For the longest time I avoided the movie. What? Kids getting into fights kinda movie? I thought. But once I watched one, I realized the last time I got this excited about a movie was with the Bourne movies. Movie effects can't carry a movie. But they can help a strong plot. And there has to be a timelessness to the theme.
Technological advances will not cure the basic savagery of human nature. There are other remedies to the savagery. And The Hunger Games speak to that. With the Bourne movies it was the idea of a super soldier going to battle with a super government agency. That is the eternal tussle between the individual and the state.
People talk about the TV screen. And there the problems stand in the form of legacy companies sitting on mountains of great content they are not willing to share in new ways. The technology part is easy.
But I'd like to talk about the movie screen at the movie theater. Digital screens could still have projectors. But there would be no physical film. And the theater owner would not decide what movie to play, or even the show times.
Every movie ever made anywhere would be an option. Once a certain number of people buy tickets to that movie, it would get scheduled to play. Some places that number might be 10, some places 50, some places 100. The movie owners get their cut. The theater owners get their cut.
And you'd get to see online how close to the threshold a particular movie you desire is. You could run social media campaigns to get your friends to join you. Ticket buyers would thus help with the marketing.
No movie would ever get old. All movies would have immediate global distribution. I think the results would be surprising. Bollywood might take over the world at that point.
California Academy of Science - Water is Life from Jessica Brillhart on Vimeo. Part of the Steinhart Aquarium at their museum in San Francisco, CA. Formerly a five-screen, 360-degree experience. Flattened to two for your sanity and mine. Narrated by Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
Image via CrunchBaseMindfood described as books, movies and music. Better than subscription is ad supported, but subscription is also pretty good. You pay a monthly fee and you get to access all books, movies and music ever created, being created. The movie people don't get this. They are like, oh no, we have to punish you by a few weeks if you are not going to show up at the theater.
The music people get it a little. They are like, if you are going to get the music for free anyways, we are going to make you pay for live concerts. And the movie people are like, we can't get Brad Pitt show up at every movie theater. That's the whole point, that he can't be everywhere. Al Pacino does some Broadway stuff. But that is one location.
The Technium: What Books Will Become: a screen that we watch can watch us. The tiny eyes built into your tablet, the camera that faces you, can read your face. Prototype face tracking software can already recognize your mood, and whether you are paying attention, and more importantly where on the screen you are paying attention. It can map whether you are confused by a passage, or delighted, or bored. That means that the text could adapt to how it is perceived. Perhaps it expands into more detail, or shrinks during speed reading, or changes vocabulary when you struggle, or reacts in a hundred possible ways. There are numerous experiments playing with adaptive text. One will give you different summaries of characters and plot depending on how far you've read. ..... books with moving images. We don't have a word for these yet .... Text inside of moving images as well as images inside of text. .... This hybrid of movies and books will require a whole set of tools we don't have right now. Presently it is difficult to browse moving images, or to parse a movie, or to annotate a frame in a movie. Ideally we'd like to manipulate kinetic images with the same facility, ease and power that we manipulate text -- indexing it, referencing, cut and pasting, summarizing, quoting, linking, and paraphrasing the content. As we gain these tools (and skills) we'll make a class of highly visual books, ideal for training and education, which we can study, rewind, and study again. They will be books we can watch or TV we can read. ......... The current custodians of ebooks -- Amazon, Google and the publishers -- have agreed to cripple the liquidity of ebooks by preventing readers from cut-and-pasting text easily, or to copy large sections of a book, or to otherwise seriously manipulate the text. But eventually the text of ebooks will be liberated, and the true nature of books will blossom. ...... We can even filter the most popular highlights of all readers, and in this manner begin to read a book in a new way. I can also read the highlights of a particular friend, scholar or critic. ....... Reading becomes more social. We can share not just the titles of books we are reading, but our reactions and notes as we read them. Today, we can highlight a passage. Tomorrow we will be able to link passages. We can add a link from a phrase in the book we are reading to a contrasting phrase in another book we've read; from a word in a passage to an obscure dictionary, from a scene in a book to a similar scene in a movie. ........ Even a minor good work could accumulate a wiki-like set of critical comments tightly bound to the actual text. ....... dense hyperlinking among books would make every book a networked event ....... Wikipedia is the first networked book. ...... This deep rich hyperlinking will weave all networked books into one large meta-book, the universal library. Over the next century, scholars and fans, aided by computational algorithms, will knit together the books of the world into a single networked literature. ....... no work, no idea, stands alone, but that all good, true and beautiful things are networks, ecosystems of intertwingled parts, related entities and similar works ........ The complete universal library, all books in all languages, will soon be available on any screen. There will be many ways to access a book, but for most people most of the time, any particular book will essentially be free. (You'll pay a monthly fee for "all you can read.") Access is easy, but finding a book, or getting it attention will be hard, so the importance of the book's network will grow, because the network is what brings in readers. ...... A book is an attention unit. A fact is interesting, an idea is important, but only a story, a good argument, a well-crafted narrative is amazing, never to be forgotten. As Muriel Rukeyser said, "The universe is made of stories, not atoms." ...... In the long run (next 10-20 years) we won't pay for individual books any more than we'll pay for individual songs or movies.
Reducing price and enhancing quality is what businesses strive for. But the music and movie industries have been bummed out for years now because modern technology has managed to drive the price point to zero. That is like the price point attaining nirvana, no?
I just finished watching one of my favorite movies by my favorite actor on the planet, Amitabh Bachchan. It is a full length movie that you can watch legitimately on YouTube. I think they made me watch three 30-second ads along the way. And I was happy to watch those ads. This is the comment I left with the video.
"Amazing business model. I hope your library size grows by a factor of 1,000. Hollywood should also follow this business model. Don't fight the technology. Instead come up with better business models. Great lesson that I hope more people learn."
This particular movie has had almost a half million views to date on YouTube.
I love it that the movie has Englishsubtitles. I understand perfect Hindi, but the subtitles allow me to share the movie with those who don't. I have always believed Amitabh has global appeal. He is the most recognized face on the planet.
I grew up watching Amitabh.
And, by the way, the ads were served by Google. So all movie producers have to do is agree to use the YouTube platform to serve full length movies. After a movie has been out in the theater one summer, put it up on YouTube. What about one year? You keep making money ad infinitum, pun intended.
Did AnyClip.com launch recently? Because I have been having a stream of thoughts about the site. My latest thoughts are to do with the bottleneck the site is facing. How do you get the movie studios to play along?
You have to start by acknowledging that they are nervous. Nervous as nervous can be. You have to acknowledge that. To them. There has to be some I feel your pain talk.
Time: Cisco's New Router: Trouble For Hollywood The CRS-3, a network routing system, is able to stream every film ever made, from Hollywood to Bombay, in under four minutes...... the business equivalent of an earthquake for the likes of Universal Studios and Paramount Pictures....... the MPAA, whose members include Disney and Universal, attacked the VCR in congressional hearings in the 1980s with a Darth Vader–like zeal, predicting box-office receipts would collapse if consumers were allowed to freely share and copy VHS tapes of Hollywood movies. A decade later, the MPAA fought to block the DVD revolution, mainly because digital media could be copied and distributed even more easily than videocassettes....... The prospect of tying their future success to online distribution scares them because it means they will need to develop new distribution and pricing models....... both the MPAA and the RIAA continue to fight emerging technologies like peer-to-peer file sharing with costly court battles rather than figuring out how to appeal to the next generation of movie enthusiasts and still make a buck..... the latest developments at Cisco, Google and elsewhere may do more than kill the DVD and CD and further upset entertainment-business models that have changed little since the Mesozoic Era. With superfast streaming and downloading, indie filmmakers will soon be able to effectively distribute featurefilms online and promote them using social media such as Facebook and Twitter....... the high castle walls built over the past 100 years by the film industry to establish privilege and protect monopolistic profits may soon come tumbling down, just as they have for the music industry
Then you have to suggest you can't fight new technology. What you can do is come up with new business models so you make more money than ever before, and new technology feels like a friend, not an enemy. Steve Jobs was able to convince the music people, AnyClip needs to be able to convince the movie people. No small undertaking, but it can be done.
Then you have to start with what they are offering. They are offering 12,000 clips to the rival MovieClips.com. You take that. That can be the starting point. It can't be everything or nothing. You have to pass the 12,000 mark on your way to the 120,000 mark. You have to first show to them that the 12,000 clips were able to generate revenue. More movies got rented and bought as a result. More clips got embedded across the web. Movies as a category rose in the search results. They are big as they are. 2% of all searches are for 8,000 movies and 1,000 actors, right?
Sure the AnyClip promise is to make available any clip from any movie ever made. But then Google's promise is to organize all the world's information. But that does not mean Google stayed in hiding until they organized all the world's information. You release, you iterate, you take the site through a few different incarnations.
It is okay to have 120 clips, then 1,200 clips, then 12,000, then 120,000.
And maybe starting with the big names in the movie business, the big studios, is not the best of ideas. Maybe independent movie makers will feed the AnyClip database for, forget the old movies, all their new releases for all the free marketing and word of mouth they will get. Mark Cuban has a thought or two on this one. That guy is not just in the sports business. He is one restless entrepreneur. He is also in the movie business.
Maybe I should seek a consulting gig with AnyClip to put a few hours into helping AnyClip get over this hurdle that seems to come in the form of intransigence from the big movie studios.
AnyClip is an ambitious undertaking. This is not the last major hurdle it will face. Got to brace for the long haul.
I was going to say Content Is King, but then figured it might come across as sexist. It is like my Facebook/Twitter intro blurb has the word BossManPerson. I could not just say boss. That would be boring. Then I was inspired by my memory of comedian Negin's use of the word bosslady to describe herself. So I opted for Bossman. That stayed for a few weeks. A few days back I changed that to BossManPerson. I hope it is both informative and interesting.
Product/content alone will not cut it. Marketing efforts are necessary. And there are times when marketing rules and product/content is secondary. But at the end of the day, it is product that is queen.
Great blogging is primarily about putting out great blog content. Do you have something to say? Can you have something to say? Can you say it well? The second question is something to do with the fact that that niche that you might be most passionate about might not be the most lucrative.
And in many cases content creation happened before blogging came along, before Twitter came along. Some of the people with the biggest Twitter followings just so happen to be celebrities, tech and otherwise. You could argue you create better tweets than Ashton Kutcher, but that dude created his content elsewhere, on that big screen, and he established connections with people there. (My Relationship With Ashton Kutcher)
Blogging and Tweeting is no substitute for your work, whatever line you might be in, and for that matter Facebooking. If you are a student, spend more time with your textbooks than with your Facebook page. Spend more time with friends in person than with them on Facebook. Social skills are necessary, for work and for pleasure.
So content creation is not just about creating great blog posts, and great tweets, and having smart aleck things to say on other people's Facebook walls. Content creation is about doing the best you can do in your workspace, it is about living the best life you can live. It is about your emotional investments in your family, relationships, friends. Because if you do all that, you will have something to say. Content does not come out of life vacuum. Live. Work. Love. Rejoice. Enjoy.
was able to convince the 
people, AnyClip needs to be able to convince the 
people. No small undertaking, but it can be done.
as a category rose in the search results. They are big as they are. 2% of all searches are for 8,000 movies and 1,000 actors, right?
stayed in hiding until they organized all the world's information. You release, you iterate, you take the site through a few different incarnations. 
has a thought or two on this one. That guy is not just in the sports business. He is one restless entrepreneur. He is also in the movie business.![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_tutk7V824UxQYdlTvzyOirw4WH8cTG3uYzQDndijDoOQ-JBf7t2V_cpN0WvcCDuahfRwvMFedaTMEN_OMOVMpTFevJ0Fi6amdYnLEAb_J0UHpTtyhZnAWnLOsnPbv5tGawlfLpeXBiHuqwvR_6Gf6W=s0-d)
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