Recently in Movies and New Media Category
Old media turns combative against new media | Technology | Internet | Reuters Annotated
"At a panel discussion on the second day of the 56th annual National Cable & Telecommunications Association conference, top executives said talk of the demise of traditional media in the digital age was overblown."
"You'll see more acquisitions," Chernin said. "This is a world where the big get bigger. You'll see increased consolidation."
I will not have access to the Internet between November 4th and the 18th, because I will be traveling on a sail boat from Grenada to Antigua. Please excuse the blog interruption.
I leave you for the time being with my undigested thoughts on the broad and relevant topic “the evolving nature and aesthetics of creative content”.
First, it covers the evolving structures of storytelling via new media. Examples of new media structures are foureyedmonsters.com and lonelygirl15.com; and interactive television content that is created on the web to supplement traditional shows. Reality TV is obviously interactive but LOST is the best original dramatic example of this interactivity; and then of course, their is the growth of user generated content from channels like YouTube and CNN): What do these new storytelling structures look like? How are these structures similar and different to their predecessors?
Television, can have a relationship with the internet that film cannot. I imagine that the nature of going to the movies will still demand High Imaging that allows for suspension of disbelief...but there is a degrading of image quality and techniques that lower-end digital technologies have supplanted into the aesthetic psyche of many younger viewers – just look at the ads created and aimed at the under 30 demographic. Old tricks. Why is that? Perhaps because they are expert consumers of electronic stories and know it’s manufactured.... They are deconstructing the image.
Another thought, I think of Mark Chiolis’ (Grass Valley) remark to me in my interview with him:
"Today there are a number of thought provoking questions that are being asked. What happens when there is a true RGB 4k (there isn't one today) sensor that rivals, if not exceeds, that of today's film stock? One of the arguments for film is that people like the "look" which includes the grain and movement through the gate. What happens when the "game-boy" generation takes over? Having grown up with "video" is this the "look" they want to see? Will they have a different set of standards to compare to?"
Film (theatrical features) is (are) different. I think they will demand even more heighten realism and I suspect that Digital 3D will become increasingly popular in that format in the years to come (an outgrowth of the gamers demand for a heightened experience).
What are the fundamental relationships that the younger generation seem to be exploring via this new media content and traditional content? Some may say the subject matter is generally solipsistic, passive - an outgrowth perhaps of the individuals solitary communion with the anonymous web or with media itself...but look at the bleeding edge technology and science of virtual reality. Look at the studies of the psycho-physical effects of these media tools on users in medical and defense research. Passive is not the right word to describe this relationship. Interactive is better. But with what (media) and whom (other players)?
I say one cannot understand this generation unless they have a MySpace page and love it. Why? There is a freedom of movement in the field of archetype and symbol that enables both artist and audience to observe without disclosure, absorb without acquisition, and create without the demand for conclusion. The repetition of archetypical representation uncovers both artist's and audience's collective mythologies, thereby revealing: The anonymous is personal.
Renowned urban planer Richard Florida notes that the fundamental social and economic changes that underpin the Creative Economy, demonstrate that in “virtually every aspect of life, weak ties have replaced the stronger bonds that once gave structure to society. Rather than live in one town for decades, we now move about. Instead of communities defined by close associations and deep commitments to family, friends, and organizations, we seek places where we can make friends and acquaintances easily and live quasi-anonymous lives. The decline in the strength of our ties to people and institutions is a product of the increasing number of ties we have.”
How have television and new media influenced the sensibility and subject matter of creative content. I see the primary relationship that the younger generation is exploring, is with the media itself (I am not talking about the news media, I am talking about media itself). You may critiqued the passivity of video games...but, perhaps that passivity masks an exploration with identity that is not understood by non-participants and therefore disregarded as irrelevant. I say this exploration is powerful and emergent in movies like Adaptation and I Heart Huckabees. This relationship between identity and media is increasingly portrayed as mystical, interactive, and “high touch”. Their is a propensity for role playing, a desire for authenticity coupled with a disdain of truthiness and even traditional ideology. For dramatic content and docu-reality, they create satire and even sarcasm (the mass may also create cynicism, but I would never characterize this generation as cynical. They know the line of complicity runs through each of them).
In some respects, “reality shows” seem like an outgrowth of this propensity for role-playing, a study of the dramas of personality. In deconstructing the “sit com” and “documentary” and even the “commercial brand”, there appears to be an investigation of topics like truth and being.
Regarding lonelygirl15.com. As one writer I spoke with remarked, “Entertainment is always flirting with reality. It seems that things that don't aim to be thought of as real do a much better job. Verisimilitude, it's what it's all about."
Is there a common thread in the subject and structures explored by newer creative content, a post-post modern sensibility? See the NYT’s article, “Brand Underground”:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/magazine/30brand.html?ex=1311912000&en=82edb890b1d6c977&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
There are several larger forces manifesting in the recent development of MTV's Virtual Laguna Beach for example. One of them is the evolution of brand: how the concept has extended itself into the realm of branded communities in the digital age. Gamers (the generation under age 35 and including generations X and Y) have grown up in a world saturated by brand so that the phenomenon is now a vehicle for personal expression and identity beyond the ostensible confines of a corporate mandate (well, except their own). Commentators like Rob Walker (The Brand Underground, NYT) have elucidated the social phenomena well, however, they tend to look at the expression as another failed modernist attempt to beat the system. Hand me the cyanide, the revolution is over and we lost!
Boomers are wired to view creativity as a choice between “selling out” or “sticking it to the man” and the quest for the great society as a dogmatic battle between the mediocrity of relativism and the virtue of absolutes. To use former bohemian terminology, today’s generation does not have that hang up. “They have relatively little generational consciousness,” writes David Brooks, “because this generation is for the most part not fighting to emancipate itself from the past.” The suggestion is provocative considering that while “the baby boom included the largest U.S. birth cohort to date, the game generation will ultimately outdo the baby boom in size, in scope, and presumably in influence,” notes John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade in their study of the game generation’s influence on organizational values in business. “The total size of the game generation is already greater than the baby boom ever was,” and the whole generation of gamers, “including X and Y and letters to be named later-simply approach the world differently than their predecessors.”
I am a broken record, but like dissident antipoliticians from the former Czechoslovakia, who used satire and absurdity to highlight the fact that in a postmodern consumer society the “line of complicity runs through each of us," this new American generation distrusts political grandstanding and even traditional forms of organized politics. Hence, the popularity of so-called no brow satires like South Park, The Colbert Report, and The Daily Show.
The playwright Heiner Mueller once remarked that the potency of theater in his native East Germany was based on the absence of other ways of getting messages across to people. "As a result," Mueller says, "Theater here has taken over the function of other media in the West," before now. While the never ending surface chatter of talking points and double speak on both the left and the right continue to erode the value of words, they also inflate the space between the lines.
None of this mentions how the game generation take globalization for granted and the growing crossover of cultural content from other traditions, “bollywood”, Japanese Anime et cetera.
Advertising Age - MediaWorks - 'Snakes on a Plane' Rakes in Lackluster $15.25 Million
Excerpt:
The figure, which included $1.4 million from late-night screenings Thursday, was good enough to capture the top spot in an otherwise lackluster frame.
"There was so much inflated hype," David Tuckerman, New Line's president of distribution, said yesterday. "We thought we'd do better."
New Line had stoked the "Snakes" fever for months, throwing open the door for fans to create their own artwork, videos, music and more, using what's usually closely guarded intellectual property. Fans took the bait, starting a groundswell of interest in the movie long before it launched.
The film's website has attracted more than 3 million unique visitors, while fan-created Snakes on a Blog has attracted half a million.
The box office receipts for "Snakes" might confirm what some industry marketers already suspected: There's no real way to equate internet chatter with consumers' intent to see a movie.
"It was very risky and very audacious for New Line to let the audience become part of the filmmaking process, and I commend them for that," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations Co. "But just because people are very aware of the movie doesn't necessarily mean they have a desire to see it. It shows that there's no direct correlation between all that online buzz and ticket sales."
Box office revenues are up about 7% so far this year, Exhibitor Relations figures show, and attendance has increased 3.7% from 2005.
Guardian Unlimited Business | | MTV hooks up with Google
MTV is to supply segments of its programmes to the thousands of websites and blogs affiliated with search giant Google.
MySpace a launch pad for next-gen media biz
Excerpts:
It's too soon to know the future of paid content downloads on MySpace, having recently launched its first offering: $1.99 downloads of the Fox series "24," sponsored by Burger King. However, paid search represents a considerable revenue-generating opportunity for MySpace and a search partner.
FT.com / Companies / Media & internet - News Corp to sell films online
Excerpts:
News Corp’s internet properties, including MySpace.com, are to start selling Fox films and television content on a download-to-own basis in an effort to create a foothold in this potentially huge new digital market.
Thanks to Cinematech I came across this audio file from a March panel presented by the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco entitled: "The Digital Revolution".
The panel included "Richard Chuang [PDI/DreamWorks], Jeff Fino, [Wild Brain], John Knoll, visual effects [ILM], and Stu Maschwitz, [The Orphanage].
Will the growing segmentation and narrowcasting of television and the Internet erode this dominance? How will the intermix of television and the internet contribute to this? I ask myself these questions.
I believe U.S. media and entertainment are undervalued assets in the American economy. It trendy to say that American films are of poor quality and that our media is valueless. Certainly, the media may deserve criticism for becoming in some respects the "un-ratified fourth branch" of American government. However, outside the context of THAT discussion, U.S. media and entertainment industries are the only U.S. sectors that boast a surplus balance of trade with nearly every nation in the world. That deserves some attention, consideration, and respect.
Creative copyright industries will always engender debate as to their cultural and social effect. Since these industries are at the core of the emerging global creative economy we can expect these discussions to become more heated as time goes on: whether the topic be American movies, Disneyland, or cloning. The point I want to make is this: These debates about cultural effect can also overpower our discussions about these sectors' legitimate economic benefit. Many countries may also use these debates as smoke screens to cover up their protectionist policies.
Media heir wants 'Airbus of the web' - Financial Times - MSNBC.com
Excerpts:
Christoph Mohn, the heir to the Bertelsmann media empire, has called for Europe to create an Airbus of the internet, to compete with US giants such as Google and Ebay.
"So far, we have not built up a sizeable internet company in Europe," he said. "It's not good for the European Union. Nano-technology, biotechnology and the internet are the growth industries but in most of these the position is not good for Europe."
Mr Mohn endorsed the controversial Franco-German plan to build a state-funded European search engine called Quaero, saying: "It's a little bit like Airbus Industries. I don't think it requires consolidation [of Eur-ope's internet industry] but it needs co-ordination."
Quaero was launched this year with initial funding of €1.7bn ($2.2bn) to develop voice-based and picture-based search technologies. "[Quaero] is not just about 'let's beat Google'," Mr Mohn said. "It's 'let's build up a competitive internet industry'." Bertelsmann and Lycos Europe are members of the Quaero consortium, which includes Siemens, Deutsche Telekom, Thomson and France Telecom.
Ultimately, television can have a relationship with the internet that features cannot. “Features have been able to grab on to what internet can do for marketing and publicity,” says Megan Wolpert, executive vice president of Spyglass Television, when I interviewed her in January this year: “However, TV can do what movies can’t with that relationship, because they don’t need to add a step. They don’t need to say come see us. They just show it. You can show a memoir, a travelogue, a serialized anything on the internet. I think even if you just look at the act of watching a movie versus watching television, it’s more analogous to the act of watching a computer.”
Certainly, the popularity of Reality TV is the outcome of the game generation trend towards interactivity. What is happening more recently, however, is an extension of the relationship between television and internet with show like Lost and VH1 Webjunk. Now MTV introduces MTV Flux a combination social networking portal/television channel.
Excerpts:
"Advertising is in turmoil because of new technology," says Dave Morgan, CEO of Litton Entertainment when I interviewed the leading independent distributor in February this year. More than fragmenting audiences new media allow viewers to bypass advertising altogether.
Excerpts from "Amazon Readies Launch of Ad-Free Video Download Service":
A year in the works, the e-tailer's digital-video-download service is set for a mid-August launch and will feature a subscription service and a la carte movies and TV shows. Yes, folks, that's more ad-free TV for sale.
The service, which is referred to as Amazon Digital Video -- or Amazon "DV" -- has evolved over the past year from a music-themed offering to a video-centric one, according to production-studio and TV-network executives briefed on the plans. The reason? Apple, these executives said, already commands such a large share of digital-music sales that Amazon felt it would be too difficult to break into the market.
Amazon's reputation for ease of use could help it capture the video-download market, much as iTunes did with its simplicity in the music market. If that happens, it's sure to speed up consumers' comfort level with paying for ad-free TV content -- at a time when networks are trying to launch their own ad-supported video-on-demand plays. ABC, for example, has offered online versions of its shows that allow the advertisers to ride along and has plans for a more sophisticated offering in October.
Revenue from licensed digital-music distribution doubled in 2005 to $653 million, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, which estimates that by 2010, digital music will be a $20.7 billion market. In contrast, the firm said consumers spent only $1.1 billion on online movie-rental subscriptions and $1 million on digital-streaming movies in 2005. Digital-streaming services are expected to outpace online rentals, by 2010 generating $400 billion in annual spending while online rentals will be a $3.2 billion business.
Amazon owns IMDb.com, the database of Hollywood information, and has been trying to get into the content creation business. Its first foray is a promotional program called "Fishbowl," a series of Bill Maher-hosted interviews, sponsored by UPS and Cingular. Mr. Maher's guests include moviemakers, actors and authors -- all of whose products can be bought on Amazon.
Excerpts:
Beginning on Tuesday, March 21 in Las Vegas, the Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA) will host a technology booth at TelecomNEXT, featuring several companies who will display some of the latest online distribution platforms and filtering tools which could assist the telecommunications industry and play an important role in the emerging legitimate digital content distribution markets. This is the first time that the MPAA has had a presence at this event which is important in bringing business and technology of communications and entertainment together.
Representatives from Audible Magic, BitTorrent Inc., CacheLogic, Peer Impact, Red Swoosh and Thomson Content Security will be on hand to demonstrate methods their companies have developed to facilitate legal online movie distribution and to protect copyrights in a digital environment.
MPAA U.S.Theatrical Market: 2005 Statistics[PDF]
Excerpts and Highlights:
In 2005, total domestic box office remained near $9 billion, a barrier broken in 2002 for the first time. Global box office remained steady at over $23 billion, just shy of the all time high in 2004 of $25 billion and 46% higher than the 2000 mark of $16 billion. U.S. theater admissions decreased 8.7% in 2005 to 1.4 billion.The number of movies released remains on a growth trajectory, with total releases topping another all time high of 563 versus 528 in 2004, growth of 7%.
New releases by the major motion picture studios (MPAA members) grossed an average of $37 million in 2005, an increase of 7% over the past five years.
A major component of the annual box office was the performance of blockbusters, which remained comparable to prior years in total box office. A new all time high was set in 2005, with eight movies grossing over $200 million, three more than in 2004, and five more than 2000, a great milestone for the industry.
The average cost to make and market a film in 2005 remained under $100 million and dipped slightly to $96.2 million. Marketing costs were up 5.2% and production costs went down 4% from the previous year. MPAA member companies spent more on network television and Internet advertising and less on newspapers and local television.
Since its inception as catalyst for cinema’s transformation from black and white to color, Technicolor’s history now spans ninety years in the motion picture industry. Even as parent, Thomson, leverages the rainbow’s magic brand to advance its digital cinema venture, Technicolor still processes over five billion feet of motion picture film a year. DreamWorks, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, Warner Brothers, and Twentieth Century Fox have all signed agreements to use digital projection systems from Technicolor Digital Cinema on five thousand screens in the United States and Canada; and under the terms of a strategic understanding with Century Theatres, Technicolor will begin to install digital projection equipment with a beta-test deployment of ninety to hundred-and-twenty screens, in the first quarter of 2006. With an initial rollout plan for complete digital projection systems on up to five thousand DCI-compliant screens over the next three to four years, Thomson intends to deploy at least fifteen-thousand digitally-equipped screens in the United States and Canada over the next ten years.
As president of Technicolor Electronic Distribution Services, Joe Berchtold is responsible for the strategic development, growth, and operations of the Thomson Services division worldwide, including all aspects of Technicolor’s digital cinema initiatives, on-demand content, and IPTV distribution services. Since joining Thomson in 2003, Berchtold has been co-head of strategy and acquisitions, leading key initiatives that include the acquisition of DirecTV’s set-top box business; the company’s investment in Content Guard with Time Warner and Microsoft, where he now sits on the board of directors; and the forging of an agreement with VeriSign to jointly develop an online content authentication and authorization service bureau to support secure delivery of electronic entertainment content over digital networks.
Alexa O’Brien
Do you think digital cinema will reverse the declining box office trend?
Joe Berchtold
Well, I think that the hope of that is what has driven a lot of the energy behind digital cinema over the past year. I think people have come to realize that the savings from digital cinema on the cost side are some ways out, and the real opportunity here is the top line. It's getting customers back. If you think about a movie theater as a retail business, it’s among the most constrained retail businesses you can imagine from a merchandising standpoint; because as a physical reel of film is tied to a physical room, there’s just no flexibility. Digital inherently creates a lot more flexibility. People are talking about some of the things. You can add more screens. You can move screens. All of which will help on the margin. But, we also think, and I’m not creative enough, but we also think that five years from now, what are some of the most creative people in the world going to have figured out to be able to take advantage of this technology?
