Category Archives: The Mediascape

Streaming killed the DVD star

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Michael Therkelsen claims on Horror Society that “VHS is kind of making a comeback“:

“Perhaps solely due to the horror genre’s loyalty to this form of home media, independent film-makers are releasing their flicks on VHS with limited and special editions, or as perks on fundraising campaigns.”

He then links to a fascinating documentary called The King of Catalog:

It’s a documentary about the career of Jeff Baker who worked as a leading figure in the home entertainment business from the 1970s until 2015. His career, in many ways, mirrors the arc of home video, from Betamax to VHS to DVD, from the rise of Blockbuster to its fall, and from boxed sets to streaming.

I couldn’t really corroborate Therkelsen’s claim but did find Kate Hagen‘s Search for the Last Great Video Store.

This is a long but fascinating read about access to films, technology, video stores and unapologetic nostalgia. For instance, did you know the world’s largest video store has over 130 thousand titles but Netflix has less than four thousand? For comparison, the average Blockbuster had around 10,000 movies.

After outlining some of the issues with digitizing classic movies, Kate tours some great video stores, maps them on the world and concludes:

“As technology continues isolating us and pushing more of our daily interactions into the digital space, I have to believe there’s going to be a bounce-back moment for video stores just as there’s been for independent booksellers and record stores.”

My take: Victoria is lucky to have Pic-a-Flic Video! Beyond all the nostalgia here, I learned that Netflix’s DVD rental service might just make more money than its streaming service!

‘Digital Fur Technology’ can sing and dance

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‘Cats‘ has released a second trailer:

This one aims to do better than the first one:

Does it?

Well, it is shorter, at 99 seconds, versus 142 seconds.

It outlines more of a story for the audience to expect. And the cats spend almost all of their time on two feet, rather than on all fours. It’s brighter.

But the biggest change was suppose to be with regards to the “digital fur technology.”

Director Tom Hooper, quoted in Empire Magazine in his first interview anywhere about the movie, claims that the explosive response caught him off guard:

“I was just so fascinated because I didn’t think it was controversial at all. So it was quite entertaining. Cats was apparently the number-one trending topic in the world, for a good few hours at least. We’d only finished shooting in March, so all the visual effects were at quite an early stage. Possibly there were, in the extremity in some of the responses, some clues in how to keep evolving it. When you watch the finished film, you’ll see that some of the designs of the cats have moved on since then, and certainly our understanding of how to use the technology to make them work has gone up, too.”

O-kay.

Me, I hardly see a difference. Maybe, when you compare Jennifer Hudson in #2 at 1:08 with her slightly furrier self in #1 at 2:04. But the others seem virtually the same. See 1:50 (#1) and 0:40 (#2.)

My take: what I think is fascinating about this is that the audience has had an impact on the final film. An early trailer caused the blog-o-shpere to gag. And the filmmakers listened and subsequently modified the film. This is a purr-fect (sorry) example of the filmmakers giving their audience what they want. Should more films do that?

Some SmartTVs to become obsolete

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Catie Keck reports in Gizmodo: Here’s Why Netflix Is Leaving Some Roku and Samsung Devices.

She says,

“Select Roku devices, as well as older Samsung or Vizio TVs, will soon lose support for Netflix beginning in December…. With respect to Roku devices in particular, the issue boils down to older devices running Windows Media DRM. Since 2010, Netflix has been using Microsoft PlayReady. Starting December 2, older devices that aren’t able to upgrade to PlayReady won’t be able to use the service.”

Netflix says,

“If you see an error that says: ‘Due to technical limitations, Netflix will no longer be available on this device after December 1st, 2019. Please visit netflix.com/compatibledevices for a list of available devices.’ It means that, due to technical limitations, your device will no longer be able to stream Netflix after the specified date. To continue streaming, you’ll need to switch to a compatible device prior to that date.”

Antonio Villas-Boas writes on Business Insider:

“This has surfaced one key weakness in Smart TVs — while the picture might still be good, the built-in computers that make these TVs ‘smart’ will become old and outdated, just like a regular computer or smartphone. That was never an issue on ‘dumb’ TVs that are purely screens without built-in computers to run apps and stream content over the internet.”

He concludes, “You should buy a streaming device like a Roku, Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV, or Apple TV instead of relying on your Smart TV’s smarts.”

My take: does this happen to cars as well?

More celebrities are about to rise from the dead

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Alex Lee, writing in WIRED UK, reveals that the messy legal scrap to bring celebrities back from the dead is only going to get weirder.

Recall that earlier this month Twitter convulsed when it was announced that 55-year dead James Dean had been “cast” in a new Vietnam war movie called Finding Jack.

(Never mind that numerous actors in franchise films have already been resurrected with CGI to continue playing roles into which they once breathed life: Peter Cushing, Carrie Fisher and Paul Walker.)

Here’s where the weird comes in.

As reported by Alex, the estates of dead celebrities hold “rights of publicity” that are typically licensed to companies for exploitation.

But, as soon as 70 years pass after a celebrity’s death, that right expires. Sometimes, it’s just 50 years.

Jennifer Rothman, professor of law at Loyola Marymount University and author of The Right of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined for a Public World says when the term expires:

“That would make them fair game.”

Of note, a new company has emerged to represent dead celebrities: Worldwide XR.

My take: This was bound to happen in our digital age. It’s just too easy to juggle the bits to create new audio and visuals. I think the backlash speaks to an unspoken feeling that this violates basic privacy and the passage of time. On the other hand — it also has the power to raise the dead and allow us to go on living forever. Or conquer space:

Data usurps Content as King

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Scott Roxborough, writing for The Hollywood Reporter, reports that Indie Execs Say Content Is No Longer King — Data Is.

“Business models on which the industry has relied for decades are breaking apart as studio blockbusters grab an increasingly large share of the domestic box office and streaming platforms splinter the audience for niche and indie fare.”

Speaking at an AFM Financing conference, Erik Feig says the new key is to target a niche audience: “You find a group of people who are passionate about something — and you start with them. You make a movie that will satisfy that niche audience and then you extrapolate beyond that, turn that audience into the proselytizers for your film.”

How do you find that niche audience?

DATA.

I’ve blogged before about the ‘king’ of data: Toronto’s Wattpad who used their data to help create After, a teen romantic thriller.

Back at the conference, Christian Parkes asked, “Is content still king? I’d say data is king. If you aren’t relying heavily on it, you are going to lose.”

For the record, it may have been Bill Gates who coined the term Content is King in 1997.

My take: maybe The Audience is King? With the proliferation of viewing opportunities (plus lots of non-screen activities available) the audience is more valuable than ever. Content and data are both important. But lets not forget that show business/storytelling requires an audience to validate the experience.

Horror Movie Social Media Marketing Case Study

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With Halloween fresh in mind, I thought it would be appropriate to look back at the CMF Trends‘s excellent post Ravenous: Marketing a Horror Movie in the Social Media Era.

Using Ravenous as a case study, we learn the team started with a social media marketing campaign to “develop a community of Quebec horror film fans to generate a significant number of ‘Likes’ as well as followers, tags, shares and retweets on social networks.” They did this by:

  1. A micro-site to collect subscriptions to their newsletter
  2. A contest for 100 zombie extras
  3. Four video demos

Next they watched the reactions of their subscribers and followers to various news items such as casting and distribution announcements.

This helped them understand their best platforms and main influencers.

The article then moves on the review sites. In their case, IMDb and Letterboxd proved to be their most popular.

The article closes with these four recommendations:

  1. Use more visual and video elements (such as gifs, memes, etc.) to feed the social network accounts more systematically and in other than informational contexts (humoristic, based on the news and calendar, etc.)
  2. Develop more promotional content such as the exhibit of storyboards… and format it in such a way as to be able to monetize it with ultra-fans.
  3. Distribute on a larger scale all of the official visual elements and those designed by fan communities throughout the world in accordance with a deployment schedule developed with everyone involved in the film (distributors, sales agents, festivals, influencers) to the greatest extent possible.
  4. Analyze, target and reassess main influencer types and functions at each stage of the film’s operational cycle (festival, local premiere, theatre release, VOD distribution).

My take: fascinating reading! I think almost all of this can be applied to any indie film. Glad I now know about Letterboxd!

The Internet turns 50!

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Last Sunday, October 29, 2019, the Internet turned 50 years old.

We’ve grown from the 1970 topology:

to this in 2019:

internetmap072

Okay, here’s a real representation of the Internet.

What’s next? The Interplanetary Internet of course.

My take: It’s important to note that the World Wide Web is not the same thing as the Internet. (The Web wouldn’t be invented for another 20 years!) The Internet is the all-important backbone for the numerous networking protocols that traverse it, http(s) being only one.

Why your first feature should be a horror movie

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Bronson Arcuri has taken NPR‘s Planet Money podcast on The Scariest Thing In Hollywood and turned it into a new genre: the horror movie news story. Watch 8 Reasons Horror Movies Are Scary Good Business:

His central thesis is: Horror movies are cheap to make and insanely popular.

And here are the reasons he says horror films are cheap to make:

  1. Limited Locations
  2. No Talking
  3. Fear is the Unknown
  4. Cheap Costumes, Cheap Props, No CGI
  5. Low Budget is the Right Budget
  6. Profit Sharing
  7. Quantity Over Quality
  8. Sequels

The Numbers bears this thesis out.

My take: I don’t like being scared or afraid and so I’ve never been a big fan of horror movies. Any suggestions on titles for a crash course?

Distribber, and other aggregators

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As the news of Distribber‘s bankruptcy spreads, Noam Kroll has a great summary: What All Indie Filmmakers Can Learn From Distribber’s Failure.

What is an aggregator? In simplistic terms, film distributors might get your film into theatres whereas aggregators might put your film online. Aggregators have relationships with all major online outlets and know what they want: both for content and for deliverables.

Noam mentions a couple of aggregators to check out:

Stephen Follows has done some excellent analysis of Distribber’s movies. Its most successful client seems to have been Survivor:

What kinds of movies did Distribber attract?

My take: if I had a feature to distribute, I’d probably go with FilmHub because I don’t have the kind of cash other aggregators demand up front.

Netflix floats bonuses for winning filmmakers

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Lucas Shaw writes for Bloomberg that Netflix Plans to Pay Bonuses to Filmmakers When Movies Succeed:

Netflix vs. Amazon Prime vs. Hulu Plus

“Netflix Inc. plans to pay filmmakers, actors and movie producers a bonus if their films are successful, a new incentive aimed at winning projects that might otherwise go to rival studios.”

This would be a departure for the currently-leading streamer:

“The bonuses are different than Hollywood’s traditional “back-end” arrangements, where filmmakers get a percentage of box-office money. Since Netflix’s films don’t get released widely at theaters — if they hit the big screen at all — there’s no hope for a big payoff there…. Netflix has never offered back-end deals. It covers the full cost of production and pays producers a premium on top of that, granting them a profit before the project is even released. These deals are a safer bet because the producer is guaranteed to make a significant amount of money, but they also cap the potential profit.”

For a great primer on the various business models, see Joe Flint‘s article The War for Talent in the Age of Netflix in the Wall Street Journal:

“For decades, the formula for producers to make big money in TV was for a show to stay on the air long enough to have 100 episodes or more — enough to sell reruns to other TV networks. The bulk of the profits for production studios and show creators have come from those “syndication” deals, not the initial fees to produce and air the show. The creators of “Seinfeld,” “Friends” and “The Simpsons” made hundreds of millions of dollars this way, as stakeholders who were entitled to a cut of the profits…. Netflix did away with that model when it started wooing superstar producers to make content exclusively for the service, including “Grey’s Anatomy” creator Shonda Rhimes and “Glee” producer Ryan Murphy. Netflix paid nine-figure upfront fees to Ms. Rhimes and Mr. Murphy. Netflix doesn’t sell reruns of its shows to other platforms, so there weren’t any syndication profits to be had for the producers, and the producers wanted a bigger check to work for Netflix.”

With the streaming marketplace to get much busier in November, it seems as if Netflix has been forced to consider sweetening its deals with filmmakers.

My take: with number of streaming services to double very soon, feature and episodic producers have more choice of outlets than ever before. How will the various streamers differentiate themselves, thereby attracting different audiences? How much overlap will the market bear, meaning how many services will folks pay for?