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.)

Gabbing About What the Future Holds for Filmmakers

Filmmaker Magazine Editor Scott Macaulay and I had a chance to chat in October about where new technologies are taking the movie business. It was a really enjoyable conversation -- and the core of it is well-captured in the Q&A that appears in the fall issue of the mag. Here's the opening:

Q. You‘ve written a book about innovation in the media arts, and one recent innovation within our new digital world appears to be the decimation of traditional ways in which artists are paid for their work. Do you think there will be a countervailing innovation that will allow artists to get paid again, or, as [Wired Magazine editor] Chris Anderson argues, is all digital media destined to be free?

A. Well, I hope that innovation will offer ways for filmmakers to capture lots of value from their work. I‘m pro making money from creative work. I‘m a writer, that‘s what I do. I worry, though, that preserving the idea of being paid cash for the privilege of watching your movie, whether it‘s a download or a DVD, may be under threat. I had a conversation with one of my students. He has never bought a movie on iTunes, he doesn‘t buy a lot of music, and he said, “Your book and Web site are great — I downloaded the three free chapters, but I haven‘t bought the book.” I think that‘s kind of representative of the fact we may be heading towards the Chris Anderson “giving a lot away for free” economy. The challenge is going to be figuring out the new business models. Maybe they are ad-supported or maybe everyone needs a benefactor, a Medici family backing you up. Or maybe it‘s something else we haven‘t discovered yet.

Q. It‘s so ironic, because all these new models harken back to the oldest artist-support models there are. The patronage model goes back to the 15th century, and the idea that the artist is a traveling showman dates from before recorded media.

A. Yeah, maybe filmmakers will have to make money at live screenings where the audience interacts with them and has a cocktail before the movie and a Q and A after. Maybe it will be a little bit like the road shows of old. I understand, though, that a lot of filmmakers, like Hollywood studios, want to preserve their ability to sell DVDs, which have a great profit margin built into them. But I just know that DVDs are not going to have an infinite lifespan. Physical media is clearly going away. Even Blu-ray DVDs are going to go away at some point.