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How to save Hollywood

6 comments on How to save Hollywood

How to save Hollywood

: Kevin Laws has some good advice in a guest post on Tim Oren’s blog. Excerpt:

2. Release everything. If I can’t get the Simpsons legally, I have that much more incentive to learn how to use illegal file-sharing services. Rather than staging things individually, just make the entire catalog available. It’s still OK to wait until the theater or TV season ends, but it better be available online soon afterwards.

3. Support the infrastructure. Once DivX supports some form of moderate DRM, Hollywood needs an iTunes-like experience for video. They should instantly make their entire catalog available to any service that wants to provide it on the same terms as DVD releases (minus the costs of physical distribution), spurring the same sort of innovation in that area as we’ve seen in music.

6 responses to “How to save Hollywood”

  1. onecent Avatar
    onecent

    How to save Hollywood
    Let’s not.

  2. Martin Devon Avatar
    Martin Devon

    People don’t realize that it isn’t that simple:
    1. Digitizing Content: This is a huge and difficult task. You would cry if you knew how poorly some classic content was cataloged and kept over the years. The majors are spend a great deal of money to fix this but releasing *everything* will take some time, even if
    2. Legal rights: The ownership and catalog exploitation rights for each property is extremely complicated and often very limited. To use a simple example, the rights to the release music by Queen belongs to different companies in the US and the UK; Who gets to release their stuff on-line? Both? Neither? and at what price?

  3. Flipperwald Avatar
    Flipperwald

    Indeed, I agree, Jeff.
    The major problem with Tim’s ideas are that they ignore the fact that even given the relatively “narrow” range of media available at the moment, the available content supply is years behind. Just look at the literally hundreds of Tele-Shopping channels on Sky Digital Satellite. I really don’t need to purchase my miracle car wax on internet video via iVideo.
    Regards,
    Flip

  4. Andy Avatar
    Andy

    Hollywood has “drunk its own bathwater” as the Canadian papers say. They are too full of themself. Their revenue reports reflect ticket prices not the number of tickets sold.
    The assumption that Hollywood produces product is only partially right. That product is usually consumed in a communal setting.
    They are like turkey farmers ignoring Thanksgiving and Christmas. A good turkey is important but not the core reason we gather together.
    Explosions and chases are fun, but boring. Posturing and attitudes from characters too shallow for us to be concerned waste our time.
    Give us a reason to care about the characters.

  5. AvatarADV Avatar
    AvatarADV

    Kevin Laws makes a big mistake in equating BT to music P2P services. Yes, it’s peer-to-peer in data transfer and thus quite useful as a swarming application; on the other hand, it is a HECK of a lot easier to knock out a torrent with a well-placed lawsuit than it is to scour Kazaa. BT has no anonymizing features (and cannot, really, from how it operates), and relies on a central “tracker” to coordinate the file transfers. Take down the tracker, nobody’s transferring files…
    (That is to say, nobody’s transferring them over BT. Yes, they can still be transferred P2P, but big ol’ file sizes make this at least partially a self-limiting proposition.)
    And, frankly, the movie industry isn’t LIKE the music industry. The average musician is exploited; the average film worker is NOT (not least of which because they have very strong unions, and film work takes dozens or hundreds of people, as opposed to a handful for music.) They’ve got a better reputation and more political capital to burn, as it were…

  6. Bob Pence Avatar
    Bob Pence

    Besides the limiting factors Martin mentions, I would think it inadvisable to just release “the whole catalog” all at once.
    Say I release all of Buffy online tomorrow. I need to scale up my servers for huge bandwidth demand. Some people buy the whole series, some can only afford to buy just the first couple seasons this week. Next month I release the first three seasons of 24, also requiring a lot of bandwidth. Do any Buffy fans buy it?
    Nope. The kids who had to scrape money together to buy the first couple seasons are back to get another season or two of Buffy, and the folks who bought the whole series are not back at all (because they are still watching the DVD’s they bought last month).
    If instead I make each season release a separate event, I acclimate customers to coming back often. The rich and the poor Buffy fans can afford the individual seasons, released weeks or even a few months apart, while they also have time between releases to watch something else… hey, how about this season of 24? Ah, a habit is formed. No excuse for piracy since the awaited seasons will be out in short order. And the bandwidth spikes — and thus expenses — are lessened.
    Selling more with less resources at the expense of customer inconveniences that cannot honestly be complained about (“I had to click to return to the website”; “I had to go outside between seasons when I wanted to the whole series during an uninterrupted week without sleep or food or AB-negative”) — this is not unlike the non-virtual world where one must return to Fry’s or FYE every few months for the next season on DVD. Repeat business is the key to business.