better label?

My take: This kinda harkens back to the days of the TV Soaps, you know.

IMAX to show less 3D

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As reported on The Wrap, IMAX Entertainment CEO Greg Foster said on a recent conference call that they will be cutting back on 3D releases in order to boost profits.

“We’re looking forward to playing fewer 3-D versions of films and more 2-D versions.”

He added:

“It’s worth noting ‘Dunkirk’ was showing exclusively in 2-D, which consumers have shown a strong preference for.”

For instance, Blade Runner 2049 will be shown in 2D, even though a 3D version will be available elsewhere.

My take: it’s smart for a large company like IMAX to mine their big data to gauge consumer interest in 3D versus 2D. The conclusion seems to be that more and more moviegoers would rather not wear 3D glasses when watching large-scale movies. Nevertheless, I still believe when it comes to small-scale individual VR watching, people will choose 3D180 over 360.

Streaming strengthens

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As Netflix releases the first trailer for its most expensive movie to date at San Diego’s Comic Con ($90 Million USD for Bright, starring Will Smith), CMF Trends explores the flourishing streaming world:

They claim one out of three homes are watching Netflix every night; one out of six are watching Youtube; and one out of 25 is watching Amazon.

“In 2016, the consumption of audio and video content amounted to 71% of evening online traffic on fixed broadband networks in North America according to Sandvine. This proportion has doubled in the past five years…. The spending shift towards streaming services can also be observed in Canada, where spending on Internet access has been higher than spending on cable TV subscription since 2015.”

The cost of all that content is exploding on an upward curve as well:

For instance, prices paid for comedy specials have doubled:

My take: I’ll tell you what drove us to Netflx: TV commercials. We didn’t mind appointment viewing for the new shows we liked but the commercials became too intrusive for all but live events (like sports and award shows). And on Netflix, if the story really grabs you, you can binge watch multiple episodes.