Adult actress Savannah Stern eats crow, according to L.A. Times

The L.A. Times’ expose (sorry) of porn’s woes capsulizes the dilemma the Internet poses for all content: consumers are willing to settle for less-than-stellar products on the Internet rather than shell out money for higher production values in DVDs, CDs, etc.  The availability of free porn on sites like YouPorn, PornHub and RedTube is apparently eating deeply into the porn industry’s profits, providing a glimpse of the mainstream DVD market’s future. “Today, instead of leading the way up (in technology adoption), porn appears to be leading the way down,” the L.A. Times’ Ben Fritz writes.

The irony, of course, is that the L.A. Times is itself getting killed by free content on the Internet. Why subscribe when you can get everything you want from the paper for free on the Internet? And no one can pretend that all those banner ads on the Internet pay more than a fraction of what the paper’s display ads pay.

But porn may still have some upside lessons for media companies. Free porn video sites get huge traffic, and the marketing manager for PornoTube told the L.A. Times the site’s real value was in driving customers to paid video-on-demand. No reason why the L.A. Times can’t put up a story on porn, but charge for access to videos of their reporters interviewing porn stars, research reports on the DVD business or discounted movie tickets.  See, you can still learn something from porn.

Posted under Michael's Blog, Video

The conventional wisdom that Hollywood never suffers in a recession may prove false this time.

Even if consumers flock to movie theaters, production appears likely to take a hit – especially for independents. Like elsewhere in the financial world, banks and other traditional funders of movie and TV production are cutting back on their investments until they see how the economy fares.

“Production will fall significantly,” said D. Jeffrey Andrick, Managing Director of Continental Entertainment Capital, which arranged co-financing in September for independent film

Indie "Give 'Em Hell Malone" was lucky it got funded in September, not October

starring Thomas Jane and Ving Rhimes. “Deals that looked like they might come together a certain way, that relied on a certain equity source, have been paralyzed.”

Hedge funds, a popular source of film financing recently,  are also struggling; and foreign distributors – which often help finance films by pre-committing to it – are also sitting on the sidelines, Andrick said.

Big studios aren’t likely to dramatically cut films they’ve already committed to. But look for a lot more caution if the recession deepens. And indie filmmakers, whose financing prospects are shaky at the best of times, are going to have more trouble getting films made.

So even if more consumers chill at the movies, they’ll likely have a lot less product to choose from.

Posted under Michael's Blog

It’s a measure of how Real Networks’ fortunes have changed in Hollywood that it would be willing to introduce a product today almost certain to attract the legal wrath of the biggest studios.

RealDVD, a $30 software program, allows users to download an exact copy of a DVD directly to their hard drives. While the company insists its program is completely legal, the jury is literally still out on whether copying DVDs is legal. The studios literally sued  321 Studios, which marketed its own DVD-copying software, out of existence; and the DVD Copy Control Association is appealing a ruling in favor of Kaleidescape, a Silicon Valley startup that enables servers to rip and stream DVDs.

Real Networks is evidently calculating that its Rhapsody music service, which depends upon record companies to sell their copyrighted material, won’t be hurt by hot-headed movie studios concerned about piracy of their copyrighted material. Nothing like irony in Hollywood.

Posted under Michael's Blog

Movie download services have been about to take off for nearly 20 years.

In the mid-1990s, Time Warner spent $10,000 a customer in Florida to show downloading movies over cable lines was technologically feasible. In 2008, movie downloads are still mired in the "proof-of-concept" stage.

Apple’s announced plans today for an online movie rental service could be the spark that sets movie downloads alight in consumers’ minds.

Not because Apple is offering a fundamentally new twist on VOD. But because it’s Apple.

The movie download market today is remarkably similar to where online music was before Apple launched its first iPod. Back then, MP3 players were already on the market. But they were largely niche products and most music that played on them was pirated. Apple created the first cool digital music player.

Steve Jobs was also the first technology executive with the heft in Hollywood to actually cut deals with studio executives to allow enough legal content online to create a marketplace — and demonstrate that making money from digital music was at least possible.

In 2008, most consumers still aren’t all that interested in cable companies’ movie download offerings — largely because the studios are so worried about piracy and cannibalizing their existing TV syndication and DVD businesses that they haven’t supplied enough product to interest subscribers.

Movie downloads from services like Netflix and CinemaNow are still largely a curiosity for hobbyists and people who don’t know how to download the pirated stuff. 

Until now, Apple hasn’t fared  that much better. It’s sold only about seven million movies, compared to about four billion songs and 125 million TV shows.

Once again, Jobs has persuaded the studios to make vastly greater stores of content available to consumers in exchange for the tacit promise that he can create enough of a market to offset the inevitable increase in piracy that will occur when millions of new consumers realize how easy it is to download and share movies on their computers, iPods and TV sets. (Just look at the movie piracy rate in Korea, which has the world’s most ubiquitous broadband).

Apple’s movie rental service could be exactly the spark Hollywood needs to jumpstart its online cinema business. Or the spark could become a conflagration that devours industry profits. Or it could flop once again, just as so many for-profit video-on-demand ventures have since Time Warner first dipped its toes in Orlando.

The only certainty is the movie downloads — legal or not — are here to stay.

See Also

• Apple Unveils Online Movie Rentals, Ultra-Thin Laptop Computer
• Time Warner’s ‘Time Machine’ for Future Video

Posted under Uncategorized

You’ll recall Tom Cruise grabbing air and moving images around on a giant screen in DreamWorks SKG’s "Minority Report".

Now, Jefferson Han hopes to sell DreamWorks and other Hollywood studios on the real McCoy: a 16-foot long giant touch-screen that lets a group of people similtaneously manipulate images and videos, perform searches, draw and cut with their fingers. Han says he’s held talks with DreamWorks, among others, about the technology, which sells for $100,000 to $200,000 and runs off a single Dell computer.

"They’re interested in doing storyboarding", says Han, who’s marketing the system through Perceptive Pixel, a company he started last year.

Storyboarding is the process of drawing freeze-frames of movies in production. Digital storyboarding — using a computer to replace paper and pencil — is still in its infancy. Steven Spielberg’s "Minority Report" was one of the first films to employ it.

Han, who developed the multitouch system at NYU, says he’s sold a few of the systems for military applications.

I couldn’t immediately reach a DreamWorks spokesperson.

See Also

• Minority Report
• Perceptive Pixel

Posted under Uncategorized

Disney and Highbeam launch good new content, but who will visit it?

Remember, “build it and they will come?” I have to wonder if we are seeing a resurgence of that discredited approach to dotcom media. Two new and very good digital content features launched this week, but how will people find them? Disney-ABC’s “At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper” site released hundreds of hours and 5,000 clips of archival reviews from Ebert, Roeper, and the late Gene Siskel that any media fan will love. Watching Roger and Martin Scorcese compare notes on air over best films of the 90s is delicious. The new archive is well-indexed, and it is a perfect adjunct to our DVD culture, where the entire library of film is open for our immediate review. But you have to remember to go to the “At the Movies” site to get this trove of goodness. The Disney press release made no mention of how this excellent material would be distributed where people most need it, when they hunt for video rentals. I checked Disney’s other big film property, Movies.com, for some sign of linkage, but I came up empty. We are still at that nascent stage of online video where putting footage online seems to be enough. What we need next is video syndication strategies that plant this kind of great, branded information more closely to the thoroughfares of task-driven traffic.

Likewise, the new and very compelling Newser.com is a fascinating project. It presents aggregated news in a grid of nine main stories, which pop up synopses and images with a mouse-over. It is well-written (by humans), offers about half a dozen main sections to explore, and the option to expand the grid to 24 items. This is like Google News with a good editor and a better interface, and it should be seen. Designed by Michael Wolff (yes, of Vanity Fair and Burnrate fame) and launched by Highbeam Research, I can’t see how this good idea gets traction without a clearer distribution plan than I see here. Which raises an interesting problem. When a new site brings novel and interesting content online, like the new The Politico site, it gets re-distributed by blogs and others. But how do you re-distribute a re-distributor like this news aggregator? Unless it strikes a deal to become an adjunct to a major portal or existing news source, I worry that no one will see a very good content idea.

It is not just a good-content game. It is also a real-estate game. Location, location, location.

Posted under Michael's Blog