Apple trying to beef up film content
By David M. Halbfinger
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
LOS ANGELES: When Edward Burns's latest romantic comedy, "Purple Violets," had its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in April, it drew positive reviews, but only lukewarm offers from movie distributors.
Burns, the director of indie favorites like "The Brothers McMullen" and "She's the One," but whose latest movies have not done as well, knew from experience how that story would end.
"Not enough money to market the film, not a wide-enough release to even make a dent in the movie-going public's consciousness," he said.
So he and his partners, who spent $4 million making "Purple Violets," instead are gambling any chance of recouping their investment on a distribution deal that involves not a single theater. On Nov. 20, the film will go up for sale exclusively on iTunes.
It is the first time a feature film will make its commercial debut on Apple's digital download service, but only the latest deal aimed at winning attention for the iTunes movie category.
Last month, for example, iTunes began distributing a 13-minute short film, "Hotel Chevalier," a prequel of sorts to Wes Anderson's "Darjeeling Limited," as a publicity vehicle for that Fox Searchlight feature. The short, offered free, has since been downloaded more than 400,000 times and has helped drive the early box office performance of "Darjeeling," the studio says.
That will no doubt gladden the hearts of Apple executives. A year after Walt Disney became the first major studio to offer its movies on iTunes, Apple admits that iTunes is struggling to achieve the critical mass in film content that it has long held in music, and is facing stepped-up online competition from rivals like Amazon Unbox, Netflix Watch Now, Jaman and GreenCine.
Though Disney has embraced iTunes, most of the other major studios have balked at Apple's refusal to work with them on flexible pricing or to accede to their demands for piracy countermeasures. Most notably, NBC Universal recently decided not to renew its contract to sell its TV shows there. NBC Universal and the News Corp. have also announced plans for a video portal called Hulu.com.
James McQuivey, a media analyst at Forrester Research, said iTunes was primarily a vehicle for selling Apple's media-playing devices like iPods, and noted that its Apple TV box, which transfers video downloads to television, has failed to gain popularity.
Apple "is in a little bit of a crisis now," he said, adding, "If they can't get the content soon, which may be why they're doing all sorts of attention-getting content deals now - they need to show they have some traction in the video space - they stand to lose whatever momentum they've gained."
Besides Disney, Lionsgate, MGM and Paramount now offer a limited number of film titles on iTunes. But the offerings seem mainly to point up what is missing. The iTunes "staff favorites" Sunday night included Paramount's 1962 John Wayne romp, "Hatari." And the top-selling iTunes film for several consecutive weeks in September and October was MGM's 1987 comic classic, "The Princess Bride."
The picture isn't much rosier in independent film: That iTunes subcategory turned up only 28 titles as of Sunday.
"We're really at the beginning stage in the movie space," said Eddy Cue, Apple's vice president for iTunes, adding that iTunes had sold more than four million movie downloads - including shorts - but still had fewer than 1,000 titles for sale.
The littlest guys - makers of short films - are singing the praises of iTunes. Apple began selling shorts nominated for the Academy Awards last year, and it distributed about half of the Sundance Film Festival shorts this year, all at $1.99, the same price as a television episode. Features sell for $9.99 to $14.99.
A result has been a shift in what it means to be a maker of short films, several directors said.
"It was so cool to actually get people to see something I directed," said Rob Pearlstein, director of the Oscar-nominated short "Our Time Is Up," who said he had previously gotten only as far as development hell. Among the people paying attention are scouts from Hollywood and the Web, said Ari Sandel, whose musical comedy "West Bank Story" won the Oscar for live-action short this year. "Now that there's a place to see a short," he said, "it makes more sense to make a short."
For filmmakers, Apple offers a cookie-cutter deal that is generous on paper, compared with Hollywood norms: It charges just 30 cents on the dollar, while, with independent films, another 10 or 15 cents typically goes to an aggregator, or middleman, who converts a film into Apple's format and accounts for the proceeds to the filmmaker.
But Apple provides financial reports only every six months, aggregators note, and it is safe to say no one has gotten rich on an iTunes short film yet.
Releasing a feature on iTunes carries its own risks. Burns's producing partner, Aaron Lubin, said video distributors had offered lower-than-expected advance payments for the film's DVD rights out of fear that its availability on iTunes would cannibalize home-video sales.
But he and Burns said they hoped that the novelty of being the first movie to go out on iTunes would generate more publicity for "Purple Violets" than if it had opened on a few screens in New York and Los Angeles.
http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=8020195
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Saturday, October 20, 2007
The next Kubrick? Sony aims to find him
By Saul Hansell
Sunday, July 15, 2007
NEW YORK: Sony is trying to edge into Internet videos with a new Web site to be introduced Monday called Crackle that will feature short segments by aspiring filmmakers, many of which Sony will pay to produce.
Crackle is the latest incarnation of Grouper, a Web site that began as a way for people to share music, photos and videos with friends. It transformed itself into a YouTube clone and was bought last August by Sony Pictures Entertainment for $65 million. At the time Sony said Grouper would mainly be focused on user-created video, which it hoped would spur use of its home video equipment.
But this approach had little traction in the market. There was a lot of competition, especially from Google's YouTube, which has become the center of user-created videos. Moreover, Sony found that advertisers didn't find user video very appealing.
So Sony decided that higher quality videos would both let it stand out in the market and attract advertisers as well. The company has been moving toward higher quality content, said Josh Feltzer, the founder of Grouper who is now the co-president of Crackle, "by rewarding the aspiring producer versus the person who wants to share a video of a wedding or of someone jumping off a roof."
Other sites have tried this approach.
Revver , for example, promised to share advertising revenue with video producers, but foundered. Sony, instead, will offer up-front cash payments to some producers. These will range from a few thousand dollars to well over $10,000 per segment, Feltzer said.
That is somewhat more than some other sites, like Heavy.com, that have been paying for video segments.
Sony has created "Crackle Studios," with 15 employees, to produce its own segments for the site. One example is Judgment Day, a reality show in which a person judges other people, then interviews them to find out if first impressions were correct.
Crackle will also invite submissions from users, and all of them will be posted unless they violate the site's terms of service. But since the user videos are meant to be added to Crackle's existing channels, Feltzer said he hoped they would be in the spirit of the site.
People who submit unsolicited videos won't earn any money, but they can try to submit ideas to get funding from Crackle for future projects.
Sony plans to make Crackle the center of a budding generation of young filmmakers by holding out the hope of possible stardom in productions emanating from Sony's movie and television studios. The makers of the best videos in each of several categories each quarter will win trips to Los Angeles where they can pitch their ideas to Sony executives. "The reason people work with us is we provide a pathway to Hollywood," said Feltzer.
Sony hopes that people will come to its site to view the Crackle videos, but it has also arranged for them to be distributed on AOL, MySpace, Facebook, and several other social networks.
Taking advantage of the company's electronics business, it will promote them as well for download to Sony's PlayStation 3game consoles, Vaio computers, and new Bravia televisions with Internet connections.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/15/business/sony16.php
By Saul Hansell
Sunday, July 15, 2007
NEW YORK: Sony is trying to edge into Internet videos with a new Web site to be introduced Monday called Crackle that will feature short segments by aspiring filmmakers, many of which Sony will pay to produce.
Crackle is the latest incarnation of Grouper, a Web site that began as a way for people to share music, photos and videos with friends. It transformed itself into a YouTube clone and was bought last August by Sony Pictures Entertainment for $65 million. At the time Sony said Grouper would mainly be focused on user-created video, which it hoped would spur use of its home video equipment.
But this approach had little traction in the market. There was a lot of competition, especially from Google's YouTube, which has become the center of user-created videos. Moreover, Sony found that advertisers didn't find user video very appealing.
So Sony decided that higher quality videos would both let it stand out in the market and attract advertisers as well. The company has been moving toward higher quality content, said Josh Feltzer, the founder of Grouper who is now the co-president of Crackle, "by rewarding the aspiring producer versus the person who wants to share a video of a wedding or of someone jumping off a roof."
Other sites have tried this approach.
Revver , for example, promised to share advertising revenue with video producers, but foundered. Sony, instead, will offer up-front cash payments to some producers. These will range from a few thousand dollars to well over $10,000 per segment, Feltzer said.
That is somewhat more than some other sites, like Heavy.com, that have been paying for video segments.
Sony has created "Crackle Studios," with 15 employees, to produce its own segments for the site. One example is Judgment Day, a reality show in which a person judges other people, then interviews them to find out if first impressions were correct.
Crackle will also invite submissions from users, and all of them will be posted unless they violate the site's terms of service. But since the user videos are meant to be added to Crackle's existing channels, Feltzer said he hoped they would be in the spirit of the site.
People who submit unsolicited videos won't earn any money, but they can try to submit ideas to get funding from Crackle for future projects.
Sony plans to make Crackle the center of a budding generation of young filmmakers by holding out the hope of possible stardom in productions emanating from Sony's movie and television studios. The makers of the best videos in each of several categories each quarter will win trips to Los Angeles where they can pitch their ideas to Sony executives. "The reason people work with us is we provide a pathway to Hollywood," said Feltzer.
Sony hopes that people will come to its site to view the Crackle videos, but it has also arranged for them to be distributed on AOL, MySpace, Facebook, and several other social networks.
Taking advantage of the company's electronics business, it will promote them as well for download to Sony's PlayStation 3game consoles, Vaio computers, and new Bravia televisions with Internet connections.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/15/business/sony16.php
Friday, October 12, 2007
Blinkx heats up online video battle with Google
By Victoria Shannon International Herald Tribune
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Blinkx, an Internet video search company based in London, will start letting consumers make money from the videos they show on their own blogs, social network sites or home pages if they agree to include advertising in the videos.By combining two hot Internet trends - social networking and online video - with a money-making opportunity, Blinkx hopes to better compete with YouTube, the market-leading service for video-sharing owned by Google, said the founder and chief executive of Blinkx, Suranga Chandratillake.
Blinkx's move heats up the competition in online video, which has sparked multibillion-dollar acquisitions, attracted countless amateur and professional video makers, and roused the interest of marketing executives worldwide who see a new audience for their advertisements.The growing reach of broadband Internet access has in the past two years made video appealing to large numbers of Web surfers.Google on Tuesday said it would allow Web sites in its advertising network to use some YouTube content. Two other companies, Babelgum and Joost, hope to use the Internet to become alternative television providers.Blinkx, however, has until now concentrated on its role as a video search engine. The company, which was spun off from the British software firm Autonomy in May, uses speech-to-text transcription and visual recognition technology to sift through Internet videos.
On Monday, Blinkx started offering search capabilities in French, German and Spanish. It is indexing content from 200 European sources and sites with more than one million hours of foreign language video content, including Eurosport, Euronews, TF1, El Mundo, Le Monde and Spiegel TV.Under Blinkx's new program, to be formally introduced in London on Wednesday, Internet video fans can take a film clip, post it to their site and submit it to Blinkx to be indexed and categorized.Each time the video gets watched, the Blinkx system will choose a relevant ad from its inventory and place it in one of two places - either in a small transparent window in the bottom of the video screen, or in a box outside the top of the frame.Every time an ad is clicked, the Web site on which the video is hosted will receive a portion of the payment for the ad placement. The rate varies based on the ad, but it is generally a few pennies per click."This way, the people who are powering the video revolution are the ones who get the rewards," Chandratillake said.
Chandratillake said the choice of ad display was up to the host of the Web site, adding that they were no more distracting than the banner ads now common on Internet pages.Many Web sites - especially social networks like MySpace and Facebook - allow users to borrow and "embed" video on their personalized pages. Others, usually professional media companies like the BBC, do not.Chandratillake cautioned that any income derived by bloggers and others agreeing to take the ads would not be much, "maybe enough to pay your Internet bill at best."
Under the new YouTube program, the videos would be provided by about 100 content partners, including TV Guide Broadband, Expert Village, Mondo Media, Extreme Elements and Ford Models. The ads would come from Google's vast inventory, which dwarfs the amount that Blinkx has to offer.Last week, Blinkx, which trades on the London alternative market, said first-half results would be at the top end of analysts' expectations. Piper Jaffray had forecast interim revenue of $2.4 million.The British company created its own video-ad network, called AdHoc, earlier this year.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/10/09/business/video.php
By Victoria Shannon International Herald Tribune
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Blinkx, an Internet video search company based in London, will start letting consumers make money from the videos they show on their own blogs, social network sites or home pages if they agree to include advertising in the videos.By combining two hot Internet trends - social networking and online video - with a money-making opportunity, Blinkx hopes to better compete with YouTube, the market-leading service for video-sharing owned by Google, said the founder and chief executive of Blinkx, Suranga Chandratillake.
Blinkx's move heats up the competition in online video, which has sparked multibillion-dollar acquisitions, attracted countless amateur and professional video makers, and roused the interest of marketing executives worldwide who see a new audience for their advertisements.The growing reach of broadband Internet access has in the past two years made video appealing to large numbers of Web surfers.Google on Tuesday said it would allow Web sites in its advertising network to use some YouTube content. Two other companies, Babelgum and Joost, hope to use the Internet to become alternative television providers.Blinkx, however, has until now concentrated on its role as a video search engine. The company, which was spun off from the British software firm Autonomy in May, uses speech-to-text transcription and visual recognition technology to sift through Internet videos.
On Monday, Blinkx started offering search capabilities in French, German and Spanish. It is indexing content from 200 European sources and sites with more than one million hours of foreign language video content, including Eurosport, Euronews, TF1, El Mundo, Le Monde and Spiegel TV.Under Blinkx's new program, to be formally introduced in London on Wednesday, Internet video fans can take a film clip, post it to their site and submit it to Blinkx to be indexed and categorized.Each time the video gets watched, the Blinkx system will choose a relevant ad from its inventory and place it in one of two places - either in a small transparent window in the bottom of the video screen, or in a box outside the top of the frame.Every time an ad is clicked, the Web site on which the video is hosted will receive a portion of the payment for the ad placement. The rate varies based on the ad, but it is generally a few pennies per click."This way, the people who are powering the video revolution are the ones who get the rewards," Chandratillake said.
Chandratillake said the choice of ad display was up to the host of the Web site, adding that they were no more distracting than the banner ads now common on Internet pages.Many Web sites - especially social networks like MySpace and Facebook - allow users to borrow and "embed" video on their personalized pages. Others, usually professional media companies like the BBC, do not.Chandratillake cautioned that any income derived by bloggers and others agreeing to take the ads would not be much, "maybe enough to pay your Internet bill at best."
Under the new YouTube program, the videos would be provided by about 100 content partners, including TV Guide Broadband, Expert Village, Mondo Media, Extreme Elements and Ford Models. The ads would come from Google's vast inventory, which dwarfs the amount that Blinkx has to offer.Last week, Blinkx, which trades on the London alternative market, said first-half results would be at the top end of analysts' expectations. Piper Jaffray had forecast interim revenue of $2.4 million.The British company created its own video-ad network, called AdHoc, earlier this year.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/10/09/business/video.php
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
I couldnt be happier to see a film like Loins of Punjab (LOP).
For one, it was genuinely funny.
Second, it marked a departure from bigger-budget-slapstick-mindless-wanna-be comedies like XXXXX - i won't name any here because there seems to be some disagreement in my taste of the current offerings with my peers. However, LOP was liked by crtics and audiences like, so I'm allowing myself to go on about how much I liked it and the reasons for it.
The direction stood out not only because all the actors did a fine job, but also because of the finesse with which each of the characters was etched out. In 90 minutes, it may sound simple, but with a multi-actor cast, it is defintely challenging.
The pace of the film was brisk, the theme very-today and the best part was that the film had an unpredictable ending. To cut a long story short, it is definetely worth a watch
I, however, liked it for another reason altogether. Films like LOP herald a new age for Indian cinema: Low-cost quality films with tight scripts and superb performances. This means that the market (read multiplex audiences) is now driving the supply of such films. The english speaking Indians in India and elsewhere are now a seperate target audience and films made seperately for them are a need-of-the-hour product.
More importantly (and this is where my adrenalin levels shoot up), it also means that anyone with a passion for film-making can actually collect the resources and make a film. Bheja Fry was made in less than Rs. 60 lakhs and grossed over Rs. 16 crores. I can also say this confidently, because a friend of mine is making a film on a shoe-string budget, but with a quality script and truck loads of energy!
It also means that you, I and the boy or girl next door can be part of the creations of the talkies - exciting innit?!
For one, it was genuinely funny.
Second, it marked a departure from bigger-budget-slapstick-mindless-wanna-be comedies like XXXXX - i won't name any here because there seems to be some disagreement in my taste of the current offerings with my peers. However, LOP was liked by crtics and audiences like, so I'm allowing myself to go on about how much I liked it and the reasons for it.
The direction stood out not only because all the actors did a fine job, but also because of the finesse with which each of the characters was etched out. In 90 minutes, it may sound simple, but with a multi-actor cast, it is defintely challenging.
The pace of the film was brisk, the theme very-today and the best part was that the film had an unpredictable ending. To cut a long story short, it is definetely worth a watch
I, however, liked it for another reason altogether. Films like LOP herald a new age for Indian cinema: Low-cost quality films with tight scripts and superb performances. This means that the market (read multiplex audiences) is now driving the supply of such films. The english speaking Indians in India and elsewhere are now a seperate target audience and films made seperately for them are a need-of-the-hour product.
More importantly (and this is where my adrenalin levels shoot up), it also means that anyone with a passion for film-making can actually collect the resources and make a film. Bheja Fry was made in less than Rs. 60 lakhs and grossed over Rs. 16 crores. I can also say this confidently, because a friend of mine is making a film on a shoe-string budget, but with a quality script and truck loads of energy!
It also means that you, I and the boy or girl next door can be part of the creations of the talkies - exciting innit?!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)