January 5, 2021
As I said in my last post before the break, I can’t make any predictions for the New Year. But as we go into 2022, I do have several questions at the top of my mind.
- Will Sundance go “virtual?” I’ve been getting emails and texts about this just about every five minutes lately, and with increasing urgency. It’s known that Park City is suffering badly from Omicron (worse than any other place in Utah, or NYC for that matter), that some sponsors have pulled out (at least from participating), and that many side-events and event-venues have called it quits. Seasonal staffers and volunteers don’t seem too happy either. Sundance is trying their best, with lots of good covid policies and told IndieWire today that the show will go on. But it seems almost comical - if you actually stop and think about it, no one in their right mind would recommend attending this right now, your flight might get cancelled, staff shortages alone could force their hand, and then there’s risking getting sick, or giving it to someone else… and as IndieWire hinted, good luck figuring out your extended condo at that point in time. That said, I’m still planning to attend as of this posting, and wouldn’t wish this decision on anyone (apparently, neither would Sundance leadership as they’ve kicked the can to the government). Related, who else pulls the plug on this year’s in-person fests if Sundance does? And does SXSW become important again as a result?
- Which film companies will be left standing at the end of 2022? There’s already been a lot of mergers, and many important companies are known to be for sale (A24, Magnolia), or are on the market more privately (ok, I won’t say here). Plus, many fests and theaters are barely holding on, and another mixed year of variants must be scary for them. There will be more consolidation among the bigger streamers and production companies, and likely among the smaller ones, too. Some of these will be for good reasons, and others will be tragedies, but 2022 seems to be a big year for consolidation and (needed) shrinkage of the field.
- At the same time, will we finally see Lina Khan’s FTC team start to make an effort at fighting back against some of these mergers? If that’s ever going to happen, it needs to be in early 2022, while the Biden administration has any power left to do much of anything. If she does make a move, things could get interesting.
- Will anyone figure out a working model for blockchain and/or NFT’s in the film space? There seems to be a new company doing something for film every few months, but so far, I’ve seen very few that are solving problems that we need solved, or that couldn’t be solved without blockchain technology. I have some thoughts on what might work here, but that’s for another article, perhaps (read more on this problem below). But regardless, I wonder if we’ll see something new here that’s actually interesting.
- The biggest problem we have in the film world right now (aside from DEI issues, which are ongoing) is how to break through the noise?. In an attention economy with too much content being produced, it’s really hard to make noise and get heard and then seen by your audience. We need a set of tools that will involve some mix of discovery, curation, trusted source recommendations, and anything else that can help bring eyeballs to films. That’s where brands excel and it’s where the opportunity lies in doing something new and smart – not what’s been done before. We don’t have issues with making or disseminating content (beyond doing so in a way that gets seen). Yet that’s what brands have been focused on, because it’s easy. So, who will stop making and start curating? Whatever brands focus on this will break away from the pack, and I hope someone does it in 2022. It’s also a good place for foundations and others to focus their energies (maybe in collaboration with brands), but perhaps that’s hoping for too much.
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Film
Why are So Many Movies Crammed with Stars?: Because that's what Hollywood does when it gets nervous, and that's what people seem to look for when the landscape gets crowded. Brooks Barnes has the story in the NYT. (BN)
Helping Producers Help Themselves - Dear Producer has a great post for the New Year, with suggested sustainability resolutions for producers to follow to keep their health, sanity and artistic integrity... and earn some deserved income while they're at it. One of the better New Year's posts. (BN)
As UK (and US) hits peak Netflix the streaming giant will have to work harder: Netflix’s subscriber growth in the UK looks like it’s nearing its peak, with just 800,000 new subscribers in ‘21. And something similar is happening in the U.S. Why? A few reasons, namely Disney +’s launch near the beginning of 2021, Amazon Prime’s strategic move into live sports coverage, but also — and perhaps most importantly — COVID 19: The Guardian’s Mark Sweney writes, “[while] the pandemic has fuelled record-setting growth…. This accelerated uptake has “pulled forward” many of those who would have signed up in the coming years, hastening Netflix’s shift towards saturation in mature markets such as the UK. In the US, new subscriber growth has stalled this year.” So how will Netflix’s numbers remain competitive in mature markets? They’ve “burned through most of the younger demographics [in the UK and U.S.]… to whom the larger proportion of content is likely to appeal…. So “the biggest opportunity is among older people [dubbed “silver streamers”]: only half of those aged 55 to 64, and who are internet-connected, are subscribed or have access to Netflix." To grow their body of silver streamers in the UK, Netflix will likely generate content “akin to traditional UK broadcast channels…[or] local productions”, according to Richard Broughton, a director of Ampere Analysis. (GSH)
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Branded Content
How Brands Can Enter the Metaverse: Transitioning seamlessly between the real and virtual worlds is the new frontier, explains Janet Balis, contributor for the Harvard Business Review. That’s why brands should position themselves to succeed in both worlds (the metaverse and the “real” world), as the “both” will likely erode into just one before we know it. Balis points out that “a handful of businesses are already shaping the landscape, with entertainment and gaming companies leading the way.” Roblox, for instance, “allows people to create and play across immersive worlds created, and often monetized, by users.” Some brands are also starting to invest in “metaverse simulations of such things as manufacturing and logistics [which have the potential to] reduce waste and accelerate better business solutions.” Balis has a number of suggestions for brands looking to make that uncertain step into the metaverse, though her most important one is as follows: “People in brand marketing or leadership roles should start thinking about how to unleash their creativity and their storytelling. If the creative palette expands dimensions in the metaverse, we should be excited to create experiences at any point in the customer journey, from acquisition, to engagement, to transaction, to customer support, which have the potential to be both spectacular and stickier than before.” (GSH)
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Miscellany:
 What Problem Blockchains Actually Solve: I probably get an email from someone about a new blockchain based solution for the film industry every week - or I learn about some new version of this online. I'm often unimpressed, and mainly because they always seem like solutions in search of a problem. For example, a new Netflix, powered by Blockchain seems to be the most popular of these. A similar problem, but one that is much bigger, is the application of blockchain ideas and solutions to an even broader set of problems that don't need them. I'm not smart enough to articulate all of the problems with most of these, but luckily I found (via Redef, h/t) this great article about What Problem Blockchains Actually Solve, on The Solution Space newsletter. It's worth a read for anyone interested in this space. His argument is that Blockchains are great at solving a particular problem - when you need a database to store transaction information in the absence of a trusted central entity to "manage and guarantee the integrity of that database," and that we should always ask, "What do we gain over the simpler alternative of resorting to a trusted entity?" There can be good reasons for this, but many solutions don't answer this question. (BN)
Bonus Points - Read An Engineer's Hype-Free Observations on Web3 (and its Possibilities) by Dave Peck & the PSL Team - as mentioned at the end of The Solution Space article. (BN)
Are partisan news sites to blame for polarization? A massive study suggests they’re not: Who’s to blame for political polarization in the U.S.? The unofficial consensus is that partisan media is to blame. But how true is this of online partisan news sites? A team of researchers found that “online exposure to partisan news… didn’t appear to make participants’ policy attitudes any more extreme, didn’t lead people to hold more contempt toward supporters of the other party, and seemed to have no polarizing impact on Democrats or Republicans or even those who are strongly partisan.” How might these findings be explained? It turns out that people don’t actually consume much online news at all. According to the study, only “1.69% of the web tracking data involved visits to news domains; of those, more than half were visits to centrist news sites.” NiemanLab contributors Mark Coddington and Seth Lewis share their takeaways: (1) We should probably be concerned about how little news is being consumed. (2) “Fox News and other partisan outlets… are no doubt consequential as agenda-setters for the larger conversation about contentious politics,” though it might be “elite behavior, rather than communication [that’s] driving political polarization.” (GSH and h/t ReDef)
Play These Classic Games Created In Communist Czechoslovakia: Slovak game developers have recently put together a collection of ten Czechoslovakian behind-the-iron-curtain video games, dating from 1987-1989. These Communist-era creations are more than just video games — They provide inroads to explore a complex, yet well-studied Eastern-European history from vastly new perspectives. In an essay on the collection, Maroš Brojo, Multimedia curator at the Slovak Design Museum explains that many of these games “touched on various socio-cultural phenomena in our territory or even reflected on the previous regime.” “In the video game P.Ř.E.S.T.A.V.B.A. (ÚV Software, Jaroslav Fídler, 1988) you blow up a statue of V. I. Lenin, the founder of Soviet communism, with dynamite, and under the statue you find a gold brick that allows you to emigrate to the free West.” In another, “Šatochín (Sybilasoft, Stanislav Hrda, 1988), the archetype of the American invincible superhero Rambo competes with his Soviet counterpart, Major Šatochín, on the battlefield in Vietnam.” John Walker for Kotaku brings us the news. You can find the Video Game collection and Brojo’s accompanying essay here. (GSH)
In the Age of Binging, Let's Look at Why Episodic Games Matter: Evan Ramirez, writer for Collider, makes a case for the episodic video game — a format which has virtually vanished from the gaming landscape (episodic games tell a story over a series of chapters, released a few months apart). First and foremost, the episodic release can act as a powerful storytelling device: The “long periods between episodes allowed these games to breathe….Just like any great TV show that aired in a similar fashion, audiences were able to speculate as to what would happen in the next episode, and wonder how and if past choices the player made would end up having severe consequences later down the line.” Furthermore, as “audiences [wait] for… new episodes to release, it let[s] players master levels in ways that you might not normally experiment with. It gave a greater appreciation for the work that [game developers were] putting into these maps and encounters.” Check out Ramirez’ piece for an interesting history of the episodic video game as well as his thoughts on why the format he loves hasn’t survived past a handful of games. (GSH)
Why AR, not VR, will be the heart of the metaverse: Louis Rosenberg, CEO and chief scientist at Unanimous AI explains that in the next 10 or so years, our society will favor Augmented Reality over Virtual Reality experiences. At first, this might sound paradoxical — As our “real” world becomes linked with the virtual world, wouldn’t we seek out the significantly high fidelity experience that VR offers? Rosenberg writes, “The fact is, visual fidelity is not the factor that will govern broad adoption. Instead, adoption will be driven by which technology offers the most natural experience to our perceptual system. And the most natural way to present digital content to the human perceptual system is by integrating it directly into our physical surroundings.” This means that again, paradoxically, it’s the physical environment that will act as the key for our seamless dipping in and out of the (virtual) metaverse. That’s my big takeaway here. Rosenberg predicts that “The metaverse, when broadly adopted, will be an augmented reality environment accessed using see-through lenses.” VentureBeat has the story. (GSH)
Outlook 2022: The Future of VR, AR and Digital Twins: We’ve all heard of VR and AR by now. VR and AR technologies are great at creating virtual images, and they’re only getting better. But have you heard of Digital Twinning? “The digital twin… creates a virtual counterpart to a physical object. In the process, it can run through various “what-if” scenarios in production facilities, make predictions and develop possible responses”(Axel Schmidt, SupplyChainBrain contributor). Not only can digital twinning improve a physical product (through these “what-if” scenarios), but they can also improve the efficiency and sustainability of the entire production facility. These same tools can be used to improve the ways we interact with our homes, office buildings, cities and other shared spaces. Schmidt’s big takeaway here is that in a world of VR, AR, and now Digital Twinning, “the key issue will be overcoming the alienation between people and technology. It must be about connection, not hostile opposition.” (GSH)
GSH = Articles written by Sub-Genre's Gabriel Schillinger-Hyman, not Brian Newman (BN)
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