The 'Netflix Effect' ?

I don't think that's true at all, doug, I think that's a naive argument put forward by fanboys with no sense of reality, I'm sorry, and no offense intended.

You think my dad wants to fart around with how to stream a movie from his computer? Seriously? No, nobody wants to do this, not even me, and I'm a hardcore computer user! I don't want to have to find a way to hook up my computer to my HDTV. Who the hell sits and watches movies at their computer? I'll tell you who -- POOR PEOPLE. Anyone with money doesn't do that because we all have high quality HDTVs. And if you're poor, you're not a valuable consumer anyway, so your opinion really doesn't count in any meaningful sense because it's about MONEY. I have money to spend. If you buy like a movie a month, you don't. One person who buys $3,000 in media content like me per year is worth ten people who buy $300/year, for instance. So I'm the consumer you want to tailor your strategy to, not someone who sits at their computer and illegally downloads movies.

Now, is VOD and streaming media a decent way to see rented material? Sure, not bad, especially if they could figure out a way to make it like a hotel room only with a million titles, where I just go to my TV and order something and watch it. But hooking my computer up to my TV? Out of the question. And out of the question for 99% of the population.

Physical media is and will continue to be far superior. Nobody wants their entire video library on some hard drive, it's just unreasonable. I want to be able to take my Blu-ray disc home to my dad's house and watch it.

And Blu-ray growth has actually been pretty awesome; the recession hurt, but still nobody is going to move to fanboy-supported systems. Hard drives don't grow even close to fast enough to support the media. If you didn't read my post, don't comment -- you didn't address a single point, you just said, "Eh well technology grows fast you underestimate it." No, I don't. I told you the facts. The technology does NOT move that fast, and there's no reason to believe it will suddenly speed up because putting fiber optic lines into the entire country is a LONG process that will NOT be finished any time in the next 15 years. And nor will hard drives magically grow in size 100-500 times.

Of course retailers and manufacturers want physical media, hahaha, god are you being intentionally retarded? Yeah, a manufacturer DOESN'T WANT SOMETHING THAT MAKES THEM MONEY. They'd rather DO NOTHING. And yeah, retailers would rather you STAY HOME and buy from iTunes than go to Best Buy. Jesus... LOL, did you even read what you wrote? Good god man. Make sense!

I'm done with this thread, haha, what a joke!
 
It's hard not to fall into the role of doomsayer when you look at the current shifting landscape for filmmakers.

Where theaters used to be a loss leader for the home market, that has now reversed and the reversal will only grow more pronounced in the next few years. And even if 3D becomes a draw, the days of cinema technology outpacing home technology are exponentially shrinking.

DVDs are dying. Some say they're already dead.

Brick and mortar video rental stores are already dangling one foot off the edge of oblivion.

$1 a rental is fast becoming the norm with the advent of Redbox and it's derivatives. This will have long reaching effects on consumer perception that will only serve to benefit companies like Redbox.

So that sound everyone's starting to hear? That's the sound of margins imploding. Budgets being slashed. Quotes being laughed it. Studios being shuttered. Financing evaporating. And output declining on an industry wide, unprecedented scale.

In my opinion:

1) Piracy is nothing now compared to what it will soon become. Close your eyes and imagine for a moment what the world will look like when the idea of a television as it's own separate thing is asinine and physical copies are extinct and everything is internet streamed, how much willpower do you think consumers will show in choosing between paying and pirating? Already the digital sales curve for music is tapering off and looks to never replace what people used to spend on physical copies. There is nothing to indicate this won't happen to film. DRM is a dead end. And as the music industry has shown, this is not a problem that can be legislated away without dropping the legislative equivalent of the A-bomb (Internet ID's etc). Everything that can be converted to 1's and 0's will become a loss leader for something that can't: t-shirts, a new herpes medication, or a fast food sandwich and this ancillary business model will likely never come close to replacing the profits of a pay-for-copies business model.

2) The Hollywood studio system will defy all the current known laws of physics by becoming increasingly smaller, insular, nepotistic, cannibalistic and harder to break into, until finally succumbing to it's own mounting pressure.

3) There will be more movies made than ever before but the median level of quality will plummet. This generation of creatives has tools that it's forbears could only DREAM OF. It has never been easier or cheaper to be a filmmaker so where are the rising stars? Where is the next Spielberg? Where is the next Orson Welles? Where is the wave of independent talent that everyone predicted would come to wash away yesterday's giants? Nowhere. Didn't happen. False prophecy. Instead what we have is a wave of indistinguishable non-talent and semi-talent. The GOLDEN AGE OF THE AMATEUR is nothing more than a kiddie pool deep enough for giraffes to drown in.

We have a glut of stock photography that enables huge magazines like Time to pay 30 bucks for their cover picture, we have a glut of independent music made by part time musicians who will more than likely never sell enough T-shirts or gigs to free them from their cubical drone day jobs, we have a self-publishing industry that is only making logging companies and book binders rich. Aggregation is the new parasite and it will suck content creator's blood up quicker than the Studios and Record Labels ever could have in their wildest, most extravagant, caviar puking, champagne drunk dreams...

The creators who think this is a great opportunity to escape corporate shackles and slavery just haven't met their new masters yet...

The films of tomorrow will more than likely be micro-budgeted niche things developed for niche audiences in an effort to make next to nil profits. The age of the A-list director, writer, actor is, IMO, almost over. The age of wealthy content creators in general is, IMO, almost over. Unless you prefer quantity to quality, the golden age of cinema is currently in it's evening hours.

I hope I'm wrong.
 
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Come on, Jonathan, if you want to have a conversation, bring a little something to it, that's all I ask. Read what I wrote with a little insight.

Look around. Almost all of the major retail chains have SIGNIFICANT online operations now. Best Buy, Walmart, Target, Radio Shack, CostCo, Home Depot, Walgreens, The Gap, and on and on. Why? Because the profit margins are higher there. They are able to offer MORE product for LESS, resulting in MORE customer satisfaction and LESS overhead. You think this is a trend that is going away? Amazon's growth has been astronomical over its lifetime, because it's a model that gets people what they want (no matter what that is) cheaply and quickly. So YES, absolutely, retailers would like to move into this space and away from the waste that intrinsically comes with expensive overhead from operating physical stores. That doesn't mean that all physical stores will shut down – but as virtual products replace physical ones, those products will be taking up less and less valuable space on the shelves.

Of course, this doesn't apply to your local corner record shop (assuming it's still in business). They provide a different service that isn't based on economy of scale/variety. If they survive, it's because they are able to offer an appreciated editorial voice – a filter – on the vast choice out there. But they cannot compete in a mainstream environment - as should be more than obvious.

Technology doesn't move that fast? You yourself said that it would take fifteen years for that sort of meaningful technological change to occur. I guess we can agree to disagree, but were you on the internet 15 years ago? I was. It was slow, it was limited, and it was expensive. Today, I'm paying $30 a month and streaming HD video in real-time. Apply the same exponential growth of the last fifteen years to the next fifteen and you might as well be teleporting your physical BluRay discs from here to your house on Mars. And if you think the technological hurdle that we can't overcome is GETTING PEOPLE TO PLUG THEIR TVS INTO A COMPUTER, well, I'm glad you're not an engineer. There are already flatscreens on the market that will play YouTube, right out of the box. Just another area that's waiting for (and getting very close to) a killer app.

Of course, there are plenty of businesses that follow your logic. That the guy who's spending $3000 per year on media is worth ten times as much. Except that he's not generating ten times as much word of mouth, he's not connected to ten times as many people, he's not bringing ten times as many interests and opinions to the world. So, actually, he is far less valuable to any given product than you'd think. If I've made an obscure indie movie (and I have), I need that word of mouth to become successful. I need the people who are going to be passionate about what I'm showing them, rather than it being just another movie in their impossibly vast collection. Maybe sometimes that guy blowing mad bank is also the superfan who's going to help my creation reach people, but by no means is that an automatic assumption. The math goes way beyond dollars.

I think arroway is half right and half wrong. I do think there is a lot of new, impressive talent out there that wouldn't have ever been found years ago. Of course, a lot of them are coming out of Italy, Spain, Mexico, Iran, Thailand. There's never been more competition for a filmmaker, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. But I also don't think that you can't make a living doing it. Or that Hollywood will totally collapse. We're witnessing a sea change. It will take years to resolve itself - if it ever does. It's entirely possible that we've reached an age so volatile that nothing will ever settle down.
 
JonathanLB said:
Physical media is and will continue to be far superior. Nobody wants their entire video library on some hard drive, it's just unreasonable.
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What was that quote, when the first iPod was introduced -- "who the hell wants to carry around their entire music collection with them?"

Everyone, apparently.

Like it or not, discs and physical media are disappearing and are going to disappear. VOD doesn't have to mean "computer" -- I've already got dozens of "on demand" channels hooked up to my 67" HDTV. I don't have to plink around with the computer... I mean, I've got netflix "instant viewing" but I never have bothered with it. But I've run a few "on demand" programs off Time Warner Cable.

It's the way television and video are going to go. Quote me on it, write it down, and check back in five years, and we'll see whether physical media and blu-ray can hold a candle to video-on-demand and downloading.
 
I agree. When I was at a TV fesitival this year the air was full of both fear and hope of the evil internet. It seemed to me that traditional broadcasters were tightening their sphincters, hoping to go back to TV's traditional roots of classic three camera, closed-ended sitcoms. On the other side of the coin, the 'new media' group was bigger than ever, and some people were flat out only focusing on 'new-media.'

The broadcasters know it and they are trying to "fight back" at 'new media' with what they know and can do best: "high-quality" fiction families will be drawn to every night. It's a dying market.
 
Ryan Paige said:
Somebody like Amazon or Netflix could benefit a good deal from such a switch. Best Buy and Wal-Mart could just as easily get cut out completely.

And that's before even getting into why Best Buy and Wal-Mart carry such products in their stores in the first place.



The worry comes from finding a model to make as much money as before, but the bright side for them is that if we've learned anything about "new media" so far is that a whole hell of a lot of the most popular stuff is stuff that the traditional studios and networks produce.
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Best Buy & Wal-Mart have the money and ability to go head to head on any of this, especially Walmart, they have an extremely effective computer management system for running their operations. I'd bet a download operation is something they could get running quickly and effectively.

Once again the Studios have survived because they do turn out the best (best = sales) cinema. If we want in, then we have to be good enough for our neighbor to choose our story from the massive pile of cinematic stories available. There is no easy way to succeed other than hard work and good fortune. Because VOD requires virtually nothing for a VOD outlet. I believe we will all have a place to sell our wares, but that doesn't mean much because selling is much more than getting a spot next to the other products. In physical stores, it's another story; shelf space is very tough to get. They can't just sell anything. It has to move (turn rate) and needs to represent the values of the retailer. Often in a grocery store a producer of a new product has to pay the store to place their product on the shelf! Crazy, but hopefully after a marketing campaign the grocery item starts to sell and the producer makes money and no longer pays for their product to sit on the shelf of the retailer.

VOD doesn't have this limited shelf restriction. Fortunately it's pure head to head capitalistic free market competition for us and the viewer. This is the best condition for everyone and especially the art of storytelling. The era is just beginning.

Screenwriting is the foundation of this competition and that is why Hollywood execs put so much into the development phase, and often (from what I've been told) screw up the story with too many cooks in the kitchen, because they just don't know what makes a good story --- and they're pretty damn smart. We too need to put very serious time and energy into development so the rest of the effort is worth it -- to all the film makers on our team: cast, crew and especially the audience, the people who make it possible for us to be professionals.

VOD is our chance. May the best storytellers & producers win regardless of their origin, cheers :beer:
 
Ryan Paige said:
It seems unlikely, though, that we'll go to BestBuy.com or Walmart.com to download our videos - just like we don't go to BestBuy.com or Walmart.com to download our music.
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But we DO go to Amazon to download our music (some do, anyway). So I have to assume you're making that statement wholly on the basis of brand affiliation. It "feels weird" to you that BestBuy.com would offer that service now, just like it probably felt a little weird when Amazon started selling everything in the world instead of just books.

For that matter, these companies probably don't care all that much what the NAME of the thing is, as long as they're at the end of the revenue stream. So if MovieStreamCo is a wholly owned subsidiary of Walmart, what's the difference?

...

To tack onto Barry's excellent reinforcement of the point we've been making, how many of you have linked up your Netflix account to your XBox Live account. It doesn't get much easier than that to stream movies right to your TV. The quality's a little rough at the moment, but as often as not I don't care... and it's only going to improve.
 
It is not hard at all to watch VOD, I do it almost every day or every other day, from the internet to my big screen TV. With a $99 Roku box, best investment you can make. It comes with a remote control, it took all of about 5 minutes to set it up to work wirelessly, with my home wifi encrypted network. I turn on my TV, switch to the "PC" mode and my TV connects to my Roku, and poof I see the Netflix menu, Amazon VOD, and now MLB (baseball). The netflix menu brings up my Netflix queue, easy to watch, pause, resume, rewatch, rate the movie, etc; I watched Gran Torino off Amazon and let me tell you it was fricken DVD quality and I only have 1.5Mbps download speed on my home network. So no PC involved, it is easy for anybody to go this route, no PC involved. The little black Roku box is the size of a paperback novel and makes zero noise. I fricken love the VOD off the Roku box, it has spoiled me! Unlimited no extra cost viewing off Netflix, and no waiting for movies by mail, and no driving to the store or get or return a movie. That is why I see VOD as the future, the Roku box simplicity, and now the equivalent is built right into newer tv sets and DVD/br players.

And as others have hinted, the whole VOD as well as user ratings on Yahoo! movies and Amazon and such, gives indie filmmakers a fair shot at word of mouth distribution. When I watch VOD, I could give a rat's behind whether Joe the Filmmaker or Sony Studios made the film-- if the other viewers rate it to my content and the logline interests me then I watch it. That means a low budget well done indie, with a GREAT STORY written by none other than one of us dvxuser writers, stands a good chance, since it can be distributed easy and cheap by selling it to Netflix and other VOD distributtors (I remember reading of some dvxuser filmmakers that sold their films to netflix for a tidy profit).
 
arroway said:
The GOLDEN AGE OF THE AMATEUR is nothing more than a kiddie pool deep enough for giraffes to drown in.
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There's actually a lot of substance in the post, but I just had to give props to this. Every so often someone here just comes out with something brilliant.
 
Buying and Selling media is soooooooo 20th century...

:)

Free (ad-supported) stuff is the new black... :grin::Drogar-Dum(DBG):
 
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