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.

How to film an indie feature

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Ted Sim of Indy Mogul recently interviewed Nigel Bluck, DOP on The Peanut Butter Falcon, to discover How to Film an Indie Feature.

Some takeaways (mostly direct quotes) for me:

  • Shooting single-camera wastes a lot of people’s time.
  • Light for the whole scene, not just one shot. Get yourself into a backlit situation for the master and then you’re going to be fine.
  • The best thing you can do is to take light away and start shaping things that way.
  • Shoot a Master and a Sub-Master. Then shoot two Over-the-Shoulder Medium shots. Those two setups gets you the minimum coverage you need for a scene.
  • Night shooting: go to the street at night and you look at what’s there; look at the colour temperature of the lights that are there and the lights that you put in, make them the same colour temperature so it all belongs in one reality.
  • Choose less gear and make smart solutions.

My take: I have never heard of the French Over, so that’s a new angle for me. Love Nigel’s approach to doing more with less. Although some find two-camera shoots scary, I will say the music video I made with two-cameras was so much easier to edit. His lighting philosophy makes it possible.

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?

Michael Bay is back — but not on the big screen

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Netflix continues to attract high-profile filmmakers to its streaming platform.

December 13th’s 6 Underground stars Ryan Reynolds, was written by Deadpool duo Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese, and is directed by none other than Michael “Mr. Bayhem” Bay.

I know what you’re thinking. Michael Bay? That 1990’s hack?

Well, did you also know that, as a director, his films have grossed over $6 billion?

Then there’s this:

My take: this film looks like a lot of fun! We’ll certainly watch it over the holidays. (btw, that is a really long trailer clocking in at a solid three minutes!)

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?

Meet the world’s smallest stabilized camera

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Insta360 has released the world’s smallest action camera, the GO. It is so small it’s potentially a choking hazard.

They call it the “20 gram steady cam.”

Here are some specs:

  • Standard, Interval Shooting, Timelapse, Hyperlapse, and Slow Motion modes
  • 8GB of on-board storage
  • iPhone or Android Connections
  •  IPX4 water-resistant
  • Charge Time: GO: approx. 20min, Charger Case: approx. 1hr
  • .Mp4 files exported via app at 1080@25fps; Timelapse and Hyperlapse at 1080@30fps;  Slow Motion: 1600×900@100fps and output at 1600×900@30fps

Some sample footage:

See some product reviews.

You can buy it now for $270 in Canada.

My take: this is too cool! My favourite features are the slow motion and the barrel roll you can add in post. This technology sparks lots of storytelling ideas!