Movie Making Trends

Movies are about to enter a whole different realm, mostly for the good. Some of the trends are:

(1) A Screen In Nearly Every Hand

The smartphone will get there before the broadband will, but the connectivity will get there fast enough. It is a legitimate expectation that people should be able to watch new releases on their own screens. You could charge 10 million people $10 each in a theater, or you could charge a billion people one cent each. Or that cent could be an ad they opt to watch. The numbers work. Micro-payments will become much more of an option.

(2) Reduced Production Costs

A small crew dabbling in the art form could do all the camera work on a smartphone and all the editing on a computer today. That opens up the floodgates of production. Every language, every culture can have its own movie industry. Every such industry has a ready global audience among the scattered peoples, all connected. Let a thousand flowers bloom. That also creates a spectrum of success. A movie making 100 K can meet someone's definition of robust business. A movie making 10 K can. What if you could earn a living making 10 minute long movies? Does that beat serving tables?

(3) Really Big

The small can do brisk business. But the big can get really big. A global super hit movie could make outsize money.

(4) Computer Graphics And Animation

For what you can show on the screen, the imagination is now the limit. You don't have to actually build a physical set. Which means it is possible to have small high tech studios. Right now the costs are high. But they will go down. Spices used to be gold. Now they are commodity. The liberation of the background should give added focus to the human element. Movies have to be thought of as therapy sessions for society at large.

(5) The Script

Some things never change. It boils down to the story, not the technology. Ultimately it is about telling a good story. That ancient art has currency.

Hunger Games

The Hunger Games (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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.

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A Smart Movie Theater Screen

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.

Seven Screens

AnyClip.com: More Thoughts

Image via CrunchBase

AnyClip.com: Second Thoughts
AnyClip Is Live Now

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 feature films 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.

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AnyClip.com: Second Thoughts

Image via CrunchBase

The AnyClip Launch PressLift

I am having second thoughts about AnyClip, but not in the traditional meaning of the phrase. I blogged about AnyClip not long back (AnyClip Is Live Now), and already I have enough new thoughts - a second train of thoughts - about the site that I feel like a new blog post is warranted.

You can't ask for traffic, and then get it, and then complain you have too much traffic. The "fail whale" might be part of doing business also for AnyClip, but the longer the site is on the better. Take care of the server issues best you can. That is basic. Expect traffic. Fulfill the basic promises made.

Add more movies. 2,000 movies are a good starting point. But God knows more than 2,000 movies have been made. Feed the monster, I mean the database.

The embed feature is a powerul one. Every blog and site that is embedding AnyClip video clips is giving AnyClip much needed Google juice. Those are one way inbound links. They matter. And so the embed feature has to "simply work," Google's phrase about their forthcoming Chrome OS.

Social media matters, but of course. There are studies showing Facebook has overtaken Google itself as the most visited site in America. If I find a clip on AnyClip that I like and want to share, I should be able to share easy. Over time there has to be a sense of community at the site itself. As to how you go about it, there are a few different ways. The Disqus integration is a very good idea. A lot of people link their Disqus profiles to their blogs and Twitter accounts. That gives you the option to get to know them better. That builds community.

New movies get made. They put out trailers before they put out movies. AnyClip is like saying no movie ever made has to go stale. The best movies have a timeless quality to them. If you are going to watch four minutes of a movie that you end up liking, you might as well rent or buy the movie. AnyClip's SceneSearch tool is a major discovery engine.

The Netflix, and Amazon integrations on AnyClip are a great first move. I wonder if it would be possible to have those integrations to also be part of the embedded clips. So someone watches a clip at my blog, and they get to go straight to Amazon to buy the movie without having to first go to the AnyClip page.

The summary statement would be, the fundamentals are already in place, just go ahead and deliver on your basic promises. Scale with gusto.          

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My Comment At TechCrunch

The movie studios are going to have to come around, and come around fast. AnyClip's promise is no movie ever made has to go stale. Otherwise movies go stale. AnyClip for the movie studios is like being able to run trailers of all their movies all the time. And once you grab someone's attention, that is one step closer to them buying or renting that movie. It makes absolutely no sense for the movie studios to drag their feet on this one.

This reminds me of Nepal, the dual citizenship issue, and FDI, Foreign Direct Investment. Issuing dual citizenship to the Non Resident Nepalis is the single best thing Nepal could do to bring in FDI to the country, and FDI is the single best thing that could happen for Nepal's economic growth, but the morons will not do it. The politicians in Nepal have been dragging their feet on the dual citizenship issue for years now. Ignorance can hurt self interest. Defies logic, but happens all the time.

AnyClip is in the movie studios' self interest.