Category Archives: The Mediascape

Half of Canadians have 5 or more connected devices: CIRA

Posted on by
Reply

CIRA, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, has just released Canada’s Internet Factbook 2018.

Blue vivid image of globe and space tin can

With over 2.8 million registered domains, CIRA manages the names of websites ending in .ca . As such, it has its (Canadian) finger on the pulse of the Internet. Some of the insights are very telling:

  • Nearly 90% of Canadians use the internet.
  • 86% of Canadians have a broadband internet connection at home.
  • 72% of Canadians use a mobile device to access the internet.
  • 52% of Canadian households have five or more internet-connected devices.
  • 66% of Canadians spend at least 1 hour online per day watching TV/movies/video.
  • 77% of Canadians use Facebook.
  • 53% of Canadians subscribe to Netflix.
  • 14% of Canadians often/always seek out Canadian content.
  • 79% of Canadians want Canadian internet service providers/online service companies to invest in building up internet infrastructure inside Canada.

See the infographic.

My take: Thank goodness for the Domain Name System because before 1985 servers only had IP addresses; it would be four years before Tim Berners-Lee would create the World Wide Web.

Tips for Indie Film Posters

Posted on by
Reply

John Godfrey, writing on Film Independent, says that indie film posters need to work harder.

You’re going up against every other film, most with budgets many times larger than yours. The key, John says, is your concept:

“The key to a successful poster is the concept behind it…. When you bring a designer on board, give them as much to work with as possible, every available image as well as letting them watch a screener of the film. No amount of synopsis or breakdowns can help a designer understand a film better than watching that film. Film is a visual medium — and so are movie posters. There are many parallels between the two, and there are sometimes iconic graphic devices used within a film that as a filmmaker you might not pick up on, but that a designer’s eye will be drawn instantly to as a subject to expand upon.”

John also reminds you that your poster needs to work in many formats:

“Your traditional 27×40” movie poster is excellent for film festivals and your IMDb page, and is the perfect way to commemorate the countless hours poured into production, with a framed print on your wall. However, that’s only a small portion of the usages your poster will be needed for. Once streaming, your poster will have to be in a horizontal format on many services. A horizontal format would also be useful right off the bat as the poster frame of your trailer on Vimeo and YouTube. A square format is very useful for social media.”

For some recent examples of great concepts, Ethan Anderton posting on /film lists his favourite film posters from 2018.

My take: I’ve mentioned before that I sometimes start with a logo that expresses a project’s identity even before writing the script that gives it a voice. It’s also worthwhile exploring the graphic design requirements of some of the streaming services so you know what they don’t allow (things like titles, laurels, URLs, etc.) so you can make sure to get all your visuals during production. For a compilation of movie poster themes, there’s none better than Christophe Courtois.

Coming soon: fix it in Post with text editing

Posted on by
Reply

Scientists working at Stanford University, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Princeton University and Adobe Research have developed a technique that synthesizes new video frames from an edited interview transcript.

In other words, soon we’ll be able to alter speech in video clips simply by typing in new words:

“Our method automatically annotates an input talking-head video with phonemes, visemes, 3D face pose and geometry, reflectance, expression and scene illumination per frame. To edit a video, the user has to only edit the transcript, and an optimization strategy then chooses segments of the input corpus as base material. The annotated parameters corresponding to the selected segments are seamlessly stitched together and used to produce an intermediate video representation in which the lower half of the face is rendered with a parametric face model. Finally, a recurrent video generation network transforms this representation to a photorealistic video that matches the edited transcript.”

Why do this?

“Our main application is text-based editing of talking-head video. We support moving and deleting phrases, and the more challenging task of adding new unspoken words. Our approach produces photo-realistic results with good audio to video alignment and a photo-realistic mouth interior including highly detailed teeth.”

Read the full research paper.

My take: Yes, this could be handy in the editing suite. But the potential for abuse is very concerning. The ease of creating Deep Fakes by simply typing new words means that we would never be able to trust any video again. No longer will a picture be worth a thousand words; rather, one word will be worth a thousand pixels.

Amazon Prime Video jettisons some Indies

Posted on by
Reply

Natalie Jarvey notes in the Hollywood Reporter that Indie Filmmakers Puzzled As Amazon Prime Drops Some Poorly Viewed Projects.

“Several emerging filmmakers who relied on Amazon Prime to distribute their work report that their movies have disappeared from the platform without warning. They say they were given no warning about the removal and that Amazon informed them those titles will not be accepted for resubmission, essentially killing any chance that audiences will discover them. Their predicament exemplifies the risk of becoming too reliant on a powerful platform whose benevolence can be fleeting.”

To recap, Amazon Prime is the world’s second largest SVOD streaming service, after leader Netflix.

What’s the little-known backdoor to their viewers? Amazon Prime Direct.

“Amazon has touted the way its video platform supports indie creators, previously reporting that, in its first year, Prime Video Direct paid tens of millions to rights holders…. Being cut off from Amazon Prime… has meant a loss of income for… filmmakers, though it’s pennies compared with even a modest VOD release. Prime Video Direct shares between 4 cents and 10 cents for every hour a title is streamed in the U.S.”

The article goes on to quote Linda Nelson, co-founder of the distributor Indie Rights:

“I would never recommend putting all your eggs in one basket. Indie filmmakers need to take this advice to heart and explore as many opportunities as they can to make sure their films get seen.”

My take: I agree; exclusivity should come at a premium. However, the reality is that it’s very difficult to make your own market. For instance, you could sell your film from your own website but that just begs the question, “How will your viewers find your website?” The unblemished truth is that the last fifteen years have seen all manner of new markets appear, with no clear replacement for the orderly windows and territories model of the last millennium. Just as we’ve witnessed an explosion of digital content, marketing options have multiplied likewise. Luckily, the future has yet to be written; nimble filmmakers can still control their destiny (at the cost of time and effort.)

Samsung’s new AI can bring photos to life

Posted on by
Reply

Ivan Mehta reports in The Next Web that Samsung’s new AI can create talking avatars from a single photo.

Egor Zakharov, Aliaksandra Shysheya, Egor Burkov and Victor Lempitsky of the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology and the Samsung AI Center, both in Moscow, Russia, envisioned a system that…

“…performs lengthy meta-learning on a large dataset of videos, and after that is able to frame few- and one-shot learning of neural talking head models of previously unseen people as adversarial training problems with high capacity generators and discriminators. Crucially, the system is able to initialize the parameters of both the generator and the discriminator in a person-specific way, so that training can be based on just a few images and done quickly, despite the need to tune tens of millions of parameters.”

But why did the researchers set out to do this?

They wanted to make better avatars for Augmented and Virtual Reality:

“We believe that telepresence technologies in AR, VR and other media are to transform the world in the not-so-distant future. Shifting a part of human life-like communication to the virtual and augmented worlds will have several positive effects. It will lead to a reduction in long-distance travel and short-distance commute. It will democratize education, and improve the quality of life for people with disabilities. It will distribute jobs more fairly and uniformly around the World. It will better connect relatives and friends separated by distance. To achieve all these effects, we need to make human communication in AR and VR as realistic and compelling as possible, and the creation of photorealistic avatars is one (small) step towards this future. In other words, in future telepresence systems, people will need to be represented by the realistic semblances of themselves, and creating such avatars should be easy for the users. This application and scientific curiosity is what drives the research in our group.”

Read their research paper.

My take: surely this only means more Deepfakes? The one aspect of this that I think is fascinating is the potential to bring old paintings and photographs to life. I think this would be a highly creative application of the technology. With which famous portrait would you like to interact?

IFC Films Unlimited SVOD to launch on Amazon Prime Video Channels

Posted on by
Reply

Brent Lang reports for Variety that IFC will launch its SVOD service IFC Films Unlimited on Amazon Prime Video Channels.

“In an interview, IFC Films co-president Lisa Schwartz said that the company has quietly been unwinding many of its licensing deals in recent years with an eye towards starting its own service. It will still maintain its distribution pacts with Showtime and Hulu, which have some of IFC’s films in first pay television window. The goal is to start releasing movies on IFC Films Unlimited in the second pay television window. “This is part of a deliberate strategy,” said Schwartz. “We watched the landscape shifting and realized that we’ve got such a terrific large library that we might be better served by taking some rights back and releasing those films under our own roof.” Although IFC’s subscription service is launching on Amazon, the company hopes to add other platforms. “We’re going to continually evaluate as we grow our subscriber base,” said Schwartz. “But our goal is to make this a destination where you can find great films.””

The service will cost $5.99 USD per month after a 7-day trial and requires Amazon Prime Video Channels.

What’s that? From Amazon:

“Channel subscriptions from Prime Video are paid monthly subscriptions to third-party premium networks and other streaming entertainment channels. Eligible Prime members have the option to purchase these subscriptions directly through Prime Video. All of the movies and TV programming included with the subscription are then available to watch on demand, on all compatible Prime Video devices — including TVs, Blu-ray players, Amazon Fire TV, Fire TV Stick, Fire tablets, computers, and Android and iOS mobile devices.”

In other words, like Roku.

But wait, there’s more!

Jared Newman of TechHive reports that Apple TV has just launched “channels” too!

“With Apple TV Channels, you can sign up for services like HBO and Showtime directly through the TV app on iPhones, iPads, and Apple TVs. You don’t have to download separate apps to start using those services, and you can manage all their subscriptions through iTunes billing. Apple TV Channels also supports offline viewing on iOS, so you can download Game of Thrones episodes before your next flight.”

See his chart showing which platforms play which Premium Channel Services:

Macworld has a chart comparing the cost of AppleTV’s premium channels with the native apps, monthly and annually.

My take: this was bound to happen. As digital content continues to proliferate in apps from individual curators, forces of consolidation are appearing to counter the splintering of the viewing environment. It’s a battle between two or three big players to recreate your TV set of old within their app/device. I predict Netflix will go the Premium Channel Service route too.

Netflix fails to market $700M blockbuster

Posted on by
Reply

Brandon Katz wonders in Observer What the Heck Is ‘The Wandering Earth,’ and Why Didn’t Netflix Tell Us About It?

The sci-fi blockbuster is only the third top film of 2019, earning $700,000,000 worldwide, albeit 99% of that in China.

The film was released for worldwide streaming by Netflix on April 30, 2019.

Here’s their short description:

“A looming collision with Jupiter threatens Earth as humans search for a new star. The planet’s fate now lies in the hands of a few unexpected heroes.”

And their long description:

“The Wandering Earth tells the story of a distant future in which the sun is about to expand into a red giant and devour the Earth, prompting mankind to make an audacious attempt to save planet. The multi-generational heroes build ten-thousand stellar engines in an effort to propel Planet Earth out the solar system, in the hope of finding a new celestial home. During the 2,500 year-long journey, a group of daring heroes emerge to defend human civilization from unexpected dangers and new enemies, and to ensure the survival of humanity in this age of the wandering Earth.”

My take: I watched this and saw the references to 2001 and Armageddon. I liked the sentimental payoff of the father-son dynamic but thought the CGI looked more like some video games than cinematic. More concerning is the way Netflix just buried this in their catalogue. Is that all producers of material that isn’t a Netflix Original can expect?

Kessler drops Stranger Things lawsuit

Posted on by
Reply

Just days before the trial, Charlie Kessler has dropped his suit against Matt and Ross Duffer claiming they got the idea for Stranger Things from him.

Charlie says:

“After hearing the deposition testimony this week of the legal expert I hired, it is now apparent to me that, whatever I may have believed in the past, my work had nothing to do with the creation of Stranger Things. Documents from 2010 and 2013 prove that the Duffers independently created their show. As a result, I have withdrawn my claim and I will be making no further comment on this matter.”

According to Variety, he met the Duffer Brothers at a reception for a screening of “Honeymoon” at the Tribeca Film Festival:

“In Kessler’s account of the 2014 cocktail reception, Matt Duffer said, “We should work together. What are you working on?” He said he told the brothers a short film he had made about a mysterious disappearance in Montauk, and said he was seeking to produce a feature.”

The Duffers always maintained they never met Charlie and developed their idea from urban legends about the Montauk Project.

My take: This reminds me of advice someone gave me to never talk about your ideas. You see, ideas can’t be copyrighted; only the expression of ideas can be copyrighted. In Canada, creating a written work automatically grants copyright to the author. So, maybe don’t be blabbing on about your idea until you have a first draft.

 

Netflix’s international competitors

Posted on by
Reply

Scott Roxborough reports in The Hollywood Reporter on Netflix’s international competition.

He says:

“Since Netflix took its streaming video service truly global in 2016, the company has pretty much had the market to itself. But things are about to get very crowded, very fast. While Disney and Apple roll out their own services — with WarnerMedia and NBCUniversal hot on their heels — scores of local players, in Spain and Singapore, Britain and Berlin, are pushing into the SVOD market, looking to occupy at least a portion of Netflix-controlled territory.”

Here’s a list of some of the countries and the contenders:

  1. Britain: BritBox
  2. France: Canal+Series
  3. France: Salto
  4. Germany: TV Now
  5. Germany: ProSiebenSat.1
  6. Spain: Rakuten TV
  7. Spain: Moviestar
  8. Scandinavia: Viaplay
  9. India: Hotstar
  10. Malaysia: iFlix
  11. Indonesia: Hooq
  12. China: iQiyi
  13. China: Tencent
  14. China: Youku

My take: Everyone has woken up and realized there’s a battle for the eyeballs to be won — or lost. As TV continues to decline and mobile continues to rise, old media needs to reinvent itself to take on Netflix, which is itself in its second incarnation. The two advantages they have are their localness and their non-Americanism. However, I think there are big improvements waiting to be made in how viewers discover content. Two ideas: the SJ (Streaming Jockey) who is the next version of the VJ (who was the next version of the DJ) and Viewing Clubs that allow you to band to together with like-minded folks to share recommendations and even comment on things you’re all watching at the same time (I think there’s something like this in Asia already.) This would be one strategy for all the smaller platforms to band together and collectively build their audiences.

Academy leaves Rule Two alone

Posted on by
Reply

Brian Welk reports in The Wrap that “the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has opted against changes to Oscars eligibility that could have shut Netflix productions out of future ceremonies“.

The Academy’s Board of Governors upheld Rule Two, which states that a film must screen in a Los Angeles County commercial theatre for a minimum of seven days, with at least three screenings per day, in order to be eligible for Academy Awards.

They rebuked a proposed rule change by Steven Spielberg that would have seen streamed features restricted to television awards.

The 92nd Oscars will be handed out on February 9, 2020.

My take: when you realize the Academy Awards are a marketing vehicle for the film industry, this spat starts to make some sense. It illustrates the rift between the old guard and the technological innovators. I wonder how Spielberg will feel when Apple+ streams his projects.