Comments on: Imagining Hollywood's postdigital future

History doesn't need to repeat itself, and Prismiq CEO Ken Goldsholl says the studios can avoid getting "Napster-ized." But there's a catch.

[duerra]

Sorry, but....

.... there's a thing called "fair use". I like to own my movies and videos so that I can watch them and use them at any time without restrictions. I like the massive innovation that MP3's have brought to the table, and as proven, letting the industry execs formulate that model themselves only ends up raping consumers in the end. Think cell phones for the perfect example - this is an area that could be absurdly ripe with innovation, but the closed nature of cell phones ends up making consumers pay for absolutely everything while getting next to nothing in return.

Next idea, please....

[duerra]

Sorry, but....

.... there's a thing called "fair use". I like to own my movies and videos so that I can watch them and use them at any time without restrictions. I like the massive innovation that MP3's have brought to the table, and as proven, letting the industry execs formulate that model themselves only ends up raping consumers in the end. Think cell phones for the perfect example - this is an area that could be absurdly ripe with innovation, but the closed nature of cell phones ends up making consumers pay for absolutely everything while getting next to nothing in return.

Next idea, please....

[CharlesRovira]

Should I hold on to my BlockBuster shares?

I already know the answer... Unless they get ready, NO!

The situation for the Hollywood establishment is as follows: No matter what they try to do, the distribution of content through broadcasting is going away.

After over a hundred years, its done its job and now they have to come up with a new way of collecting money. Many of them won't figure out how to do it and the multimedia equivalent of the dot-bust that's coming will challenge everybody in Hollywood.

The implications of this are manyfold.

For advertisers, they had better launch a web presence because the age of forced watching of ads, which really never worked anyway for several reasons, is coming to an end. Soon, it will be more important to have a clean interesting site and a high Google rating.

For the major studios, the rise of digital video editing suites means that the producers don't really need them. Its still early steps yet but the handwriting is on that wall too.

For the producers, the rise of digital video editing suites means that they can produce their vision of the content without needing the money that the major studios can provide. That money comes with a price: the studios need executive control, which interferes with creative control, because they need to make a great deal of money. That ability will be undercut by direct payment for content and, more importantly, by the destruction of their advertising revenues.

Then there's distribution. I suspect that BlockBuster (amongst many others,) will become a huge digital warehouse, connected to fibre, renting or selling the content to the consumer, without any need for their (forceably and foreseably dwindling) current stores.

That will greatly reduce the physical need for MultiPlexes and going out to the mall but the psychic need for the mall as a place of communion will remain, and so will the mall. It just probably have a BlockBuster store in it.

[CharlesRovira]

Should I hold on to my BlockBuster shares?

I already know the answer... Unless they get ready, NO!

The situation for the Hollywood establishment is as follows: No matter what they try to do, the distribution of content through broadcasting is going away.

After over a hundred years, its done its job and now they have to come up with a new way of collecting money. Many of them won't figure out how to do it and the multimedia equivalent of the dot-bust that's coming will challenge everybody in Hollywood.

The implications of this are manyfold.

For advertisers, they had better launch a web presence because the age of forced watching of ads, which really never worked anyway for several reasons, is coming to an end. Soon, it will be more important to have a clean interesting site and a high Google rating.

For the major studios, the rise of digital video editing suites means that the producers don't really need them. Its still early steps yet but the handwriting is on that wall too.

For the producers, the rise of digital video editing suites means that they can produce their vision of the content without needing the money that the major studios can provide. That money comes with a price: the studios need executive control, which interferes with creative control, because they need to make a great deal of money. That ability will be undercut by direct payment for content and, more importantly, by the destruction of their advertising revenues.

Then there's distribution. I suspect that BlockBuster (amongst many others,) will become a huge digital warehouse, connected to fibre, renting or selling the content to the consumer, without any need for their (forceably and foreseably dwindling) current stores.

That will greatly reduce the physical need for MultiPlexes and going out to the mall but the psychic need for the mall as a place of communion will remain, and so will the mall. It just probably have a BlockBuster store in it.

[Fritzly]

It could work but...

The big but here is that I want to own not to rent. I own my house, my car and my computers.
I am not giving away my rights to nobody, less then ever to companies with such a poor records for accountability and Customer-oriented attitude.
If I can buy a movie, store it, back-up it and sharewithin my home-network I will buy movies online otherwise I will stop buying them and guess what? I can live witout buying movies, there are millions of books to read; movie industries on the other hand cannot survive one month without sales, less then ever they will able to keep sponsoring politicians who forgot that they aare supposed to serve the Citizens and not their "sponsors".
oh did I mention that I am also entitled to move all my media on my new computers when I replace the aging one and also move them to my house in the mountain, the one on the sea-side etc.

Short-sighted...

I'm not sure that the author "gets it" any more
than today's Hollywood executives do. People
most certainly don't want to "rent" or
"pay-per-view" their music, video, books, etc.
Nickel-and-diming the consumer, obliterating
convenience, and encumbering everything with
rules, regulations, limitations, and nonsensical
fees will only serve to torpedo the system that
tries to implement it. The author would have you
believe that "virtual" posession will be
acceptable as posessing actual goods or
receiving actual services -- and it won't.

It doesn't help Hollywood either. The notion
you're going to stop distribution of materials
with a business model is almost as absurd as
trying to do so with a technical measure. It
makes too many assumptions about behaviors and
motivations for the consumer (which are
constantly in flux).

This doesn't address Hollywood's biggest fear:
that they will simply become obsolete.
Hollywood's product has been a cash cow because
only Hollywood could conjure up glitzy
entertainment, bottle it, and ship it out for
consumption. Fat pipes and increasingly
sophisticated low-price consumer electronics are
making it possible for individuals to produce
high quality music and video and distribute it
globally. There are a number of fantastic
examples of amateur cinematography you can
stream or fetch via BitTorrent out there --
commercial free and without plot retreads.

Hollywood's still going to have a lock on
real-life pyrotechnics for some time to come,
but they are loosing their grip on the medium as
a whole. If they really want to survive, they'll
need to begin with the premise that any public
release of something is effectively a global
broadcast of it, and that advertisements
attached to any release should not be expected
to reach anyone (they will be removed or skipped
over). This is a very pragmatic way of looking
at things since, if you can develop a business
model that works given those two presumptions,
then you've utterly side-stepped the concern of
copying and the legal and technical morrass they
build up trying to combat it.

Attempts at legislating behavioral standards or
technical standards that might eliminate the
need to rethink the business will ultimately
fail -- so why hemhorrage cash trying to do so?

[Brinf]

intractable problem

The way I see it, the problem inherent in the whole issue of consumers' rights vs studios' rights comes down to the basic fact that both parties are completely untrustworthy. Like others, I'd love to be able to back up my legally-purchased DVDs, etc, but I also realize that consumers, as a group, will steal anything they can get their hands on as long as the risk of getting caught is sufficiently low. The fact that 3-5 percent of consumers actually purchase their media legally *all the time* doesn't come close to offsetting the vast majority of everyone else whose movie and song collections are a mishmash of legally and illegally obtained materials (at best). I would prefer to be able to "own" all my movies and music, to pull them out and use them whenever I want without paying a "rental fee" each time - but I also recognize that, if easily-abused tech like peer-to-peer continues to eat away at profits, eventually there will be less product to purchase and what will be available will probably be inferior in quality, originality, etc. I don't know what the solution is, but I know that both sides in the battle will and are taking every opportunity to rip the other off, and will continue to do so in the future regardless of how things shake out legislatively/technologically. Onward, capitalism (too bad there's no better system) . . .

[Fritzly]

It could work but...

The big but here is that I want to own not to rent. I own my house, my car and my computers.
I am not giving away my rights to nobody, less then ever to companies with such a poor records for accountability and Customer-oriented attitude.
If I can buy a movie, store it, back-up it and sharewithin my home-network I will buy movies online otherwise I will stop buying them and guess what? I can live witout buying movies, there are millions of books to read; movie industries on the other hand cannot survive one month without sales, less then ever they will able to keep sponsoring politicians who forgot that they aare supposed to serve the Citizens and not their "sponsors".
oh did I mention that I am also entitled to move all my media on my new computers when I replace the aging one and also move them to my house in the mountain, the one on the sea-side etc.

Short-sighted...

I'm not sure that the author "gets it" any more
than today's Hollywood executives do. People
most certainly don't want to "rent" or
"pay-per-view" their music, video, books, etc.
Nickel-and-diming the consumer, obliterating
convenience, and encumbering everything with
rules, regulations, limitations, and nonsensical
fees will only serve to torpedo the system that
tries to implement it. The author would have you
believe that "virtual" posession will be
acceptable as posessing actual goods or
receiving actual services -- and it won't.

It doesn't help Hollywood either. The notion
you're going to stop distribution of materials
with a business model is almost as absurd as
trying to do so with a technical measure. It
makes too many assumptions about behaviors and
motivations for the consumer (which are
constantly in flux).

This doesn't address Hollywood's biggest fear:
that they will simply become obsolete.
Hollywood's product has been a cash cow because
only Hollywood could conjure up glitzy
entertainment, bottle it, and ship it out for
consumption. Fat pipes and increasingly
sophisticated low-price consumer electronics are
making it possible for individuals to produce
high quality music and video and distribute it
globally. There are a number of fantastic
examples of amateur cinematography you can
stream or fetch via BitTorrent out there --
commercial free and without plot retreads.

Hollywood's still going to have a lock on
real-life pyrotechnics for some time to come,
but they are loosing their grip on the medium as
a whole. If they really want to survive, they'll
need to begin with the premise that any public
release of something is effectively a global
broadcast of it, and that advertisements
attached to any release should not be expected
to reach anyone (they will be removed or skipped
over). This is a very pragmatic way of looking
at things since, if you can develop a business
model that works given those two presumptions,
then you've utterly side-stepped the concern of
copying and the legal and technical morrass they
build up trying to combat it.

Attempts at legislating behavioral standards or
technical standards that might eliminate the
need to rethink the business will ultimately
fail -- so why hemhorrage cash trying to do so?

[Brinf]

intractable problem

The way I see it, the problem inherent in the whole issue of consumers' rights vs studios' rights comes down to the basic fact that both parties are completely untrustworthy. Like others, I'd love to be able to back up my legally-purchased DVDs, etc, but I also realize that consumers, as a group, will steal anything they can get their hands on as long as the risk of getting caught is sufficiently low. The fact that 3-5 percent of consumers actually purchase their media legally *all the time* doesn't come close to offsetting the vast majority of everyone else whose movie and song collections are a mishmash of legally and illegally obtained materials (at best). I would prefer to be able to "own" all my movies and music, to pull them out and use them whenever I want without paying a "rental fee" each time - but I also recognize that, if easily-abused tech like peer-to-peer continues to eat away at profits, eventually there will be less product to purchase and what will be available will probably be inferior in quality, originality, etc. I don't know what the solution is, but I know that both sides in the battle will and are taking every opportunity to rip the other off, and will continue to do so in the future regardless of how things shake out legislatively/technologically. Onward, capitalism (too bad there's no better system) . . .

[Hernys]

Experience vs. cost.

I think the solution to this problem is not very complex. it just requires doing something that might be difficult to swallow.
Pirating a movie is not THAT easy. Requires finding a decent copy, verifying it's quality, format, language etc., downloading it, downloading subtitles (if it's not on your primary language), moving it around and playing it on the appropriate device. I think the industry will have to implement a system that's easier, faster, simpler (that excludes any type of activation or verification that requires interaction), of better quality and CHEAP. Technically, that's perfectly feasible today, since most of those steps mentioned before are related with not having uniform and systematic access to all the original media by the same source. Of course, it will never be as cheap as free, but it doesn't need to. It just needs to be cheap enough, and lazyness will do the rest. Maybe a dollar a movie or so. At that price pirating is not worth the effort.
Obviously, this might imply reducing present profits (75% of piracy is better than reducing profits by 90%), and the companies might be tempted to go that way at the last time, when piracy is so high the loss looks reasonable. But if they don't do it now, the P2P technologies and networks will keep improving the experience to a point that, by the time the industry reacts, it will be a lost battle.

[Hernys]

Experience vs. cost.

I think the solution to this problem is not very complex. it just requires doing something that might be difficult to swallow.
Pirating a movie is not THAT easy. Requires finding a decent copy, verifying it's quality, format, language etc., downloading it, downloading subtitles (if it's not on your primary language), moving it around and playing it on the appropriate device. I think the industry will have to implement a system that's easier, faster, simpler (that excludes any type of activation or verification that requires interaction), of better quality and CHEAP. Technically, that's perfectly feasible today, since most of those steps mentioned before are related with not having uniform and systematic access to all the original media by the same source. Of course, it will never be as cheap as free, but it doesn't need to. It just needs to be cheap enough, and lazyness will do the rest. Maybe a dollar a movie or so. At that price pirating is not worth the effort.
Obviously, this might imply reducing present profits (75% of piracy is better than reducing profits by 90%), and the companies might be tempted to go that way at the last time, when piracy is so high the loss looks reasonable. But if they don't do it now, the P2P technologies and networks will keep improving the experience to a point that, by the time the industry reacts, it will be a lost battle.

[ygtbfkm]

statistics

Where do you get "3-5 percent" of people are the only ones who
don't violate copyrights? I suppose I could believe that if you're
including people who tape shows on their VCR, skip
commercials on their Replay, or burn a CD for the car from a CD
they own - but if you're talking about people who download
music and video from the Internet without authorization, I think
your view of how much of that is going on is way skewed.

[ygtbfkm]

oops, was reply to earlier comment

Oops, sorry, that was a reply to Sean Watson's comment
"intractable".

[ygtbfkm]

statistics

Where do you get "3-5 percent" of people are the only ones who
don't violate copyrights? I suppose I could believe that if you're
including people who tape shows on their VCR, skip
commercials on their Replay, or burn a CD for the car from a CD
they own - but if you're talking about people who download
music and video from the Internet without authorization, I think
your view of how much of that is going on is way skewed.

[ygtbfkm]

oops, was reply to earlier comment

Oops, sorry, that was a reply to Sean Watson's comment
"intractable".

[ygtbfkm]

100 Mbps

Even at 100Mbps, a 40GB HD movie is going to take about an
hour, not a few minutes.

DVDs do have some protection, certainly more than CDs do.
Granted, it's been completely broken, but it still forms an
impediment. I'm not sure why you think that doing an on-line
distribution is going to be more secure.

Frankly, the amount of storage required is still going to swamp
hard drives, and to have the only copy of a movie I've bought be
sitting as an ephemeral copy on a hard drive would scare me -
I'd want a backup of it immediately. Seems to me its easier to
just buy the "backup disk" and copy it to my video server.

What I do think will happen, IF the studios get over their
irrational paranoia, is that Disk-on-demand will become
feasible. That would eliminate the inventory problem (both
ways), and hopefully eliminate the stupidity of titles going out of
print as well.

What it won't solve is the morass of copy rights - such as the
Criterion Collection version of, say, Spinal Tap going out of print
because they lost the rights to it, so a different version comes
out by someone else, losing all the extra material that CC came
out with; or how the only version of some film is available only
as Pan-n-Scan, or has a terrible transfer, or is missing a critical
scene (Madacy version of My Man Godfrey, for example, before
Criterion came out with their version); or the utter travesty of It's
a Wonderful Life falling into and out of the public domain.

[ygtbfkm]

100 Mbps

Even at 100Mbps, a 40GB HD movie is going to take about an
hour, not a few minutes.

DVDs do have some protection, certainly more than CDs do.
Granted, it's been completely broken, but it still forms an
impediment. I'm not sure why you think that doing an on-line
distribution is going to be more secure.

Frankly, the amount of storage required is still going to swamp
hard drives, and to have the only copy of a movie I've bought be
sitting as an ephemeral copy on a hard drive would scare me -
I'd want a backup of it immediately. Seems to me its easier to
just buy the "backup disk" and copy it to my video server.

What I do think will happen, IF the studios get over their
irrational paranoia, is that Disk-on-demand will become
feasible. That would eliminate the inventory problem (both
ways), and hopefully eliminate the stupidity of titles going out of
print as well.

What it won't solve is the morass of copy rights - such as the
Criterion Collection version of, say, Spinal Tap going out of print
because they lost the rights to it, so a different version comes
out by someone else, losing all the extra material that CC came
out with; or how the only version of some film is available only
as Pan-n-Scan, or has a terrible transfer, or is missing a critical
scene (Madacy version of My Man Godfrey, for example, before
Criterion came out with their version); or the utter travesty of It's
a Wonderful Life falling into and out of the public domain.

[kgofsb]

Why digital distribution can be more secure than DVDs

DVDs use one encryption key for all of North America, and that key has been "discovered". While not everyone is aware of the tools for decrypting DVDs, enough people are, so that virtually any DVD is available on the Internet. If movies were sold on-line or in kiosks, each stream or file would be encrypted with a unique key, so that if anyone wanted to take the time to hack the file (at best a few days) to uncover a key, that key would only work for one particular file. The incentive for spending the time to unlock a movie would be greatly minimized.

A 90 minute HD movie would not require 40 GB if a new codec (MPEG4, WM9, H.264, etc.) was used, more likely it would be about 7 GBbytes. With a 100 Mbps broadband connection, the time to download would be about 9 minutes. If the file was purchased at a kiosk, the transfer rate could be about 3x faster (USB2.0), taking only about 3 minutes.

[kgofsb]

Why digital distribution can be more secure than DVDs

DVDs use one encryption key for all of North America, and that key has been "discovered". While not everyone is aware of the tools for decrypting DVDs, enough people are, so that virtually any DVD is available on the Internet. If movies were sold on-line or in kiosks, each stream or file would be encrypted with a unique key, so that if anyone wanted to take the time to hack the file (at best a few days) to uncover a key, that key would only work for one particular file. The incentive for spending the time to unlock a movie would be greatly minimized.

A 90 minute HD movie would not require 40 GB if a new codec (MPEG4, WM9, H.264, etc.) was used, more likely it would be about 7 GBbytes. With a 100 Mbps broadband connection, the time to download would be about 9 minutes. If the file was purchased at a kiosk, the transfer rate could be about 3x faster (USB2.0), taking only about 3 minutes.