Are the MPAA's Lawyers Already Onto This Dude?

Perusing some reviews of the new Kodak Zi8 pocket video camera, I stumbled across this astonishingly honest one by S. Lakshmi:

Got this Camera for certain purposes

1) Small size
2) Easy transfer to PC
3) Basic camcorder functions that FLIP has with additional features like 4X Zoom and some little image stabilization
4) Ease of use without complex features that require reading a manual
5) Recording movies in the local multiplex without arousing suspicion

Glad that multiplex bootleggers are conscientious enough to post their product reviews on Amazon...

Audio: Dan Bricklin on Piracy, Monetizing Content, and More

Dan Bricklin is a technology pioneer who has a new book out called "Bricklin on Technology."

We talked last week about a few of the topics he addresses in the book, including how content will be monetized in the future, how creators (whether musicians, filmmakers, or software developers) ought to deal with piracy, and how Dan is promoting and selling his new book (including Twitter and YouTube). The MP3 is here, or you can just click 'Play' below. (It runs about 25 minutes.)

Three Monday Links: Flash Wants to Be Omnipresent ... Lumina's Business Model ... Inside the Pirate's Mind

- The NY Times reports this morning on Adobe's efforts to get TVs and mobile phones to support its Flash format for online video. From the piece:

For consumers, what sounds like a bit of inconsequential Internet plumbing actually means that a long overhyped notion is a step closer to reality: viewing a video clip or Internet application on a TV or mobile phone.

For Hollywood studios and other content creators, a single format for Web video is even more enticing. It means they can create their entertainment once in Flash — as the animated documentary “Waltz With Bashir,” from Sony Pictures Classics, was made — and distribute it cheaply throughout the expanding ecosystem of digital devices.

“Coming generations of consumers clearly expect to get their content wherever they want on it, on any device, when they want it,” said Bud Albers, the chief technology officer of the Disney Interactive Media Group, who will join Adobe executives at the convention to voice Disney’s support for the Flash format. “This gets us where we want to go.”

- Dan Carew of the blog Indie 2.0 offers a great example of someone taking the "Fans, Friends & Followers" approach to building an audience for her work: Jen Thym, director of the online series "Lumina." Thym explains her business model in a Q&A with Carew:

On LUMINA, we’re going with the fan supported business model, which basically goes like this: Viewing is free. If you like us and want to support us, please spread the word about us and, if you’re feeling really generous, buy our mechandise. Webcomics have succeeded on this model with varying degrees of success - Penny Arcade probably being the most famous of these - and they even have a themed convention called PAX now, next year I’m sure they’re going to host a panel on the moon or something! On the music side, Nine Inch Nails did something similar by giving away Ghosts for free, and then selling limited editions of the CD, concert tickets, and so forth.

- Slate's Farhad Manjoo explains why there isn't yet an expansive, totally comprehensive movie service. And he offers some insights into the thinking of people who get their movies illegally:

... I've been getting my programming from the friendly BitTorrent peer-to-peer network. Pirates aren't popular these days, but let's give them this—they know how to put together a killer on-demand entertainment system.

I sometimes feel bad about my plundering ways. Like many scofflaws, though, I blame the system. I wouldn't have to steal if Hollywood would only give me a decent online movie-streaming service. In my dreams, here's what it would look like: a site that offers a huge selection—50,000 or more titles to choose from, with lots of Hollywood new releases, indies, and a smorgasbord of old films and TV shows. (By comparison, Netflix says it offers more than 100,000 titles.) Don't gum it up with restrictions, like a requirement that I watch a certain movie within a specified time after choosing it. The only reasonable limit might be to force me to stream the movies so that I won't be able to save the flicks to my computer. Beyond that, charge me a monthly fee and let me watch whatever I want, whenever I want, as often as I want.

Fox Critic Gets the Axe for Reviewing Pirated 'X-Men' Movie

Fox News fired online columnist Roger Friedman this week. His sin? Reviewing a pirated, partially-finished version of Fox's forthcoming 'X Men Origins: Wolverine.'

I have to say, I respect the impulse to do something journalistically innovative and review a partially-finished movie pulled down from a file-sharing site. What could be more contemporary? But I also feel like movie criticism involves reviewing movies when they're done... and also not encouraging readers to do things that chisel away at the economic model of actually making movies.

Some great analysis on this from Michael Wolff.

(Would Fox News have done the same if Friedman had reviewed the pirated version of another studio's film? I'm not so certain...)

Your take?

Talking 'X-Men' and Hulu, on the new show TechVi

Randall Bennett has a new online show (still in "soft launch mode") called TechVi. I joined him today, via Skype, to talk about some of today's news on the digital entertainment front.

What was amazing to me was that he had the show up, with some decent post-production, about a half-hour after we shot it. Cool!

Thursday Reading: 'Wolverine' piracy, Hulu, Star Salaries, ShoWest, and More

- An unfinished version of 'X Men Origins: Wolverine' seems to be available online, a month before its scheduled release. Brian Stelter of the New York Times writes:

Eric Garland, the chief executive of the file-sharing monitoring firm BigChampagne, called the widespread downloading of “Wolverine” a “one-of-a-kind case.” “We’ve never seen a high-profile film — a film of this budget, a tentpole movie with this box office potential — leak in any form this early,” he said.

The studio, a unit of the News Corporation, spent the day demanding that copies of the film be removed from the largely anonymous swath of Web sites that swap movie files. But the copies propagated at such a swift rate that the digital cops could not keep up. BigChampagne estimated the digital film copy had been downloaded in the low hundreds of thousands of times in its first 24 hours on the Internet.

The studio said the F.B.I. and the Motion Picture Association of America were both investigating the film’s premature distribution.

- Interesting piece in BusinessWeek about Hulu's success at attracting viewers... but its problems selling advertising.

- In the recession, Hollywood studios are changing the way they pay big stars, according to The Wall Street Journal. Lauren Schuker writes:

For years, top movie stars often landed deals paying them a percentage -- sometimes as much as 20% -- of a studio's take of box-office revenues from the first dollar the movie makes, even if it turned out to be a flop that cost the studio millions. As a result, the biggest celebrities broke the $20 million mark. Eddie Murphy got that kind of payday for the flop "Meet Dave," which cost Twentieth Century Fox about $70 million and took in only $11.8 million at the domestic box office.

These "first-dollar gross" deals are hitting the cutting-room floor as studios slash the number of movies they're making. For two new projects, Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures has done away with such deals, even though it has landed top talent. In "Dinner for Schmucks," with Steve Carell, and "Morning Glory," starring Harrison Ford, the actors accepted "back-end" deals, in which they get a portion of the gross, but only after the studio and its financing partners have recouped their costs. The studio also cut a back-end deal with "Dinner" director Jay Roach.

- The NY Times reports that the annual ShoWest convention in Vegas, where studios present their forthcoming product to theater-owners, is smaller and lower-key than usual this year.

Variety has its ShoWest coverage here.

Audio: Talking About the Future of Indie Film, at SXSW

Eight folks who were in Austin this week for the SXSW Film Festival sat down yesterday morning to have breakfast and talk about the one big idea or big challenge or big shift that we've been thinking about most these days. We recorded the conversation so you could listen in, but be forewarned that there's a lot of background noise; the restaurant was noisier than is ideal for audio recording. (It gets better as the recording goes on, as the restaurant empties out.) The order in which people speak in the recording is: producer Ted Hope, filmmaker Lance Weiler, conference organizer and producer Liz Rosenthal, technologist Brian Chirls, outreach guru Caitlin Boyle, filmmaker Brett Gaylor, producer and Filmmaker Mag editor Scott Macaulay, and me (Scott Kirsner.)

Some of the things we talked about:

- film financing
- transmedia experiences
- Creative Commons Plus licensing (ways to profit from people sharing and redistributing work licensed under Creative Commons)
- the need for more experimentation and information-sharing among filmmakers
- business models around piracy and file sharing (in particular what Jamie King has been doing with VODO)
- the desire for participation (IE, the audience is no longer just interested in passive consumption)
- the possibility of some kind of "Oprah's Book Club" movement that would involve groups of people watching and discussing films, rather than books
- the rise of YouTube, and whether filmmakers should be paying more attention to what audiences are doing (IE, watching short YouTube videos with groups of friends or colleagues), rather than insisting that the 90-minute film is the only "respectable" product to be making today

And much, much more.

I started the conversation by asking everyone to talk about one big idea or challenge that they'd been thinking about lately.

Here's the MP3, or you can listen by clicking 'Play' below.

Some Interesting Data on Oscar-Nominees and Piracy

Andy Baio looks at how quickly the 2009 Oscar nominees showed up online in pirated form.

Baio writes:

Out of 26 nominated films, an incredible 23 films are already available in DVD quality on nomination day, ripped either from the Oscreeners or the retail DVDs. This is the highest percentage since I started tracking.

Only three films are unavailable — 'Rachel Getting Married' wasn't leaked online in any form, while 'Changeling' is only available as a low-quality telecine transfer and Australia as a terrible quality camcorder recording. (Update: A DVD screener of 'Australia' was just leaked today.)

...Surprisingly, it seems like this year's Oscar movies took longer to leak online than in previous years. If I had to guess, it's because far fewer camcorder copies were released for this year's nominees. This could be because of the theaters cracking down on camcorder recordings, but I suspect it's because fewer nominees were desirable targets this year for cams.

Warner Bros. & the Internet

The NY Times has a lengthy article today about the renewed focus on content at Time Warner. (The headline is 'Holy Cash Cow, Batman! Content is Back at Time Warner'.)

What's most interesting about the article is that Warner Bros. executives either aren't talking much about creating original content for the Internet ... the reporter didn't ask ... or the info simply didn't wind up in the story.

Instead, it sounds like Warner Bros. is mainly focused on using the Internet to distribute movies and TV shows. They're also a bit obsessed, like all studios, with stopping digital piracy.

Tim Arango writes:

The future, most agree, is seamless distribution of films to television using Internet technology. But the big question facing Hollywood is, how far off is that future?

That transition will be, and is, wrenching because studio executives must walk a fine line between preserving the traditional business, which still amounts to a vast majority of revenue and profits, and experimenting with new ways of distribution.

What about new ways of creating content? While 'The Dark Knight' is going to be one of the biggest big-budget hits of all time, there must be ways of telling stories for the Web and mobile devices that don't require a $185 million up-front investment (and that's before marketing).

No?

If Warner Bros.' top execs aren't thinking hard about that opportunity, I'd say that leaves a pretty big opening for independent content creators, wouldn't you?

Actually, there is a Warner Bros. venture to create original content for the Web, but it hasn't been making many waves since it started two years ago. It's called Studio 2.0. Here's one example of what they've done. Another project, T Works, was supposed to launch this spring, but is still "coming soon."

Here's an earlier Times article about Warner's original content creation efforts. Perhaps the highest-profile effort so far has been the 10-episode series Viralcom. On YouTube, the ten episodes have about 900,000 views altogether.

A Few Monday Reads: Piracy, Cameron, Blockbuster, and Digital Cinema Fees

- The NY Times has an interesting piece today that suggests that piracy is moving from NYC street corners to the Internet. (This may be in part due to a big enforcement initiative by NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg.) Eric Taub writes:

Since December 2003, when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg started an initiative to stem the trade in bootlegged and counterfeit goods, [NYC enforcement agent Shari] Hyman has “seen a huge decrease in illegal DVDs being sold in buildings.” In a February sweep, the organization checked out three buildings and 32 storefronts for bootlegged DVDs, and found none.

But New York may not be the best barometer of piracy. Worldwide and on the Internet, video piracy remains rampant. The movie industry has devised new ways to fight piracy, and has pushed for antipiracy laws and run ads to discourage pirates.

Besides pirated DVD copies of first-run films, copies are also available online for illegal downloading, mainly through peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. High-definition camcorders, some not much bigger than a cellphone, can copy films from a movie screen with little loss of detail.

- James Cameron shares a lot about what he's learned about shooting in 3-D in this e-mail interview with Variety's David S. Cohen. It's full of juicy observations, advice, and opinions. A snippet:

COHEN: Right now, 3-D is pretty much being used for films that have some spectacle in them, whether it's "Journey to the Center of the Earth" or "U2 3D"; nobody's talking about using it for domestic dramas. But there are people wondering whether it will actually enhance the impact of character-driven stories. What are your thoughts on how 3-D changes the experience of watching actors act?

CAMERON: I plan to shoot a small dramatic film in 3-D, just to prove this point, after "Avatar." In "Avatar," there are a number of scenes that are straight dramatic scenes, no action, no effects. They play very well, and in fact seem to be enhanced by the stereo viewing experience. So I think this can work for the full length of a dramatic feature. However, filmmakers and studios will have to weigh the added cost of shooting in 3-D against the increased marketing value for that type of film.

- Blockbuster wants to buy Circuit City for more than $1 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. Why? Blockbuster's CEO wants to create a company that can sell digital and physical media, and also the devices you need to play it on ... "an $18 billion global retail enterprise uniquely positioned to capitalize on the growing convergence of media content and electronic devices," CEO Jim Keyes wrote in a letter.

- Studios and cinema owners are wrangling over the fees studios will pay each time they deliver a digital file to a theater. (Known as the "virtual print fee," this helps theater owners --or a third-party that installed the digital projector and server -- defray the cost of the digital equipment.)

Why Aren't More Sundance Movies Pirated?

Slate has a story that poses that question.

Tim Wu observes that it's nearly impossible to find any of the hits from this year's Sundance Film Festival, or last year's, on any of the leading networks for pirated media. He hypothesizes:

...The simplest explanation is that it takes a critical mass of interest—lots of people who want to see a film—before it will get decent pirate distribution. There are a number of reasons for this, but, crucially, every step of the piracy distribution system relies on knowing that the film exists at all. Moreover, to get effective, fast distribution on a peer-to-peer network, you need lots of reliable peers—enough people willing to share the burden of distributing the film online.

In the end, it's a numbers game. How many people want to see the film? Of those, which will get access, break the protection, and put it online? How many will download it, and of those, how many will share the burden of allowing others to download it? These numbers determine whether a film is online at all and mark the difference between a BitTorrent download that takes one hour, and one that takes five days or doesn't work at all.

...What this suggests is that film pirates are not predators but parasites. They do not roam around looking for new and unknown films to eat, but rather prey on big films with name recognition. Some pirates also seem to take pride in landing the "big film," and, by that measure, documentaries about the Pentagon's classification policies (Secrecy) do not measure up. In a sense, this is more bad news for independent filmmakers. Forget about Sony Classics: It's not all that easy to get distribution on the Pirate Bay.

Reading the piece kept bringing to mind the quote from Tim O'Reilly: "Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy."

Post-Thanksgiving Linkage: Blockbuster Kiosks, Streaming Video Piracy, Speed Racer, Vudu

- Blockbuster is gonna try putting automated movie rental kiosks into Papa John's pizza joints and Family Dollar stores. DVDs will rent for just a buck, cheaper than at Blockbuster's traditional outlets, and they can be returned to any kiosk -- not just the one they came from.

- Slate has a great piece on a new kind of online movie piracy. Dan Morrell writes:

As the MPAA has focused on BitTorrent downloading, however, a newer, more popular kind of piracy method has come along. BitTorrent is out. Streaming video is in.

Before it was shuttered by European authorities in October, the British-based TVLinks—which offered links to hundreds of pirated movies and television shows—had become perhaps the Web's leading destination for illicit streaming video. If you've never heard of it, you're not alone: A LexisNexis search found only four mentions of TVLinks in major news sources over the past year. The Pirate Bay, one of the most popular torrent Web sites, was cited more than 300 times. The lack of hype didn't stop the site's spread. According to Web traffic analyzer Alexa, TVLinks passed both the Pirate Bay and TorrentSpy in global traffic rank this August. At the height of its popularity, TVLinks ranked 160th in global traffic, near the level of the New York Times.

- Looks like the Wachowski Brothers are taking the green screen approach with 'Speed Racer.'

- To help market its $399 set-top box, Vudu is throwing in high-def copies of two of Universal's 'Bourne' movies. (Here's more on Vudu.)

- My mother-in-law asked me on Thanksgiving for my advice on whether she should buy "a Blu-ray." When I mentioned the format war, she didn't seem aware of it, and she didn't seem to have much recognition that HD DVD existed. She and my father-in-law are big Netflix users, and Netflix offers movies in both Blu-ray and HD DVD, so I told her the only possible problem could be if HD DVD wins, they'd need to buy a new DVD player in a couple years. Just a data point...

Prince is Pissed at YouTube ... More Original Content for MySpace ... Tron 2.0?

- Prince is suing YouTube.

"YouTube ... are clearly able (to) filter porn and pedophile material but appear to choose not to filter out the unauthorized music and film content which is core to their business success," a statement released on his behalf said.

Good point, Prince. How well are all those much-promised content filtering tools working at YouTube? Clearly not well enough to automatically keep people from posting videos of Britney on the VMAs (which is content owned by Viacom, YouTube's primary law-suitor.)

- 'quarterlife,' a new online video series from Marshall Herkovitz and Ed Zwick ('My So-Called Life' and 'thirtysomething'), will debut November 11th on MySpace. There will be 36 eight-minute episodes, and Herkovitz is promising that they'll spend more producing it than any Web series so far. (Is that really the right objective?) The preview clip does look sorta promising, though.

Clearly, a goal of all these Web efforts is to produce something that can later be monetized in another way ... on DVDs, foreign TV, cell phones, etc.

- Looks like the 'Tron' sequel is closer to starting production...and Steven Lisberger, director of the original, is serving as a producer. From Borys Kit's story:

When making the original, in order to convince the studio to take a chance on a first-time director, Lisberger shot a test reel, financed by the studio, involving the deadly Frisbee battle. In a case of historical synchronicity, sources said one of the things Kosinski will be doing is working on a sequence involving the movie's Light Cycles to work out his vision for the movie. Sources also said visual effects personnel, for many of whom "Tron" was an inspiration to enter the business, already are jockeying for pole position to work on the sequence.

The Wired blog has some cheeky commentary.

Susan Sarandon Explains Digital Cinematography to You ... 'Manufacturing Dissent' Debuts on AOL ... CNET Q&A with MPAA Piracy Exec

- So apparently the Wachowski brothers are doing something innovative with the digital cinematography on their next project, which a live action version of the cartoon 'Speed Racer'. Will you understand exactly what they're up to by reading this interview with actress Susan Sarandon? Probably not.

- AOL is making 40 minutes of the doc 'Manufacturing Dissent' available online for free. It's a somewhat critical profile of Michael Moore that played at South by Southwest; it felt toothless and overly-long to me when I saw it there... but maybe a 40-minute cut is an improvement.

What's the business model? Ads will be shown throughout the online version, and the distributor (Liberation Entertainment) hopes that when the DVD is released on November 6th, the online marketing will help. (November is a long way from August, guys...) Video can be found here.

- CNET interviews Dean Garfield, an attorney (no surprise there) who is the MPAA's chief strategy officer. (I interviewed Garfield in LA a year or so ago, and his responses to my questions were so milque-toasty I never did anything with it. A shame Jack Valenti is no longer around to give him some media training.) Here's a sample exchange:

CNET: What kind of technologies are you guys using to help prevent piracy?

Garfield: We're at the point where technology provides real opportunity, and it's not just down the road, but today. We're conducting requests for proposals in conjunction with MovieLabs around content recognition technologies. (MovieLabs is a company started by the six major studios to develop technologies that can help distribution of film.)

That testing is still ongoing, but the reports are that the technology really works. It is really effective. You can distinguish one piece of content versus another. That's real potential for monetizing and filtering out copyright content. Technology gives us real opportunities to give consumers what they want while also protecting the investment.

WSJ on Piracy ... Next Week's Web Video Summit

- The Wall Street Journal covers summer movie piracy, including illegally posted versions of 'Ratatouille,' 'Sicko,' and 'Hostel: Part II.' Merissa Marr and Sarah McBride write:

Weinstein Co. has sent private investigators out to hunt for the culprit who leaked its coming Michael Moore documentary "SiCKO," after it appeared online last week. And director Eli Roth recently blamed a weak opening of his horror sequel "Hostel: Part II" on the prerelease availability of pirated copies online.

While not unprecedented, the availability of these movies online may suggest that the studios are still losing some significant battles in their war on piracy. After a surge in piracy a few years ago, including leaks of movies like "Hulk" weeks before its theatrical release in 2003, the studios seemed to successfully crack down, setting up metal detectors at prerelease screenings, cutting back on screener DVDs, and instituting tough security procedures at production labs.

Now, as the studios desperately try to build buzz for their movies in one of the most crowded summers ever, they may have opened themselves up to a greater risk of prerelease piracy with tactics such as holding numerous prescreenings of their movies.

Disney apparently held 800 sneak previews of 'Ratatouille' last weekend, and the pirated version may have come from one of those, infiltrated by someone toting a camcorder.

- Next Wednesday and Thursday is the Web Video Summit in San Jose. I've got one guest pass to it, and I'd like to give it to a CinemaTech reader who:

1. Will use it, and
2. Is willing to send in a blog post about (at least) one of the sessions that we can post here.

So send me an e-mail if you're interested: kirsner at pobox.com.

Tuesday: 'Sicko' removed from YouTube ... Michael Moore OK with Piracy ... and More

- Cinematical has the definitive posting about Michael Moore's new doc 'Sicko' being posted on YouTube in 14 segments. (It was posted to BitTorrent, too.) The first few segments of the movie were seen by about 3000 people.

From the Hollywood Reporter coverage:

"Every filmmaker intends for his film to be seen on the big screen," Moore said. "This wasn't a guy taking a video camera into a theater. This was an inside job, a copy made from a high-quality master and could potentially impact the opening weekend boxoffice. Who do you think benefits from that?"

When asked about accusations that he may have leaked the film himself for publicity purposes, Moore scoffed at the notion:

"Oh no. The (Weinstein) brothers are devastated."

But here's some video of Moore saying he's OK with piracy, as long as the person isn't doing it to make a profit. In the video, Moore says, "I make these books and movies and TV shows because want things to change, and so the more people who get to see them the better."

- On another topic, here's an LA Times report on niche programming at movie theaters during the daytime (mostly for kids). Piece focuses on Bigger Picture, a digital movie distributor in LA.