Category Archives: The Mediascape

More celebrities are about to rise from the dead

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Alex Lee, writing in WIRED UK, reveals that the messy legal scrap to bring celebrities back from the dead is only going to get weirder.

Recall that earlier this month Twitter convulsed when it was announced that 55-year dead James Dean had been “cast” in a new Vietnam war movie called Finding Jack.

(Never mind that numerous actors in franchise films have already been resurrected with CGI to continue playing roles into which they once breathed life: Peter Cushing, Carrie Fisher and Paul Walker.)

Here’s where the weird comes in.

As reported by Alex, the estates of dead celebrities hold “rights of publicity” that are typically licensed to companies for exploitation.

But, as soon as 70 years pass after a celebrity’s death, that right expires. Sometimes, it’s just 50 years.

Jennifer Rothman, professor of law at Loyola Marymount University and author of The Right of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined for a Public World says when the term expires:

“That would make them fair game.”

Of note, a new company has emerged to represent dead celebrities: Worldwide XR.

My take: This was bound to happen in our digital age. It’s just too easy to juggle the bits to create new audio and visuals. I think the backlash speaks to an unspoken feeling that this violates basic privacy and the passage of time. On the other hand — it also has the power to raise the dead and allow us to go on living forever. Or conquer space:

Data usurps Content as King

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Scott Roxborough, writing for The Hollywood Reporter, reports that Indie Execs Say Content Is No Longer King — Data Is.

“Business models on which the industry has relied for decades are breaking apart as studio blockbusters grab an increasingly large share of the domestic box office and streaming platforms splinter the audience for niche and indie fare.”

Speaking at an AFM Financing conference, Erik Feig says the new key is to target a niche audience: “You find a group of people who are passionate about something — and you start with them. You make a movie that will satisfy that niche audience and then you extrapolate beyond that, turn that audience into the proselytizers for your film.”

How do you find that niche audience?

DATA.

I’ve blogged before about the ‘king’ of data: Toronto’s Wattpad who used their data to help create After, a teen romantic thriller.

Back at the conference, Christian Parkes asked, “Is content still king? I’d say data is king. If you aren’t relying heavily on it, you are going to lose.”

For the record, it may have been Bill Gates who coined the term Content is King in 1997.

My take: maybe The Audience is King? With the proliferation of viewing opportunities (plus lots of non-screen activities available) the audience is more valuable than ever. Content and data are both important. But lets not forget that show business/storytelling requires an audience to validate the experience.

Horror Movie Social Media Marketing Case Study

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With Halloween fresh in mind, I thought it would be appropriate to look back at the CMF Trends‘s excellent post Ravenous: Marketing a Horror Movie in the Social Media Era.

Using Ravenous as a case study, we learn the team started with a social media marketing campaign to “develop a community of Quebec horror film fans to generate a significant number of ‘Likes’ as well as followers, tags, shares and retweets on social networks.” They did this by:

  1. A micro-site to collect subscriptions to their newsletter
  2. A contest for 100 zombie extras
  3. Four video demos

Next they watched the reactions of their subscribers and followers to various news items such as casting and distribution announcements.

This helped them understand their best platforms and main influencers.

The article then moves on the review sites. In their case, IMDb and Letterboxd proved to be their most popular.

The article closes with these four recommendations:

  1. Use more visual and video elements (such as gifs, memes, etc.) to feed the social network accounts more systematically and in other than informational contexts (humoristic, based on the news and calendar, etc.)
  2. Develop more promotional content such as the exhibit of storyboards… and format it in such a way as to be able to monetize it with ultra-fans.
  3. Distribute on a larger scale all of the official visual elements and those designed by fan communities throughout the world in accordance with a deployment schedule developed with everyone involved in the film (distributors, sales agents, festivals, influencers) to the greatest extent possible.
  4. Analyze, target and reassess main influencer types and functions at each stage of the film’s operational cycle (festival, local premiere, theatre release, VOD distribution).

My take: fascinating reading! I think almost all of this can be applied to any indie film. Glad I now know about Letterboxd!

The Internet turns 50!

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Last Sunday, October 29, 2019, the Internet turned 50 years old.

We’ve grown from the 1970 topology:

to this in 2019:

internetmap072

Okay, here’s a real representation of the Internet.

What’s next? The Interplanetary Internet of course.

My take: It’s important to note that the World Wide Web is not the same thing as the Internet. (The Web wouldn’t be invented for another 20 years!) The Internet is the all-important backbone for the numerous networking protocols that traverse it, http(s) being only one.

Why your first feature should be a horror movie

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Bronson Arcuri has taken NPR‘s Planet Money podcast on The Scariest Thing In Hollywood and turned it into a new genre: the horror movie news story. Watch 8 Reasons Horror Movies Are Scary Good Business:

His central thesis is: Horror movies are cheap to make and insanely popular.

And here are the reasons he says horror films are cheap to make:

  1. Limited Locations
  2. No Talking
  3. Fear is the Unknown
  4. Cheap Costumes, Cheap Props, No CGI
  5. Low Budget is the Right Budget
  6. Profit Sharing
  7. Quantity Over Quality
  8. Sequels

The Numbers bears this thesis out.

My take: I don’t like being scared or afraid and so I’ve never been a big fan of horror movies. Any suggestions on titles for a crash course?

Distribber, and other aggregators

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As the news of Distribber‘s bankruptcy spreads, Noam Kroll has a great summary: What All Indie Filmmakers Can Learn From Distribber’s Failure.

What is an aggregator? In simplistic terms, film distributors might get your film into theatres whereas aggregators might put your film online. Aggregators have relationships with all major online outlets and know what they want: both for content and for deliverables.

Noam mentions a couple of aggregators to check out:

Stephen Follows has done some excellent analysis of Distribber’s movies. Its most successful client seems to have been Survivor:

What kinds of movies did Distribber attract?

My take: if I had a feature to distribute, I’d probably go with FilmHub because I don’t have the kind of cash other aggregators demand up front.

Netflix floats bonuses for winning filmmakers

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Lucas Shaw writes for Bloomberg that Netflix Plans to Pay Bonuses to Filmmakers When Movies Succeed:

Netflix vs. Amazon Prime vs. Hulu Plus

“Netflix Inc. plans to pay filmmakers, actors and movie producers a bonus if their films are successful, a new incentive aimed at winning projects that might otherwise go to rival studios.”

This would be a departure for the currently-leading streamer:

“The bonuses are different than Hollywood’s traditional “back-end” arrangements, where filmmakers get a percentage of box-office money. Since Netflix’s films don’t get released widely at theaters — if they hit the big screen at all — there’s no hope for a big payoff there…. Netflix has never offered back-end deals. It covers the full cost of production and pays producers a premium on top of that, granting them a profit before the project is even released. These deals are a safer bet because the producer is guaranteed to make a significant amount of money, but they also cap the potential profit.”

For a great primer on the various business models, see Joe Flint‘s article The War for Talent in the Age of Netflix in the Wall Street Journal:

“For decades, the formula for producers to make big money in TV was for a show to stay on the air long enough to have 100 episodes or more — enough to sell reruns to other TV networks. The bulk of the profits for production studios and show creators have come from those “syndication” deals, not the initial fees to produce and air the show. The creators of “Seinfeld,” “Friends” and “The Simpsons” made hundreds of millions of dollars this way, as stakeholders who were entitled to a cut of the profits…. Netflix did away with that model when it started wooing superstar producers to make content exclusively for the service, including “Grey’s Anatomy” creator Shonda Rhimes and “Glee” producer Ryan Murphy. Netflix paid nine-figure upfront fees to Ms. Rhimes and Mr. Murphy. Netflix doesn’t sell reruns of its shows to other platforms, so there weren’t any syndication profits to be had for the producers, and the producers wanted a bigger check to work for Netflix.”

With the streaming marketplace to get much busier in November, it seems as if Netflix has been forced to consider sweetening its deals with filmmakers.

My take: with number of streaming services to double very soon, feature and episodic producers have more choice of outlets than ever before. How will the various streamers differentiate themselves, thereby attracting different audiences? How much overlap will the market bear, meaning how many services will folks pay for?

Sandvine profiles Internet usage in 2019

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Cam Cullen,VP of Global Marketing for Sandvine, has announced the release of the 2019 Global Internet Phenomena Report (registration required.)

There are lots of valuable takeaways here.

For instance, this year Netflix has been bumped into second place for downstream traffic by HTTP Media Stream, the collection of video streaming sites that use a standard video streaming protocol that Sandvine does not track individually.

Nevertheless, Netflix still accounts for 12.6% of global downstream traffic.

More:

  • Video is over 60% of the total downstream volume of traffic on the internet.
  • Netflix is 12.60% of the total downstream volume of traffic across the entire internet and 11.44% of all internet traffic.
  • Google is 12% of overall internet traffic, driven by YouTube, search, and the Android ecosystem.
  • Gaming traffic and gaming-related bandwidth consumption is increasing as gaming downloads, Twitch streaming, and eSports go mainstream.
  • BitTorrent is over 27% of total upstream volume of traffic, and over 44% in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) alone.
  • Facebook applications make up over 15% of the total internet traffic in APAC, the Asia-Pacific region.

And fragmentation is only going to get worse. “There are a number of new services that will be launching in the next year that may yet again change the traffic landscape by the next Phenomena Report:

  • Disney+: Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, and decades of TV and movies, all priced extremely well with compelling original content. How could this fail?
  • Apple TV+: With the offer of free original content with purchase of an Apple device, this could drive up usage in Apple-heavy markets.
  • Universal: Another library with decades of content, with attention being given to “The Office,” which was one of Netflix’s most watched TV shows.
  • HBO Max: Warner Bro’s offer with another massive content library that will build on HBO Go and will leverage popular TV series, especially “Friends”, this service promises to be, ‘there for you when the rain starts to fall.’
  • Other video services: DC Universe, Facebook Watch, and Discovery have all announced planned services.
  • Google Stadia: It’s not just streaming video that is coming, Stadia is maybe the “Netflix of Gaming,” perhaps something totally unique with bandwidth requirements between 10-35Mbps and expectations of low latency.”

Even more interesting: over 43% of the internet is consumed by Netflix, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple.

“The biggest bandwidth consumption for applications or content libraries for each brand included:

  • Google (Alphabet): YouTube, Android Market, Google Search, Google Docs, Google Drive, DoubleDlick, Gmail, and Crashlytics
  • Netflix: Netflix Video
  • Facebook: Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Video, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Oculus Rift
  • Microsoft: Xbox Live, Windows Update, Skype, Outlook 365, Office 365, SharePoint, OneDrive, Windows Store, LinkedIn
  • Apple: iTunes, iCloud, Apple Software Update, FaceTime, Apple Music, Apple.com, iCloud Photo Stream, Mac App Store
  • Amazon: Amazon Prime, Twitch, Amazon.com, Alexa, Amazon Glacier, Amazon Music”

I highly recommend registering and downloading the 23 page PDF for all the insights.

My take: I think the most interesting stat here is the 43% share of the Internet by the six largest tech companies. It won’t be long before their share is more than half. What happens when more than half of the traffic on the information super-highway is by the Big Six?

Theatrical dreams, quantified

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Stephen Follows and Bruce Nash in a post for the American Film Market answer the question How Many Independent Films Get A Theatrical Release?

For 2017 films, as of mid-August 2019, the answer is, “Not many.”

Fully three out of four films did not report any box office earnings. And only one in six reported theatrical earnings of over $100,000.

However, some genres performed better than others:

“Large releases are the realm of the drama, with 23% of independent dramas earning over $100,000 at the domestic box office. Comedies (16%) and thrillers (15%) are also more likely to get into this top tier.”

In addition, provenance matters:

“Adaptations are three times as likely to secure a large theatrical release compared to independent films with original screenplays. That’s a significant jump, and shows how hard it is for an independent film based on original material to get a substantial theatrical release.”

They conclude:

“Seeing a film played in a theater is still regarded as the best way to experience the art form. It’s also, understandably, the goal of many film producers…. However, the numbers say that an independent film will, five times out of six, not go on to make much money in theaters. Knowing how to maximize revenue from the home market remains an essential skill for an independent producer.”

My take: these are sobering statistics! But then I think of how many films I’ve seen in a theatre versus the number I’ve seen at home. The one bright light in exhibition is Theatrical-On-Demand. See Tugg, Gathr or Demand.Film

Curation coming to Netflix?

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Sarah Perez of TechCrunch reports that Netflix tests human-driven curation with launch of ‘Collections’:

“Netflix is testing a new way to help users find TV shows and movies they’ll want to watch with the launch of a “Collections” feature, currently in testing on iOS devices…. According to Netflix, the titles are curated by experts on the company’s creative teams, and are organized into these collections based on factors like genre, tone, story line and character traits.”

A Netflix spokesperson confirmed the test, saying:

“We’re always looking for new ways to connect our fans with titles we think they’ll love, so we’re testing out a new way to curate Netflix titles into collections on the Netflix iOS app.”

My take: This is fascinating because it’s a bit of deja vu all over again. Years ago Netflix bragged that its algorithm would learn from our viewing habits and only recommend movies to us that it calculated we would want to watch. It worked to some extent; my home screen is quite different from my wife’s. However, we both still have to do a lot of scrolling to find something we want to watch. I think brining back curation is an acknowledgement that we all yearn for some degree of commonality. Remember that, before the internet changed everything, the media was a de facto curator, only showing us what they had already selected. I would like to see a blending of curation and algorithmic selection so that I can see what the masses are consuming in Collections, and personalized offbeat suggestions in Recommended for Me.