Mark Gill on the Future of Indie Film

Anne Thompson of Variety posts the text of a keynote address that Mark Gill of the Film Department (and formerly of Warner Independent and Miramax) gave over the weekend at the LA Film Festival. It's worth a read.

I disagree with Gill when he says that studios need to focus on making fewer movies... but he's right that lower prices for digitally-delivered movies will help goose consumption. In his talk, he touches on the way that prices for DVDs dropped relative to VHS tapes, and that the same will likely happen again for movies in digital form:

When the movie business went from tape to digital, we dropped the wholesale price per unit from $65 to $10. And everyone said: “Oh my god, they’re killing the business. Our profit margins are ruined.” Well, the margin was smaller, but sales exploded. The studios made tens of billions of dollars on the difference. And consumers mostly like what they’re getting. So much so that movies are the second-highest rated consumer value for the money. Behind only chicken. Not so for albums, which are so far down the list you can’t find them.

The next big change will be when we start shooting movies to mobile devices in a big way. The wholesale price will drop again—probably to $3 per unit. But we’ll sell so many more of them that revenue will explode all over again. This has very favorable implications for getting past piracy problems that helped kill the music business: the charge for downloading a film will land on your phone bill. And the moviemakers can hold the phone companies accountable (whereas now internet providers duck and hide when we try to pursue them for what amounts to transfer of stolen goods).

Text Messaging the Movie Screen

Screenvision and Verizon Wireless are getting together later this month to test an audience survey technology together, in 10 US cities. The idea is to encourage movie-goers to text message votes about their favorite music to the screen, where they'll see the results tallied (amidst the rolling series of pre-show advertisements.)

News of the deal is here and here.

If you're at a theater that's showing pre-show ads, I suppose it can't hurt to have more to do than just sitting there passively...though I do worry that this will make it seem OK to be text-messaging *during* the movie.

Spike Lee Thinks Small

Nokia has signed up Spike Lee to make a short film for cell phones, relying on some user-contributed content, according to the NY Times. The user content will have been shot using cell phones.

Laura Holson writes:

By hiring Mr. Lee for the project, Nokia is seeking to combine the populist appeal of user-generated content with the power of a famous director’s pedigree. The film will have three acts, each three to five minutes long, with the theme loosely based on the concept of humanity.

“I’m interested because it’s a great collaborative effort,” Mr. Lee said. “Within five years, new movies will be made with devices like these.”

He added: “I like working with people who have talent but aren’t in film school.”

The project is an experiment for Mr. Lee, but it is also a way for Nokia to promote its wares. Cellphone companies are all trying to position their products not just as devices for talking, but as multimedia devices that can play music, search the Web and capture video.

Lee says that he himself is "a dinosaur," and that his kids help him turn on the TV at home.

Sony Pics on Phones ... Original Content for Xbox ... Yahoo and Microsoft's Video Strategies ... Pocket Projectors

- Sony Pictures Television is developing PIX, the first movie network for mobile phones. It'll be available on the recently-announced AT&T Mobile TV service in May. From the Hollywood Reporter piece:

Sony eventually might convert PIX to an on-demand model and might take the brand online as well. The full-length linear strategy is just one of many different content plays with which the studio is experimenting. "We're not doubling down and saying it's only about longform," [Sony VP Eric] Berger said. "We'll continue to do innovative things in the shortform universe as well."

- Microsoft and the Safran Company are collaborating to create original shows for the Xbox game console, according to the NY Times. From the piece:

In an interview at his office in Los Angeles last week, [producer and talent manager Peter] Safran said his first round of programs would all be scripted, as opposed to reality shows, and would probably run under 10 minutes. He said he planned initially to focus on genres, like comedy and horror, that appeal to the Xbox 360 audience, which is heavily concentrated from the ages of 14 to 34, and tends to be more male than female. The first shows are expected to be available to viewers by the fall.

Microsoft’s previous forays in digital entertainment include a two-year-old initiative, MSN Originals, to provide original shows for the Web, and an ill-fated foray more than 10 years ago in which it poured about $100 million into Internet shows like the comedy “475 Madison,” about an advertising agency, then quickly canceled most of them.

- I wrote a piece for this week's edition of Variety that looks at Yahoo and Microsoft's video strategies. From the piece:

"Video consumption is becoming part of most users' Internet experience," says Karin Gilford, VP of entertainment at Yahoo. "The question is, what do you do to differentiate yourself?"

Yahoo and Microsoft have both been struggling to answer that question since the February 2005 launch of YouTube. Since then, video viewing on the Net has become an addiction for some: The top 20% of diehard downloaders watch an average of 14 hours a month, according to research firms comScore and Media Contacts.

- I've been eagerly following the development of pocket LED projectors for a few years now... looks like 2008 could finally be the year a few of them hit the US market, according to the NY Times.

Blockbuster CEO Watching Movies on His BlackBerry

Pretty cool... Blockbuster CEO James Keyes seems to grok the concept that people want to watch movies on mobile devices, and he's even worked out a way to get Movielink titles onto his BlackBerry (with a little help from his IT staff.)

Viewing Video on Cell Phones Gets Easier (and Cheaper) .... New Ad Model for Revver

Here's a Wall Street Journal video that shows how MyWaves.com allows users to get short videos onto their phones -- without subscribing to a separate service like MobiTV:

The story is here. From the piece:

MyWaves Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., is one of a flurry of start-ups offering new ways to access Internet videos on cellphones, hoping to overcome barriers that have prevented mobile video from taking off in the past.

For years, cellular carriers including Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc. have offered licensed video content for cellphones, such as sports highlights, TV shows and music videos. But these services, which carry monthly subscription fees, offer limited content programmed by the carrier and usually work only on certain phones. Adoption has been slow.

Now, the new services are taking a different approach, allowing users to view a wider array of Internet video clips -- without locking themselves into a subscription and without purchasing a fancier phone. The services each operate slightly differently, but users can view online videos using any standard video-enabled phone. Videos can be wirelessly downloaded to a handset for viewing later, or sometimes streamed over cellular networks to be watched in real time.

...Some new offerings say they have attracted nearly a million users and are attracting tens of thousands more a day.

In other news....Revver says it will let video creators put ads at the start or the end of their videos, and earn money not based on clicks (as Revver has done in the past) but on how many times the ad was shown. Revver's CEO says the ads could command about $20 per thousand impressions -- money that'd be split 50/50 with the creator.

Here's the Adweek story.

Sunday/Monday links: Cellphone entertainment ... Blockbuster picks Blu-ray ... Digital cinema overseas

- Interesting piece in yesterday's New York Times about producing content for cell phones. Much of the focus is on ESPN's efforts.

Funny how everyone mentions the small screen as being the main limitation of working on a cell phone -- for me, it's the slow or stuttery frame rate.

- Blockbuster Video says it'll carry primarily Blu-ray high-def discs from here on out. From Forbes:

Since late 2006, the movie rental company has offered both formats at 250 stores across the country. Both formats were given equal billing, but Blockbuster soon realized that Blu-ray outsold its competitor by 70%.

Blockbuster will continue to rent the HD DVD titles it already offers and may expand its HD DVD inventory in the future but, for now, the company has placed all its chips on Blu-ray.

I still am not sure this is the HD DVD death knell everyone will assume it is. (I certainly can't remember the last time I was in a Blockbuster, and the one near my gym closed last year...)

- Variety has a report on the digital cinema roll-out in Europe.

- My Boston Globe column yesterday covered the use of artificial intelligence in videogames.