Audio: Sunday's Panel on 'Where Film & Internet Collide' at the Apple Store SoHo

There was a really great crowd at the Apple Store SoHo yesterday for the panel that IndieGoGo organized about how the Internet is changing production, promotion, and distribution.

A bunch of folks had Flip cams (and other cameras) in the audience, so if you recorded video of some of the panel, do post a link to it in the comments here.

I've got some rough audio (listenable, but recorded on my iPhone) of the entire panel, which runs 90 minutes. Slava Rubin of IndieGoGo talks first, then me, then Gary Hustwit, Noah Harlan, and Chris Roberts (just to give you a feel for people's voices.) Gary makes docs... Noah does narrative and transmedia stuff... Chris mostly narrative.

You can read some tweets from the panel here. Some interesting tidbits: we talked about how to promote your film on Twitter, various funding and business models for film and Web video series, and how much life the DVD still has in it (doc-maker Gary Hustwit predicted that this is the last year he'll make DVDs for his films, and speculated about a really nicely-designed USB drive that would contain one of his films.) We also bashed iTunes a bit for being so impenetrable to indie film and video folks who'd like to sell their work there.

My favorite tweet about the panel: "'Where Film & Internet Collide' panel is the MOST informative event at NYC#internetweek hands down..." I didn't attend other events at Internet Week, but I'm sure that person is right.

Here's the MP3 file, or just click play below.

How Your Film is Like the Palm Pre, But Not Like the iPhone

This story in today's NY Times about movie marketing got me thinking... in particular, there's one great quote at the end that I'll share in a second.

Most people making a movie imagine that they're like Steve Jobs and the iPhone. When they're done, they're going to exit the editing suite, unveil their wonderful film, and have the world suddenly care about it: film festivals will want to be the first to premiere it, theaters will be falling all over themselves to show it, and eventually, cable networks will want the rights to play it and consumers will be lining up to buy the DVD.

Isn't that how things always work for Steve Jobs and Apple? The merest hint that they're going to release a new product brings the entire media world scurrying to the company's doorstep.

But it just doesn't work that way for most filmmakers.

Instead, you ought to look at what Palm is doing with its new smartphone, the Pre (it'll go on sale next month.)

Palm started building up anticipation for the phone in January, with some very limited demos at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that led to glowing reviews. It has been building up anticipation: software developers say it's easy to create apps for the Pre, and tech publications have been evaluating its features and wondering how it will compare to the iPhone. Essentially, this is a product that has had six months of steady build up in advance of its release -- and a lot of marketing work on Palm's part.

That's the kind of work many indie filmmakers (and some studios, too) fail to do for a new movie. People ought to know it's coming, have a sense for what it's about, be excited about it, and have had opportunities to get involved with it ... all well before the release date.

Here's the quote from today's NY Times story:

“One of the biggest differences between movie marketers and consumer brand marketers involves timing,” said Richard Ingber, president of marketing at Alcon Entertainment. “Films have a very narrow window in which to succeed,” he said. “Products are designed to gain momentum while they live on the shelf.”

That's a great insight. Products like the Pre, even with all their advance hype, don't have a week or two to succeed. They'll sit in phone stores for months or years waiting for consumers to discover them. That's not true of films -- and it's why a pre-release marketing strategy is incredibly important.

Disney Joins Hulu: What Does It Mean?

I don't think the news this week that Disney will contribute content to Hulu is any sort of death knell for iTunes.

Today, Hulu is there for viewing content when you've got a reliable Net connection (at home or in the dorm, for instance). But iTunes is there when you want to download content and watch it later on your laptop or iPod or iPhone -- usually when you're in motion.

One thing that Apple has succeeded at -- wildly -- is getting you to create an account, and hand over your credit card info. That enables you to make impulse buys of movies, apps, music, and TV shows. Even if Hulu had a long term plan to start selling downloads one day, in addition to streaming content with ads, getting viewers to cough up payment info is no small feat.

But Disney's link-up with Hulu signifies that clearly, media companies don't want to hand over control of their customers entirely to Apple.

Here's more analysis of the news, from the Wall Street Journal.

Apple Dropping DRM from Audio, Keeping It On Video

Apple announced today that it plans to ditch digital rights management (DRM) restrictions on the music it sells through the iTunes Store. By the end of March, all 10 million songs on iTunes will be DRM-free. (Here's more from Macworld's Web site.) Cleverly, Apple will also sell you an "upgrade" to your existing music library, peeling off the DRM wrapper, for just 30 cents per song. Music without DRM is much easier to move from one device to another.

But DRM (Apple's is called FairPlay) will still be affixed to all videos sold by iTunes.

How long do you think that will last? Especially given that everyone in Hollywood pays lip service to having learned important lessons from the digital distribution experiences of the music industry?

How to Get Your Indie Film on iTunes (...It's Not Easy)

If you are a filmmaker who wants to self-distribute your work in digital form, there’s probably nothing more frustrating to you than Apple’s indifference to helping you do that.

You may own a Mac. You may use Final Cut Pro for editing. You may carry an iPhone or iPod in your pocket. You may have a MobileMe or .Mac account.

But Apple doesn’t seem to want to help you do business online.

I’ve harped on this issue since 2005, the year that Apple first started selling movies and TV shows on iTunes. Since then, iTunes has become the dominant marketplace for legal movie sales and rentals; in June, Apple said iTunes users were renting or purchasing 50,000 movies a day. (Apple’s rivals, like Amazon Unbox, Movielink, and CinemaNow, have never disclosed how many movies they sell and rent – but my belief is that they’re bit players.)

So how do you get your movie sold on iTunes?

It’s not easy, and Apple doesn’t make things any easier by supplying absolutely no official information to filmmakers who’d like to sell their work on iTunes. (By contrast, here’s CreateSpace’s crystal clear explanation of how to sell your work on Amazon Unbox – the best non-iTunes option that exists today.)

Here’s the scoop: Apple’s strategy thus far has been to only work with aggregators, or services that will collect a number of indie films and then deliver them to iTunes. They don’t want to work directly with filmmakers. But there is no aggregator yet that will take just any finished film and deliver it to iTunes, in the same way CreateSpace (which is owned by Amazon) will take any finished film and sell it on Amazon Unbox.

So, who (aside from indie-majors like Lionsgate and The Weinstein Company) is working with iTunes today? Here's my list. (If you know of others that would be interesting to indie filmmakers, mention them in the comments below.)

- New Video seems to be getting a lot of full-length features onto iTunes, including “King Corn” and “Bomb It,” both recently-released docs, and Henry Jaglom’s “Eating,” from 2004. They also connected Ed Burns with iTunes for his latest film, "Purple Violets." One filmmaker who got his doc onto iTunes via New Video told me the split is 70/30, with 70 percent going to the filmmaker; he’d initially contacted Apple about selling his movie on iTunes (he has been self-distributing DVDs, and selling tens of thousands), and was told to get in touch with New Video. Here’s their contact info. And here's a recent story from Video Business about their relationship with iTunes.

- Shorts International in the UK has distributed a few dozen short films through iTunes, including the recent Oscar-winner “West Bank Story.” Here’s the page that explains how to submit your film.

- The Independent Film Channel (IFC) has a handful of features on iTunes, including “Four Eyed Monsters,” “Does Your Soul Have a Cold?” and “Before the Music Dies.” Oddly, all of them are priced at $3.99 instead of the usual feature film price of $9.99. Contact info here, here, and here.

- Mediastile is the company that offered Sundance short films earlier this year on iTunes. One of these films, “Sick Sex,” is currently #2 on iTunes’ list of best-selling shorts, sandwiched in between two Pixar shorts. Mediastile also handled “The Tribe,” a short film that played at Sundance in 2006, and was briefly an iTunes best-seller last year. I’m not aware of any feature-length films that the company has handled, and no one at the company’s Lake Tahoe headquarters answers the phones, returns messages, or answers e-mail. (I happened to have the e-mail address of their president, and he did e-mai me to insist that the company is still in business, but didn’t return my phone calls.) I wonder what would happen if you wanted to call them to ask about getting paid? Their Web site, for the bold and courageous, is here.

So this is the best that Apple can offer indie filmmakers? Apparently so.

I’ve been told for the past year that other aggregators will soon, any day now, begin working with iTunes. Some of them may be more open to submissions than the four I’ve listed above. (By open, what I’d like to see is an aggregator accepting any finished film where the filmmaker can guarantee that there are no rights issues that will result in lawsuits… or at the very least any finished film that has played at least one festival.)

Here’s who else could soon be delivering films to iTunes:

- The Independent Online Digital Alliance. Already distributes music to iTunes. Their online application is here. IODA chief Kevin Arnold says via e-mail that they are "working on initial deliveries and ingestion now. No solid ETA yet though."

- Film Baby. Film Baby’s sister company, CD Baby, already distributes music to iTunes.

- IndieFlix. Co-founder Scilla Andreen told me this week that she expects a few IndieFlix titles to show up on iTunes in the fourth quarter of 2008, at the earliest.

- The guys at Cinetic Rights Management say they're close to a deal to work directly with iTunes.

Again, Amazon.com's CreateSpace is the best option today for selling your film in digital form, in my opinion. But you'll have to drive customers to your work -- unlike iTunes, where the customers are already buying movies in big numbers.

And if you know of other routes to getting onto iTunes, or have opinions about the ones I've listed, post them here!

Sony Envisions a Whiz-Bangy Digital Download Future

Here's an idea: what if new consumer electronics could connect to an online marketplace where you could purchase content?

That's Sony's new strategy, announced this week. (WSJ coverage / NY Times coverage)

It's a radical idea, connecting these newfangled "devices" to storehouses of digital content. Like, what if you had an online destination called iTunes, and a device called an iPhone, and they'd work together?

Oh, wait, Apple has been pursuing that vision since January 2001.

Seven-and-a-half years seems like a pretty slow pace for a game of catch-up....

(Here are some notes from Stringer's recent appearance at the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital conference.)

Data Point: iTunes Selling or Renting 50,000 Movies a Day

Apple's iTunes Store could sell and rent more than 18 million movies this year, according to this piece from Variety.

From the piece:

"In the first week, they had 20 times the volume of the next biggest customer, and it didn't go down after that," said an exec overseeing digital at a rival major.

Who's number two? That's hard to say, since no one else releases data. Whoever it is, it's clearly a distant number two -- but I'd guess Amazon.com Unbox, or perhaps CinemaNow.

HBO Shows Will Appear on iTunes, Some at a New Price

Apple has been famously inflexible about pricing on iTunes: TV shows are $1.99, songs 99 cents. (NBC flew the coop last year over Apple's unwillingness to alter that policy.)

So now Apple is changing the rules, to be able to add HBO shows to its library (only when they are released on DVD.)

From the Wall Street Journal's coverage:

...It's the first time HBO has agreed to sell downloads of individual episodes of its shows. And Apple, in a departure, has agreed to charge more than its uniform price of $1.99 per television episode. Some of HBO's shows will cost $1.99 per episode while others, including "The Sopranos," "Deadwood" and "Rome," will cost $2.99 per episode.

Variety also has a story. Diane Garrett writes:

Deal reps HBO's first electronic sell-through pact. The feevee channel has been reluctant to cannibalize its subscription fees and DVD sales. HBO did, however, experiment with free iTunes podcasts of "In Treatment" as a way of boosting the aud of the five-day-a-week skein.

It’s no coincidence that “Sex and the City” was one of the first HBO skeins to go on sale at iTunes Tuesday; a feature film followup is due in theaters later this month. Eventually, most of the channel's library is expected to go on sale through the iTunes Store.

Jobs has apparently decided that access to content that will drive hardware sales of iPods, iPhones and Apple TV devices is more important than maintaining rigid pricing. He previously resisted variable pricing on music and TV skeins for the sake of simplicity, although some of the global iTunes Stores do offer variable pricing.

For Thursday: Set-Top Box Reviews, Upconverting DVDs, and Player-Developed Games

- NY Times columnist David Pogue evaluates four leading Internet-connected set-top boxes, and gives the $300 Vudu the highest overall grade. (Others included in his survey include Xbox 360, Apple TV, and TiVo.) Pogue also makes some good points about the limitations imposed on all of the boxes by studios:

...[N]o matter which movie-download service you choose, you’ll find yourself facing the same confusing, ridiculous time limits for viewing. You have to start watching the movie you’ve rented within 30 days, and once you start, you have to finish it within 24 hours.

...What would the studios lose by offering a 27-hour rental period? Or three days, or even a week? Nothing. In fact, they’d attract millions more customers. (At the very least, instead of just deleting itself, the movie should say: “Would you like another 24-hour period for an additional $1?”)

Then there’s the fact that to protect their cash cows, most studios don’t release their movies on the Internet until a month after they’ve been available on DVD.

- NY Times reporter Saul Hansell talks to an electronics retailer who says that until the cost of Blu-ray players drops below $200 or $150, most consumers will still be happy buying standard-def DVD players that upconvert, producing a very nice looking picture from a garden-variety DVD.

- This feels important, somehow: Microsoft allowing players to develop their own videogames and share them with others via Xbox. A vidgame twist on YouTube?

More color on last Tuesday's Apple news

I did some post-MacWorld analysis for Variety, focusing mostly on the addition of movie rentals to iTunes. (Diane Garrett also wrote this piece a few days later.)

The big things that could hamstring Apple's move into rentals: the breadth of its selection, and the fact that rentals won't show up there until about a month after the DVD release. Both those limitations, in my mind, still favor Netflix.

Let me share some interesting studio exec comments that didn't make it into my piece...

- Jim Gianopoulos, chairman of 20th Century Fox, told me that his studio had eventually gotten comfortable with Apple's DRM system, Fairplay: "Nothing's perfect, but they've worked hard. The better the content protection, the easier content flows... and the more comfortable content providers are about handing over their titles." He said that digital revenues simply won't grow in the presence of rampant piracy: "None of this works if there's a parallel flow of freely-available content."

Gianopoulos also said he didn't think that digital rentals from Apple and others would necessarily undermine bricks-and-mortar rental chains, or services like Netflix. "People make choices, and they make choices that are most convenient to them. We're in all of those businesses, and we want to support all of them. It's up to those providers to provide good value."

- Thomas Lesinski, president of Paramount Pictures Digital Entertainment, told me that last week's announcement from iTunes "will be the beginning of a significant digital media business." He added that Apple "learned a lot from the original Apple TV, and changes in the 2.0 version will get a lot of people interested in digital distribution in the home. It's a very easy-to-use product, and they lowered the price."

What's Up Today: More Hybrid Devices, Distributed Video, Apple News

- Comcast is partnering with Panasonic to make a portable DVR and a TV that has a built-in set-top box (negating the term "set-top"), according to the Wall Street Journal. From Dionne Searcey's piece:

...[C]onsumers won't need to lease a separate box or a separate remote control from cable operators. By the time it's on the market later this year, it will be compatible with major cable companies' technology in most markets. Panasonic did not release pricing or other details about the TV.

The portable DVR allows consumers to take their TV recordings with them when they travel, for playback on a plane, in a car or on a TV set away from home. Including 60 hours of recording capacity, it can also play CDs and DVDs, and will be available in early 2009. While Comcast is offering the device to its customers, Panasonic says it can be used on the systems of other cable operators.

- Viacom's MTV Networks subsidiary is following a strategy of making its video available on a wide range of sites, according to Reuters. Sites include Dailymotion, GoFish, and Veoh.

- BusinessWeek looks at the negotiations between Apple and the movie studios over adding more movies, and movie rentals, to iTunes. From Ronald Grover's story:

Getting the studios to give Apple their movies for online rentals has been tricky. [Steve] Jobs wants new movies available for download "day and date" with DVD releases so that iPod users can rent them the same day the DVDs become available at Blockbuster, Wal-Mart, and other rental venues. Studios generally won't make their latest releases available for rent electronically—mostly through video-on-demand services on cable systems—until about 30 days after the DVDs hit store shelves.

Thursday links: Rentals on iTunes? ... Viral video picks ... Predictions

- Reuters and The Wall Street Journal say Apple may bring Fox movies into the iTunes universe -- as rentals only. This is likely something that'd be announced at Macworld next month in San Francisco. From the Journal's story:

Apple has for months been trying to persuade the Hollywood studios to agree to a digital rental model, in which consumers would be able to download movies through iTunes that could be played for a limited time. Until now, no studio has agreed to such a deal with Apple, and some companies have continued to resist Apple's pitch.

What do you think the pricing will be? I'm guessing $2.99. And hopefully Apple will make the other terms less frustrating than they've been on other online rental sites... as far as how much time you've got to start and finish watching the movie.

- The LA Times has put together a list (this is what journalists do at the end of the year, when no one is around the be interviewed) of 2007's best viral videos.

- The Hollywood Reporter makes eight predictions for 2008. The most interesting to CinemaTech readers:

1. NBC will return to iTunes with its content priced slightly higher than before.
2. A major studio will try releasing one of its movies simultaneously in theaters and on pay-per-view TV.
3. Blu-ray wins the high-definition disc wars.

Wednesday linkage: iTunes movie rentals, more opera on digital screens, 'Honeydripper' Q&A

- An Apple analyst suggests that the company may start renting movies on iTunes in 2008, and perhaps even delivering them directly to an AppleTV.

- Following the lead of the Metropolitan Opera, the San Francisco Opera is going to start transmitting pre-recorded operas to about 200 digital cinemas, starting in March. The plan is to do six a year. (The Met, by contrast, does live broadcasts to cinemas.)

- Jane Green of the blog Film Publicity Help has a Q&A with Maggie Renzi and John Sayles, who talk about the marketing and distribution of their latest film, 'Honeydripper.'

Some mid-week linkage: ILM, Sam Raimi, Michael Bay, and More

- For about a week, the blog world has been buzzing about this post from director Michael Bay, alleging that Microsoft is trying to slow down adoption of either high-def DVD format so that it'll have time to corner the market on digital downloads.

I think the theory is a bit off. First of all, Microsoft's Xbox Live Marketplace, where it sells digital downloads, is still an unknown quantity -- the company has never announced how many movies and TV shows it has sold there (unlike Apple with iTunes). Second of all, if you wanted to propagate conspiracy theories, why wouldn't you suggest that Apple is trying to hamstring high-def discs? It's iTunes Store is the dominant place for buying downloads, and Apple has yet to ship a computer that can play either Blu-ray or HD DVD discs.

- Industrial Light & Magic says it wants to work on lower-budget projects. What's a shoestring pic to the San Francisco-based VFX topdog? $35 to $40 million, according to Variety.

- Director Sam Raimi talks visual effects in another Variety piece. (I have a soft spot for Raimi, since in his 'Dark Man' days, he was the first director I ever interviewed.) He says:

No director is ever done with their film. Now the director has the necessity and opportunity to keep directing the film, not just for the shooting period of three months, but on a longer picture, maybe for an entire year or on a 'Spider-Man' film for 2½ frickin' years straight. And it's hard. It's exhausting. You can keep redirecting this shot forever. It's an opportunity to work yourself to death.

- Lots of cool video on the promo site for the new Indiana Jones movie... but no way to embed it in a blog, or link directly to an interesting clip. That makes it harder for bloggers and fans to promote the movie on their sites.

- Wall Street Journal reports on Internet-connected set-top boxes, which aren't yet getting traction in the market. Nick Wingfield writes:

What's the holdup? Generally speaking, the video players are just too complicated to hook up, too expensive and too limited in what they can do. There are skeptics, too, who think Internet video players are trying to solve a problem that simply doesn't exist -- especially as cable companies enhance on-demand video services.

...Still, tech companies can't stay away from the idea, because of the booming popularity of Internet video. In August, Internet users in the U.S. viewed 9.13 billion online videos, up 26% from 7.24 billion in January, estimates research firm comScore Inc.

Users watched more than a quarter of those videos on Google Inc.'s YouTube, but online video from traditional entertainment companies is exploding, too.

Tongue-in-Cheek Marketing for Pixar's Next Project

What do you do when a company is just at the top of its game?

I think you just stand back and learn.

Here's the Web site for Buy n Large, a fictional Wal-Mart-like retailer that seems to play some sort of role in the forthcoming Pixar movie 'Wall*E,' due out next summer.

There's no mention of the movie at all.... but lots of pages with lots of hidden gags. You can even buy real Buy n Large t-shirts, neck ties, and coffee mugs, to show your allegiance to the corporate megalith.

Here's the early trailer for Wall*E. No official site yet, but that's OK. (I only wish Apple made their movie trailers embeddable.)

Assessing the stagnant set-top box market

Tom Krazit of CNET has a good piece looking at the failure-to-launch of the Internet-connected set-top box sector. He focuses mainly on Apple TV (I wish there was more talk about others who've tried to bring Net-top boxes to market, like Akimbo, Vudu, TiVo, etc.)

Krazit writes:

With Apple TV, Apple fulfilled its usual goal of coming up with something sleek and quiet that people wouldn't necessarily mind putting in their living rooms, and the device seems relatively easy to set up and use.

But it doesn't come even close to fulfilling the promise of Internet-delivered video: the ability to watch anything I want, whenever I want it, without having to pay for all the useless channels I never watch. Nothing does yet, unfortunately, so I make do with the 250-plus channels I now get plus my digital video recorder.

Apple Flubs Its First Direct-to-iTunes Release

The Ed Burns movie 'Purple Violets' is the first direct-to-iTunes movie release.

I covered it here on CinemaTech and also in Variety.

But unfortunately, even though Burns was promoting the movie on NPR today, and even though the official release date is November 20th (that's today), the movie still isn't for sale on iTunes at 4 PM Eastern... though you can pre-order it. (Update: I just tried to pre-order it, and got an error message that I couldn't do that, either.)

The movie has gotten some nice placement on the iTunes Store home screen, and on the main Movies page. But why wouldn't iTunes start selling the movie at 12:01 in the morning? Or even noon Pacific time? How many potential purchases are they missing by having national (free) publicity for the release on NPR, but not making the movie available?

This is a promotional blunder that's reminiscent of the way Google Video mishandled the release of their first direct-to-Google feature film last year, 'Waterborne.'

In Variety: "Studios' Digital Dilemma"

I have a piece in Variety this week that is basically a state-of-the-market report on digital downloading of movies. It argues that Apple is becoming the Wal-Mart of this new medium -- and that that has big implications for studios and independents. From the opening:

Like Wal-Mart, Apple seems to be flexing its muscle to dictate terms to studios and indie producers. iTunes is a digital "big box" store to be reckoned with, and the choices Steve Jobs' company makes and the conflicts it faces will likely shape the way movies are consumed over the next decade.

Note to NBC: Putting Video on the Net is Not Enough ... It Actually Has to Work

NBC's spat with iTunes has been well-publicized. The result is that new NBC shows are no longer available for purchase on iTunes.

Having missed a few recent episodes of 'The Office,' I first visited iTunes ... before remembering that they weren't for sale there. (I've bought two or three episodes of the show from iTunes in the past.)

Then I went to NBC.com, which offers recent episodes for free, supported by advertising.

The only problem is that they are utterly unwatchable. After four attempts on two different days, I couldn't get the videos to play at anything better than what looked like one frame per second.

I noticed today on the NBC Web site that others have the same problem. "I can't get the full episodes working either. Tried IE and Firefox to no avail. :(" wrote a user named Matt. "NBC.com has been totally lame all day. nothing's working," wrote another user.

Someone who seems to be an NBC employee posted the helpful advice, "To get the full episodes to work you have to refresh the page tben you have to close the page or try getting the video back. NBC is very sorry for you difficulties and wishes you the best."

Hmmm... is it better to sell episodes for $1.99 on iTunes, or offer them with advertising in a way that no one can actually watch them?

Ed Burns' next feature: Exclusively on iTunes

Not sure how I missed this story last week in the NY Times, but it's a big deal: Ed Burns is giving his new feature, 'Purple Violets,' exclusively to iTunes.

It played at the Tribeca Film Festival in April, but didn't spark much interest among distributors.

This is the first exclusive release of an indie movie iTunes will offer, and I think it'll be something to watch.

From the story:

Releasing a feature on iTunes carries its own risks. Mr. Burns’s producing partner, Aaron Lubin, said that video distributors had offered lower-than-expected advance payments for the film’s DVD rights out of fear that its availability on iTunes would cannibalize home-video sales. But he and Mr. Burns said they hoped that the novelty of being the first movie to go out on iTunes would generate more publicity for “Purple Violets” than if it had opened on a few screens in New York and Los Angeles.