Alternative approaches to entertainment distribution/consumption

Started by Sleepless, September 06, 2013, 02:08:09 PM

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Jeremy Blackman

Netflix has been canceling so many good shows, it seemed like they were tightening their belt. I guess not?

wilder

Word is they cancel shows after a couple seasons not because the series didn't perform, but because re-upping contracts to produce more seasons would mean paying higher salaries. Supposedly Netflix chooses to scrap shows and start from scratch in order to avoid doing this.

Jeremy Blackman

That's so, so dirty.

I remember when Netflix was a corporation you could feel warm and fuzzy about.  :(

jenkins

though it is quite impressive how they're dominating the streaming field while other big names chase them. i'm against them through a general principle but i do acknowledge their achievement

Sleepless

Wilder's right. Apparently it's something they have in the contracts, not sure if it's above the line raises or budget increases, but supposedly there's a big increase after S3 for most originals, which is why most shows get cancelled after 3 seasons. Unless it's one of their true flagship shows like Stranger Things or OITNB.

It's a symptom of the whole Streaming Wars, though, right? Everyone stopped licensing their shit to Netflix so they could have their own streaming service, but that market is already saturated even before the launch of HBO Max and Peacock. At some point the streaming universe expansion has got to reverse and contract back to a sustainable number of platforms, right? Or do you think CBS All Access brings in more money from their small pool of Trekkies that they'd get from simply licensing their content out, that the brave new world of the cord cutter is just as fragmented as cable before it? If the former, then Netflix just need to survive - debt be damned - until it can emerged as the constant champion while all contenders around it crumble.
He held on. The dolphin and all the rest of its pod turned and swam out to sea, and still he held on. This is it, he thought. Then he remembered that they were air-breathers too. It was going to be all right.

Drenk

Their algorithm also informed Netflix that, past season 2, series don't attract as much viewers. I wouldn't be against a world where writers know they're working for 2 seasons.
Ascension.

WorldForgot

Quote from: Drenk on January 17, 2020, 09:05:15 AM
Their algorithm also informed Netflix that, past season 2, series don't attract as much viewers. I wouldn't be against a world where writers know they're working for 2 seasons.

Isn't this basically how British TV operates? :p

Ravi

Quote from: wilder on January 16, 2020, 05:16:32 PM
Word is they cancel shows after a couple seasons not because the series didn't perform, but because re-upping contracts to produce more seasons would mean paying higher salaries. Supposedly Netflix chooses to scrap shows and start from scratch in order to avoid doing this.

That also happens on network TV after a show has been on for like eight seasons if the increased salaries aren't justified by the show's revenue, but I'm surprised it happens after only a couple of seasons on Netflix.

Sleepless

Quote from: Drenk on January 17, 2020, 09:05:15 AM
I wouldn't be against a world where writers know they're working for 2 seasons.

At least then they know how many episodes thy have to tell their story and actually finish it.
He held on. The dolphin and all the rest of its pod turned and swam out to sea, and still he held on. This is it, he thought. Then he remembered that they were air-breathers too. It was going to be all right.

jenkins

so Netflix didn't buy it at Sundance, they made it for Sundance, is that accurate or did they just buy it early.
Duplass Brothers Productions



Oh it looked it up:

After dominating this year's Oscar nominations, Netflix will continue its disruption when it premieres eight films at the festival — the most of any distributor.

A24, Sony Pictures Classics, Focus Features, HBO, Bleecker Street, and Fox Searchlight are all coming to the festival with two films each, while Showtime and National Geographic Documentary Films each have one.

wilberfan

Quibi Is Either a Clever Gimmick or the Future of Entertainment

Quibi is either going to be brilliant and influential to how we consume media, or we're going to watch Hollywood and Silicon Valley shit the bed in a way that just not common in 2020.

The new streaming service, dreamed up by Jeffrey Katzenberg, founder and CEO of Dreamworks and one of the architects behind Disney's golden age in the early '90s, is a mobile-first platform delivering movies and TVs to your phone in 10-minute chunks. It can either be galaxy-brain goodness or incredibly stupid. Right now, I'm heavily leaning toward Quibi being good. The technology, at least, is extraordinary.

I should be clear that it was only after seeing a demo of Quibi in action that I started to feel this way. Heading into my meeting at CES, I was a lot more suspicious. Up until now, details about Quibi have been sparse and either uninspiring or downright bizarre. In October, the LA Times confirmed that Quibi was partnering with T-Mobile, the third-largest mobile network in the U.S. Partnerships with a single carrier aren't quite as common as they once wore, and partnering with the third-largest carrier sort of feel makes Quibi feel like a joke.

The name isn't much better. Short for "quick bites," Quibi sounds like a start-up you're destined to forget in two months. Then there were the explanations for what Quibi was going to be. Katzenberg and his hand-picked CEO, former HP chief executive Meg Whitman, have spent a lot of time describing Quibi as entertainment for a younger and more phone-focused generation. No watching the content on your TV—or even your laptop. Phone only. They said it would be viewable in both landscape and the heinous portrait mode.

Then there was the huge list of shows reportedly coming to Quibi. Over 175 at this point. Which is—well, way more than Apple or Disney+ launched in their first year. Quibi is spending over a billion dollars on content in 2020, but it's all movies chopped up into 10-minute segments and shows designed to air 10 minutes at a time.

There was also this weird report that Steven Spielberg was making a show for the service. It would be a horror show, and it would only be available to watch at night—the content melting before your eyes as the sun came up. Potentially cool. But potentially weird.

The Spielberg show came up a few times as I discussed the service with Katzenberg and Whitman on Tuesday. Whitman made it clear that content on Quibi is intended to be viewed between around 7 in the morning and 7 at night. It's not unwinding content, it's little excursions when you're grabbing lunch or taking the train to work. (All content will be available offline at launch, so subway commuters, rejoice!)

"Steven sort of ignored the 7 a.m. to 7:00 p.m," Whitman said with a laugh. Spielberg had heard about the service from Katzenberg and others and, according to Whitman, actually approached them—not the other way around.

"He came to us, and he said, 'Listen, I want to do a show that you can only watch after dark. Because think about how scary it would be all to do it. Super scary show. And if it's after dark, it's gonna be even scarier.'"

According to Whitman, Quibi's engineers told Spielberg that it was very possible to do a show tied to the times of sunrise and sunset according to the location of the user's phone. "ecause we know your phone knows exactly where you are. It knows exactly what time it is," she said.

The phone has traditionally been the enemy in Hollywood. Step into a darkened theater, and you'll be told to turn it off. Katzenberg seems to envision the phone as the next big medium for entertainment. Instead of viewing it as a tiny TV we keep in our pockets, Katzenberg wants us to envision the phone as a whole new way to experience entertainment. So shows that can only be watched at night and bound to your phone's GPU location. Or shows bound to the gyroscope in your phone—showing you a different version of the film based on orientation.

Director Catherine Hardwicke (she directed Thirteen! And Twilight!) told me Katzenberg's vision is what appealed to her the most and that she's found herself imagining even bigger and wilder possibilities. She told me a story about jogging along a bridge in Vietnam the week before, racing to catch a bus. As she ran past dozens of people taking selfies and capturing videos, she thought, "it'd be some neat to, like, fuck with everything, you know? And like to be able to sort of shove my footage onto their camera, interact with them."

Something a lot of hackers would probably also find appealing!

But what Hardwicke was getting at was the appeal of just engaging with a (willing and eager) audience in very different ways than filmmakers traditionally have.

Which, I will admit, sounds like something folks say after a bong rip. Yet when Quibi CPO Tom Conrad and CTO Rob Post sat me down to show me the new kind of videos being made for Quibi, I found myself... kind of falling for the hype.

Everyone I spoke with calls the videos "turnstyle," and they're a little different from what you'd expect. When content is viewed in landscape mode, it behaves just like videos you watch on Netflix or YouTube. Yet, when you turn the phone around to portrait orientation, something very cool happens. Instead of the landscape video shrinking down into a postage stamp at the top of your screen, or cropping down to just the center of the video, you get a whole new video. Everything seems to reorient so you're watching the same story but in a completely different perspective.

For example, in Catherine Hardwicke's new show, Don't Look Deeper, the portrait mode version provides a much more intimate experience, with close-ups of the actors and a focus on expressions rather than actions. Flipping to landscape mode reveals more of the action and gives you that sense of scope you've come to expect from really wide shots.

Hardwicke's approach isn't the only way of doing it. Director Zach Wechter said he was eager to experiment with the platform, and in his short Nest, the landscape version of the film is a traditional horror film about a woman being stalked in her own home and watching the intruder through her Nest cameras. But turn the phone to portrait mode and instead you have a view of her phone. So you see the grainy Nest cam footage or watch as she jumps out of the app and opens Facetime to call her dad in terror.

What's happening is Quibi has not one but two versions of the film bound to one soundtrack. One version is edited in landscape mode and the other in portrait mode, and the idea is the app seamlessly switches between the two, allowing you to control how you experience the story. Done right, it could create a far more immersive and interactive experience than you'd normally expect from narrative content on a phone.

It's both positively gimmicky and absolutely cool, and I kind of hate myself for how into it I am.

Quibi's Post says it was a challenge to create the tech that allows Quibi to deliver the turnstyle videos because you have to supply not one, but two streams concurrently and then switch between them without hiccups. "[W]hen Tom [Conrad] and the designers first came to me with this, and they showed it to me, like, my heart skipped a beat because I've been streaming video for over 10 years. Immediately, I know, 'oh, I'm in trouble.'"

For Post, the challenge was building out technology to support it all, and he thinks they've done it. The tech that allows the concurrent streams and quick switching between them is "the foundation of our patent portfolio," he said. It helps that the videos he has to deliver don't need to be as large or high-quality as what's found on Netflix. Quibi won't be delivering 4K video to phones that don't even have 4K screens, and while HDR could be supported in the future, it isn't now. "We want to future-proof ourselves," Post told me, after noting that they're still shooting everything in the highest quality and will be able to deliver better-looking versions of the content as phones improve.

But crucially, future-proofing means ignoring TV sets altogether. And laptops. There's no browser app or Roku app. For everyone at Quibi, the first and only venue for their content is the phone. This means if we all move to smart watches or AR glasses by 2040, Quibi will be screwed if it doesn't innovate. Whitman and Katzenberg seem optimistic that phones will stick around for a while.

And I... I'm starting to feel actually pretty optimistic about Quibi. Maybe. The service launches April 6, 2020, on both iOS and Android. The ad-supported version will cost $5 a month, while the ad-free version will cost $8 a month. Quibi plans to release one chapter of a movie, five episodes of shows, and 25 "Daily Essentials" clips featuring news and sports every day. All told, about three hours of new content per day, 52 weeks a year.

Between now and April, a lot will still need to happen for me to truly believe in Quibi. For one thing, we still don't know what the app looks like. The footage I saw was all on a test application intended for demos. But after just one demo, I'm willing to at least give Quibi a shot.
Source

jenkins

it's true that i'm organically resistant to letting bee and gray control me. perhaps if their thoughts concentrated on other avenues of thought rather than their ceaseless sense of dread

WorldForgot

Timur Bekmambetov Is Making The First Vertical Blockbuster

QuoteV2: Escape From Hell, the next film from filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov, which according to Deadline will be the first major feature film shot in the vertical format. The Russian production, based on a true story, concerns "a captured Soviet pilot who leads an escape from a German concentration camp by hijacking an aircraft." Bekmambetov says the film is "about a man standing up and straightening his shoulders in spite of the circumstances. And about a rescue plane soaring up into the sky,” so he's clearly thought about how framing conventions will change in, for lack of a better word, Vertical Vision.

Bekmambetov is no stranger to experimentation with cinematic form. In addition to directing blockbusters like Ben-Hur and Wanted, he produced first-person action film Hardcore Henry and spearheaded the "screenlife" format, producing a number of films made as computer or smartphone screen captures. The resultant films have been surprisingly good - though the best of the bunch, Bekmambetov's own Profile, sadly has no scheduled release - and that's largely due to Bekmambetov's thoughtful engagement with developing the screenlife format's visual language. He also produced Dead of Night, a vertical-video zombie series shot for Snapchat.

V2 is being shot with smartphone audiences in mind, which makes sense. Part of the hatred for vertical video stems from its appearing cropped when viewed on a traditional horizontal-format screen; perhaps a smartphone release will ameliorate some of that. I for one am intrigued to see what it ends up looking like - if anyone's adept at turning cinematic language inside out successfully, it's Bekmambetov - though I'm certainly skeptical. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but human beings simply see in widescreen - our eyes are next to each other, not on top of one another - and I've never watched anything shot vertically that wouldn't have been better the other way around.

V2: Escape From Hell goes into production next week with a budget of $10 million, and is scheduled for mobile-centric release early next year in both Russian and English-language versions.

One day we'll experience the theater hall masking vertical...

wilberfan

QuoteMaybe I'm just old-fashioned, but human beings simply see in widescreen - our eyes are next to each other, not on top of one another.

Let's make a epic, wide-screen re-telling of the Shackleton expedition to the South Pole--and project it UPSIDE-DOWN in the northern hemisphere!  It'll be awesome!  And patrons will wear special boots that contain dry-ice, so they can really FEEL the frostbite!

Sleepless

This is like, what, the third horseman of the apocalypse? Sorry, I've lost count where we're at...
He held on. The dolphin and all the rest of its pod turned and swam out to sea, and still he held on. This is it, he thought. Then he remembered that they were air-breathers too. It was going to be all right.