The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘studios’

As you may have heard by now, Netflix has agreed to movie studio demands that they not rent new movies until 28 days after their DVD release. The idea is that this will help drive DVD sales, which have been plummeting in recent years, taking billions out of the pockets of the studios. Right now, this deal is only in place with Warner Brothers, but you can be sure that the other studios are going to want the same deal. Netflix says it’s going along with this because most of its customers care more about catalog (older) releases than newer ones. But the popularity charts suggest otherwise.

Each month, Netflix releases a list of the top 25 rented movies for the previous month on its Facebook page. This week, they gave out the data for January 2010, and guess what? Of the top 25 rentals, over half (13) would not have been fully available to rent for the month under the new 28-day rule. And some wouldn’t have been available at all. Clearly, this new policy is going to have a bigger effect on Netflix users’ rental habits that the company wants you to believe.

Here’s a full list of the top 25 rented films in January 2010 with their DVD release data next to the title, followed by a yes/no note of if they would have been available to rent for the full month of January:

1) Julie & Julia: December 8 —— No

2) District 9: December 22 ——- No

3) 500 Days of Summer: December 22 ——- No

4) Angels and Demons: November 24 —– Yes

5) The Proposal: October 13 ——-Yes

6) The Hangover: December 15 ——— No

7) Star Trek: November 17 —Yes

Up: November 10 ——-Yes

9) The Taking Of Pelham 123: November 3 —– Yes

10) Night At The Museum 2: December 1 —– Yes

11) The Ugly Truth: November 10 ——- Yes

12) Public Enemies: December 8 —– No

13) The Hurt Locker: January 12 ——- No

14) Inglourious Basterds: December 15 ——- No

15) Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs: January 5 —— No

16) Funny People: November 24 —- Yes

17) G.I. Joe: November 3 —— Yes

18) Harry Potter 6: December 8 ——- No

19) Terminator 4: December 1 — Yes

20) Gamer: January 19 —- No

21) A Perfect Getaway: December 29 —— No

22) Extract: December 22 —— No

23) 9: December 29 ——– No

24) Transformers 2: October 20 —— Yes

25) Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past: September 22 —- Yes

A few other things to note. First, two of the movies on this list benefitted from the fact that December 1 was a Tuesday (the day DVDs are released). In other months, these films may have missed the 28-day window depending on when the first Tuesday of the month was. Second, Netflix actually started implementing its 28-day rule in January, so films such as The Invention Of Lying were already subject to this and as such, not available to rent from Netflix. It’s hard to know if these movies would have made the top rental list even if it were available, but it’s worth noting (and more on that below). Third, it’s already a bit difficult to rent new releases due to demand, so it’s certainly possible that if Netflix focused on supply of newer films rather than removing them until 28 days later, many of the newer films would be even higher on the list.

Darth Vader’s fatherly coming out. Tinanic’s King of the World moment. There Will Be Blood’s sobering lecture on milkshakes.

Whether you want to poke fun at something, embellish a love note, or just prove a point, there’s probably a movie scene out there that can help you do it. People reference scenes all the time in their daily lives, and on the web it’s not uncommon for a blogger to accentuate their post with a particularly relevant clip. But for their popularity, there still isn’t an established site that’s known as the place to find a movie clip — YouTube and Hulu are always worth a shot, but they can be very hit or miss. AnyClip, a new startup that’s launching today at TechCrunch 50, wants to be the solution, with a searchable database of movie scenes.

There are, of course, other places to look for movie clips on the web. But these all have their faults: YouTube is riddled with content that may be somehow related to the scene you’re looking for, but acted out by people who most definitely aren’t the original actors. All of Hulu’s content is licensed straight from content owners so you don’t have to worry about issues with user-generated clip, but their library is still quite limited.

To help make the search engine as accurate and thorough as possible, AnyClip draws its data from a number of sources: first, it has compiled publically available data on the web and associated it with each film. The site has also created a Mechanical Turk-style operation, with a team of humans inputting meta data for each film (workers are contributing from all over the world, with most of them coming from the US and Israel). On average, each film in the database has 500 tags.

The site is also launching a public API, which will allow developers to query its database of movie clips from their applications.

SP: The content deals are really hard.
A: Yes, they’re very challenging. We’re in discussions with everyone. Mickey Schulhof (former Sony of America CEO) is a principle investor.
SP: I’ve seen deals like this take a decade…

A: Everyone has an emphasis on long from, but nobody is paying attention to the short formats. As a result you can acquire content for less than you would elsewhere.
SP: I think fear is a big factor, and if you’re focusing on short form content you may be able to overcome some of that fear.
RH: I think you’ll be competing with tags on YouTube clips. Another question is I would elaborate some kind of discovery. One of the other things is that people will only type so much on a search, but they’ll keep clicking on things. And the more money you make the more the studios will try to renegotiate deals to take that..
A: We invigorate interest with these clips, so it helps them.

Jason Calacanis: If not all the studios sign up. What do you think you can do with fair use? Could you do 15 seconds of content?
A: I’m not that interested in having tons of content that they don’t want us to have. We can’t build a business on the backs of their content illegally and hope it works. Over time we will get it all. AnyClip is a dream, a vision. We can start with very comprehensive comedy, or horror coverage.
JC: Do you see this going into other verticals, like AnySportsClip?
A: There’s a reason we didn’t name it AnyMovieClip. But we’re on film now because they’re used to selling it.
SP: I totally believe your argument that this allows studios to better monetize back catalog. Lets people monetize stuff that there would be no other reason to talk about. This is the kind of thing that absolutely should happen. But it will take twice as you long to make those details.

Images:

Videos:

Other Coverage:
TC50: AnyClip searches movies for quotes, famous moments VentureBeat.

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Praise jeebus! Marvel’s Executive Vice President of Global Digital Media Group, Ira Rubenstein, said Marvel is done making crap games based on movies. We are not doing movie-based games anymore,” Rubenstein said following yesterday’s announcement of Digital Comics for PSN at Sony’s GamesCom press conference.

Go here to read the rest:
Hooray!: Don’t expect crappy movie games from Marvel anymore

I will personally kick each and everyone who purchases or downloads this app in the teeth. I’m serious, people. I dare you to say “tat” or “ink”

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Worst. Idea. Ever.: Tattoo Mania for the iPhone

Movie piracy is a problem, but it’s not as huge of a problem as music piracy was this past decade. While certainly the size of the movie files and the need for fast broadband connections to get them in a reasonable amount of time plays into it somewhat, also helping is the fact that there are some fairly decent ways to get movies quickly, for a pretty fair price these days. And now Hollywood is apparently trying to change that.

The studios are starting to rally around a horrible new idea: Keeping new releases out of Redbox and more importantly, Netflix for 30 days. Let me repeat that: They think Netflix shouldn’t be able to ship many new movies to you until 30 days after they’re released on DVD.

Now, this doesn’t appear to be set in stone yet for Netflix, as the studios are said to be currently negotiating this with the company, but it is what the studios want. And the strategy is going forward with Redbox, which recently filed a lawsuit against 20th Century Fox over the same issue. And now, with Universal and Warner Brothers getting on board, another lawsuit seems likely.

And in a move that couldn’t be less surprising, Blockbuster is on the wrong side of this. Despite the company having a strategy to do a massive roll-out of kiosks like the ones Redbox has, it is all in favor of the 30-day window, based on comments CEO Jim Keyes made during its Q2 earnings call.

Why? Well the company once again completely bombed in those earnings, posting a net loss of $36.9 million, while overall sales fell 22 percent in the quarter. It is getting fleeced by the likes of Redbox and Netflix and needs to gain some sort of competitive advantage in movie rentals. A 30-day rental window for its stores would certainly offer that.

Of course, as the name synonymous with movie rentals for the past couple of decades, Blockbuster could have used its power to get ahead of some of these trends (by-mail rentals, cheap kiosks, online rentals/streaming), but didn’t. So now they will have to rely on the movie studios attempting to put stricter rules in place for gaining access to its movies right away. Rules, that would seem to be basically prodding users to obtain those movies illegally.

If the studios are allowing some places like Blockbuster stores to rent movies on day one, but limit Netflix from doing the same, how many of the millions of Netflix users are going to drive to a Blockbuster store to get that movie? Some certainly will, but a lot will also turn to the web and simply download the movie. And some who have never done that before will learn how to get around such a ridiculous restriction.

And Blockbuster’s comments on this are pitiful. Having failed so far with its movies-by-mail approach, online approach, and set-top box approach, Blockbuster is now turning to kiosks. It hopes to have some 2,500 of them by the end of the year and 7,000 of them by next year. Some of their ideas for them are pretty laughable (a good example is the digital transfer of movies to portable media players, but no iPod/iPhone support, meaning that basically no one would use them), but more importantly, Blockbuster is against the two things that made this solution work for Redbox: Availability and price.

Keyes comments during the earnings call indicate that he believe the $0.99 price that Redbox offers its movies for is far too low for a sustainable model. He probably doesn’t mean for Redbox’s end, because they seem to be doing just fine — which is to say, just about the opposite of Blockbuster — using that model. Instead, he seems to be saying that Hollywood can’t survive on such a model, which again, is probably not true, but it’s good that Keyes is the movie studios new PR agent.

Here’s the best part of what he said though:

A vending rental window would enhance the complementary relationship between Blockbuster stores and Blockbuster kiosks. On Fox, Universal, and now Warner titles, for example, we can be far more aggressive in filling the store shelves with product to assure 100% availability of hot new releases. After 30 to 45 days, we can then make use of that product in our vending channel at a substantially reduced cost of goods, since that product will be partially amortized. Our customers can then use Blockbuster stores for depth and breadth of selection and assurance of hot new releases being available on Friday night or Saturday night. The customer can use vending kiosks then for value and convenience.

So basically, he wants to use the studio’s ridiculous 30-day window to prop up his own stores, which are flailing badly. He sees a movie rental ecosystem in which you get new releases from Blockbuster stores, and then slightly older options from the kiosks. Of course, both of those methods of getting movies are already dead, Keyes just doesn’t realize it yet.

He’s investing in these kiosks because Blockbuster has failed elsewhere to make inroads against competitors. But eventually, everyone knows that all of this distribution is going to go online, and then Blockbuster will be left with thousands of kiosks that are useless, just like its store are becoming. At least those won’t be the black holes for money that the stores are, I guess.

Supporting Hollywood’s ridiculous and dangerous idea to place 30-day rental holds on Netflix and Redbox, might prop up his failing brick and mortar stores a bit, but the idea that it will save them long term is laughable.

And Hollywood shouldn’t be tricked into thinking this 30-day rental window is a good idea because they have Blockbuster’s support. Blockbuster doesn’t matter anymore. And they well pay for that mistake in piracy.

[photo: flickr/gwaar]

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4volt Jansen Walker Beta 1 from a3o Studios on Vimeo .

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