Category: General

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Item of Interest

Telestream To Acquire Anystream

Telestream To Acquire Anystream Business From Grab Networks http://bit.ly/bIxyVa

Grab Networks sells an asset no longer core to its business, an Telestream acquires the Agility and Velocity products, which are enterprise class transcoding and media management platforms.

Streaming Media’s Dan Rayburn comments:

This is a perfect fit for Telestream’s core business and allows them to continue their push into the enterprise vertical. While some might think that Telestream and Anystream already compete, there is not much overlap between the two and Anystream’s product line gives Telestream new products to add to their portfolio.

Categories
Item of Interest The Business of Production

Why asking how much a movie costs is the wrong question.

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.

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Distribution Item of Interest

5 Questions With…Clicker CEO Jim Lanzone

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.

Categories
Item of Interest Monetizing The Business of Production

Web video company My Damn Channel gets $4.4m funding.

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”.

Categories
Item of Interest Monetizing The Business of Production

Tesco goes to Trolleywood

Tesco goes to Trolleywood http://bit.ly/c068cD

One step beyond branded media – custom movies! Content for one store only – harkens back to the early days of cinema where the studios also owned the cinemas. Kraft and P&G have jumped into the music business, so it’s only logical that Tesco will jump into the movie business. (Really, that’s logical?)

The supermarket giant that inhabits virtually every corner of our existence has this year moved into film-making with a straight-to-DVD movie or, as its makers prefer, a “DVD Premiere”. This autumn, Paris Connections will go on sale exclusively in Tesco stores. If successful, it could revolutionise the movie business, removing distributors and agents in one swipe and transforming how many films are made and funded.

Paris Connections is the first in a series of Collins adaptations, loosely based on her novel LA Connections, but transposed to Paris Fashion week. Today, in the Hotel Lutetia, the director Harley Cokeliss is shooting a catwalk scene. Many of the extras are authentic fashionistas: a man with wet-look leather trousers, plenty of big glasses and vertiginous heels. The effect is tarnished somewhat when I am hurriedly shepherded among them to make up the numbers.

Right now it’s just one movie, but it does indicate that there is a way around the stranglehold on production by the MPAA studios. Unlike those studios, Tesco didn’t intervene to micromanage the movie asking just “that it not be porn” and be PG15.

No matter how bad the movie, actors, directors, producers and the whole product crew got paid!

Categories
Item of Interest

Don’t build from scratch – use a HTML5 Boilerplate

Don’t Build from Scratch. You Now Have an HTML5 Boilerplate to Work With http://bit.ly/cRheud

It’s essentially a good starting template of html and css and a folder structure that works. But baked into it is years of best practices from front-end development professionals. Take a peek through the source to get a feel of what’s inside. And if you think there’s too much? Delete key that badboy.

Read the list of features you get with this boilerplate. Makes it much easier to adopt HTML5 having the sorts of frameworks and support we have with older technologies.

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Item of Interest

Harware accelerated H.264 OS X Flash Player

Harware accelerated H.264 OS X Flash now available http://bit.ly/9N0KhE

Maybe now Flash will stop being a resource hog on OS X but, since it was a resource hog not playing video before, I’m dubious.

Categories
Item of Interest Monetizing The Business of Production

Anyone But Me Crowdsources $17K for Season 3.

Anyone But Me Crowdsources $17K For Season 3 http://bit.ly/a54rQr

One way to fund production – particularly web production – is to ask the fans to fund it. Anyone but Me (a show I haven’t seen but has completed two seasons) had the first two seasons funded by a “private investor”.

And like good filmmakers these days, there are graduated responses:

Ward and Miller have set a series of milestones for fundraising: When they reach the $30,000 mark, a special video of series stars Rachael Hip-Flores and Alexis Slade singing will be released. And at $55,000, Miller and Ward have committed to doing at least five new episodes of the show. “We wouldn’t just leave things where we left them [in the season two finale],” Miller said.

Categories
Business & Marketing Item of Interest

Hurt Locker: Why no Takedown notices?

Hurt Locker Still Shared Widely Online; Wonder Why Producers Aren’t Issuing Takedowns? http://bit.ly/aKUIzZ

In what is clearly a new business model for filmmakers, the producers of Hurt Locker look set to make more money from “settlements” than it did from the box office.

If the above scenario becomes reality, The Hurt Locker would make $25 million in settlements alone in the coming months. This number could of course go much higher, as thousands of people are still downloading the movie every day.

With this $25 million the film makers would have collected more money from BitTorrent users than they did from U.S. movie theater visitors. Despite the recognition from Academy members and the huge success among downloaders, the U.S box office revenue has been relatively low at $16.4 million.

http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-will-earn-hurt-locker-more-than-the-box-office-100530/

No wonder they haven’t filed DMCA take-down notices. It’s not in their best interested to prevent unauthorized copying (something that has never been show to harm a film’s revenue) because they stand to make more money from suing (on flimsy evidence that probably wont’ stand up in court if any of these get there, unlike Tennenbaum et al, which were Kaza or eDonkey based) than from distributing the film in a traditional manner.

Congratulations for finding a way to make unauthorized distribution pay. And turn fans against you.

Categories
Item of Interest

Netflix signs $1B deal with Epix for VOD movies

Netflix signs $1B deal with Epix for VOD movies http://bit.ly/cL4vof

Netflix is on something of a roll; growing strongly and proving that streaming on demand is a viable distribution method, that people are willing to pay for, but it’s hard to get too excited about the Epix deal. First the good news:

Netflix has signed a five-year-deal with pay-TV channel Epix that will give Netflix exclusive online streaming rights to new releases from Paramount Pictures, Lionsgate and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 90 days after their premium-pay TV and on-demand debuts.

The deal, estimated to be worth about $1 billion to Epix over five years in licensing fees, kicks off next month.

But then SteramingMedia.com’s Dan Rayburn in his personal blog points out:

Neither company is giving out any details on when the content will be available on Netflix but you can take a look at the current list of 306 movies that EPIX has available by going to www.epixhd.com/all-movies. While rumors of the licensing deal are saying that Netflix will pay EPIX $1B over five years, I find that number hard to believe. Even if Netflix got access to all of EPIX’s current inventory, they would be paying an average of $200M a year for less than 300 movies. That’s an average of $650,000 per movie. That can’t be right.

That sure is expensive programming, but then we already knew that programming costs where the most expensive part of Netflix’s streaming service.