random rants - banjax blog

Digital Cinemas

I have been following Philip Anschutz, the Qwest entrepreneur, with interest for several years as he snaps up US cinema chains and invests in media ventures such as Walden Media (producer of the forthcoming The Chronicles of Narnia movies from CS Lewis). The ability to eliminate existing print and distribution charges for feature films by online delivery to digital projectors in cinemas is a game-changer ('The average total cost per movie with 3,000 prints will fall from US$6 million to US$42,000'). But with the rise in broadband, home cinema, DVD sales, pay-per-view and new low-cost distribution technologies, its just not clear that cinemas will survive in their present form.

The San Francisco Chronicle's Tom Abate says:

As one of the four big release dates -- along with Memorial Day, Christmas and New Year's Day -- Thanksgiving week can draw 40 million Americans into theaters, far exceeding the average weekly attendance of 25 million to 30 million, he said.

Impressive as those numbers may sound, the theater industry will sell fewer tickets during this peak week than it did during any seven-day period in the 1920s -- when the U.S. population was just a third of what it is today.

For discerning moviegoers, however, the real story this Thanksgiving isn't what's on the screen. Rather it's the changing nature of the $9 billion theater industry, whose biggest box office days are in the past, and whose future is uncertain in an age of DVDs, 24-hour cable and high-definition television.

I wonder where these competing forces will lead us? Personally I do not think it is an 'either or' scenario. I think both will evolve into newer forms. Cinema for the big screen shared experience is too hard to beat. And home theatre is a compelling use of thechnology for entertainment.

... for decades, producers who release new films have had to spend millions of dollars to make thousands of prints and deliver those canisters nationwide.

Switching to digital projection would cut costs and save time as well as make theaters venues for new forms of live entertainment, "like beaming in a Rolling Stones concert,'' Holden said.

But theater owners say neither they, nor ultimately their patrons, should pay the estimated $100,000-per-screen conversion cost, when Hollywood would be the prime beneficiary of any film-to-digital switch.

Indeed, theater owners see themselves as caught between moviegoers -- who gripe about prices, commercials, even sticky floors -- and moviemakers, who take most of the box office in a film's first few weeks, while producing titles with life expectancies measured, also, in weeks.

Goodbye Disney

So Roy Disney has resigned from the board of Disney. And now his friend has left. Should be fun to watch this space!

It is clear to me that this board is unwilling to tackle the difficult issues I believe this company continues to face -- management failures and accountability for those failures, operational deficiencies, imprudent capital allocations, the cannibalization of certain company icons for short-term gain, the enormous loss of creative talent over the last years, the absence of succession planning and the lack of strategic focus. Instead, the board seems determined to devote its time and energies to adopting policies that focus not on substance, but on process and, in reality, only serve to muzzle and isolate those directors who recognize that their role is to be active participants in shaping the company and planning for executive succession. Further, this board isolates those directors who believe that Michael Eisner (when measured by the dismal results over the last seven years) is not up to the challenge. Perhaps acting independently, from outside the boardroom, not hamstrung by a recently enacted board policy barring board members from communicating with shareholders and the media, I can have greater success in shaping the policies, practices and operations of Disney than I had as a member of the board.

NB Roy E Disney and Stanley Gold are partners in Shamrock Holdings.

Roku Rocks!

Anyone fancy an HDTV PVR? Is this another step towards RSS video feeds?

State of Google

Interesting article Can Google Grow Up about Google at this pre-IPO time:

When the numbers pertain to Google, they look very, very good. In 18 months the company has quadrupled in size, now employing more than 1,300 people. Annualized revenues have sextupled, to about $900 million. Annualized pretax profits have grown by a factor of 23, to about $350 million, according to a handful of people who have been told the figures. Only a few high-tech companies in history, like Apple, Compaq, Sun, and more recently Amazon.com, have generated that kind of revenue growth so fast. None has made as much money doing it—not even Netscape, which grew faster than Google has but made money in only one of its years.

BitTorrent & RSS Video Feeds

Just been reading about a very interesting P2P technology - BitTorrent.

What is BitTorrent?

You have a great product, many customers, and are delivering your product to hordes of happy customers online. Serving large files creates problems of scaling, flash crowds, and reliability. As you grow, they become more central to your business, but your bandwidth costs go up as well. It's a vicious cycle.

There is a solution. BitTorrent is a simple software product which addresses all of these problems.

The key to cheap file distribution is to tap the unutilized upload capacity of your customers. It's free. Their contribution grows at the same rate as their demand, creating limitless scalability for a fixed cost.

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer protocol for distributing files. It makes use of the upstream bandwidth of every downloader to increase the effectiveness of the distribution as a whole, and to gain advantage on the part of the downloader. On average, the faster you upload to your peers, the faster you will be able to download.

Read why some people think BitTorrent might be a 'game-changer'. Another example is Swarmcast.

Tie this form of peer-to-peer file sharing to a net ready PVR (Tivo) and RSS style video feeds, it should be possible to create your own ideal TV schedule. A network of one! (Perhaps I should trademark that sentance..)

There is a very interesting article about The Future of Television on Grant Henninger's blog. He also has a recent post Further Designs for TV's Future where he discusses his recent conversations with James Seng.

(This book, The Aula Exposure: From Friction to Freedom, looks like a good starting point to understand what may be happening in this digital networked age. To quote from the Aula website:

The Aula Exposure: From Friction to Freedom book is ready. The talks and discussions from the Aula Meeting of Minds ’03 event, along with selected essays, are now bound in hardcover.

The central argument of the book is that as different areas of culture start flowing in digital networks, it becomes self-defeating for artists, publishers, labels, and also regular people to insist for control over the distribution of their own creations. Although the fact is simple, its repercussions are only starting to be understood in their full complexity. At Aula, we’ve started referring to these economic, social and legal repercussions as the “exposure” of art, ideas, and everyday life.

Contributors include Marko Ahtisaari, John Perry Barlow, Tom Coates, Cory Doctorow, Jyri Engeström, Dan Gillmor, Jim Griffin, J.C. Herz, Joichi Ito, Matt Jones, Alex Nieminen, Abbas Raza, Clay Shirky, Eric Wahlforss, and Kim Weckström.)