Why asking how much a movie cost to make is the wrong question. http://bit.ly/9xchrE Article also talks of $800 movie shot on Pentax DSLR.

There’s no positive benefit to spending more on a film than is going to be seen on the screen and yet the majors all talk about “$200 million movies”.

A few years back at a Cato Institute conference on copyright, a guy from NBC Universal challenged me with the question of “how will we make $200 million movies?” if content is freely shared. As I noted at the time, that’s really the wrong question. No one watching a movie cares about how much the moviecosts. They just want to see a good movie. The question for a good filmmaker or producer or a studio should be “how do I make the best movie I can that will still be profitable?” Starting out with a “cost” means that you don’t focus on ways to save money or contain costs. You focus on ways to spend up to those costs. That’s backwards, and it’s how you fail as a business.

The article goes on to talk about a new short film from Futuristic Films, which notes in the opening that the whole damn thing was shot with a Pentax K-7 DSLR, which you can find these days for around $800 or so!

Big difference from the $200 million movie, but trying to compare them is probably ridiculous.

5 Questions With…Clicker CEO Jim Lanzone http://bit.ly/bk79Db

Jim Lanzone, who, prior to starting “internet television guide” Clicker.com, was CEO of Ask.com and Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Redpoint Ventures. Below, he submits the phrase “nanocasting” for approval, sings the praises of the Double Rainbow and explains why using Clicker.com is better than having a brain hemorrhage.

Web video company My Damn Channel zeroes in on branded entertainment  and celebrity content http://bit.ly/aNKCLK This is the third company in the “mini-web-studio” category to get funding recently.

There’s a lot out there beyond that original article – someone has a good publicist or is good at getting out to the media. The New York Times has After Drought, Hope for Shows Made for Web; there’s the Venture Beat article mentioned above and New TeeVee focus on the fund raising and expanding staff to “10 people”.

All three articles are worth the read. While there’s some duplication in content they give varying amounts of context and mentions of other similar mini-web-studios like Revision3, BlipTV and more, and how their shows “pay the bills”.