Catching Up: Peter Broderick Video, DVD Data, 'Inbound Marketing' book, SMPTE Talk

- Filmmaker Magazine this week published an interview I conducted with Peter Broderick at Sundance this year, talking about new approaches to indie film distribution. (You can tell I have the usual Park-City-in-January cold.) I'm planning to post the full 30-minute interview here soon. This video is part of a series I'm doing on the future of entertainment, underwritten by the nice folks at Akamai. The idea was to take some of the topics we discussed at The Conversation last fall in Berkeley and make them more accessible to people anywhere in the world. I invite you to embed the video wherever you like, link to it, or comment on it.

The Future of Indie Film Distribution: Peter Broderick from Scott Kirsner on Vimeo.

This video, of course, is also a nice little appetizer for the Distribution U. workshop Peter and I are doing next Saturday, November 7th, at USC.

- This NY Times piece from Monday is really worth a read: "Studios' Quest for Life After DVDs." Here's just one juicy passage from Brooks Barnes' story:

In the first six months of 2009, revenue from disc sales declined 13.5 percent, to $5.4 billion, according to Mr. Morris’s evaluation of Digital Entertainment Group data. A $200 million uptick in Blu-ray sales partly offset a $1 billion decline in DVD sales. Over all, home video revenue declined just 4 percent, helped by a spike in rental revenue.

That bleak picture has studios now openly discussing what they have known privately for a long time: DVDs will continue to play a role, but it may be a supporting one to digital.

“DVD is going to remain very viable, but you’ve also got a strong base of interest in digital consumption,” Mr. Chapek of Disney said. “I see a peaceful coexistence.”

- The best book I've read about marketing and social media in a long while was just published this month. It's called Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs. This is the kind of book I guarantee you'll find useful if you work in marketing or are trying to sell DVDs or downloads of a film (or other creative work.) It was written by two of the founders of a marketing firm in Boston called HubSpot, and the company also runs this weekly video podcast about Internet marketing, which you can subscribe to (for free) in iTunes. (That, by the way, was not a paid promotion...just an honest endorsement of something worthwhile!)

- Variety was kind enough to run some coverage of my keynote talk last Wednesday for the annual SMPTE Tech Conference in Hollywood. (This was a version of my talk about Inventing the Movies, with lots of movie clips. It was fun to have a few digital cinema pioneers in the audience whom I'd interviewed for the book back in 2006 and 2007.)