March 17, 2021
You constantly hear the refrain that “everything moves so fast” these days. That the pace of change due to digital is hard to keep up with. Malarkey. We were promised jet packs. Technology is slow. And it progresses through the prodigious use of duct tape and bailing wire. Many of the tech “revolutions” we’re living through now are half-assed versions of what we should have at our disposal by now. Most engineers/coders I know share this sentiment. They can see what could/should be, but know that we always settle for what’s “good enough,” or that they can’t get the attention of management to make it any better.
This has been made abundantly clear – like much else – by coronavirus. As we switched to working from home, doing video meetings, live-streams, watching more films from home, ordering from home – pick your poison, but odds are, you found yourself saying “wait a minute, it’s 2020 (now 2021) and we’re still dealing with this crap?!”
Case in point (#1) - Livestreaming. Did you know that in 2021, it’s still exceedingly difficult to host a live screening of a movie and then a live panel, all at the same link and on the same platform? But wait, you say, Vimeo has Vimeo on Demand and Vimeo Livestream. But alas, these two products were acquisitions and they’ve never tied the tech stacks together. Long story short – if you try to host a Vimeo screening of your film via Vimeo On Demand, you have to download and stream the file from your home (or work) computer, which then relies on your upstream bandwidth. I was speaking with an expert on this who works for a movie theater that is literally renting a WeWork space just to have the bandwidth to host their livestreams and Q&A’s. Yes, several platforms have risen in the past year that try to address this – Eventive and StorySpaces being two that I like, but most of them are overpriced, not exactly consumer-ready and… why did it take this long?
But thinking we can livestream a film and Q&A should be peanuts compared to making a festival or theater website that’s navigable and user-friendly. But as I’ve mentioned here before, they all suck. Thanks to a few companies like Shift72, most fests and theaters can now offer you a pretty good streaming experience, even one that connects to your favorite device. That’s a relief – and the bare minimum we should be expecting, mind you – but try finding that film, or adding it to your queue. Or try perusing a film catalogue without breaking your back arrows – the idea of flipping through a selection of films in some convenient fashion seems alien to every festival out there.
This can be chalked up to the low budgets fests and cinemas have, the quick turnaround they had during covid-cancellations, and their general reluctance over the years to embrace digital. Netflix, Apple and Amazon can’t hide behind the same claims, but just think of what a shit-show their algorithms remain. You would think that after 23 years of engineering – and about as long as me populating their algorithm with my choices – they would know that I have zero interest in watching anything like NCIS, but there it is at the top of my recommendations, while the new thriller, Sentinelle, starring Olga Kurylenko should be automatically added to my queue. But it wasn’t even recommended to me, and I had to find it via a tweet from a film critic friend. It's not very good, by the way, but I was going to watch it well before I get around to anything else they’ve recommended me, much like Bilge did:
This list of slow technologies could go on and on – I haven’t even gotten to the jetpacks, or the promise of a true hyperspace where everything should have been connected. Heck, when I took a cyberspace class in college in 1992, we were expecting that by now we’d be flying through that space with our working VR goggles, building nanorobots that replace errant genes, and relaxing afterwards from within fully immersive movie-like, holodeck-style worlds. All of these things are close, but if you’ve tried any of them – you know we have a long way to go.
Anyway, this is all just a long intro to a discussion about another “cutting-edge” concept that is long overdue – micropayments. I wrote a grant to the Macarthur Foundation back in 2007 for a new VOD system that would have united all of the indie distributors, and individual creators, on one curated, common platform that would let them all share data, and keep 95% of the revenue. The project would have digitized their older films for free, and make them available for sale/rent or for clip licensing. It would have also let people grab clips and “promise to pay” in micropayments later, based on actual usage of the resultant film – if ten people watched the final film, the filmmaker of the underlying clip would get less than if a million people watched it, and they’d get even more if it was incorporated into a Spielberg film, for example. And instead of a school paying $1000 for a license to a film, they could pay micropayments every time students watched it – which could have led to more revenue over time, and fairer licensing terms. The lesson here being two-fold – some ideas come too early, and that we’re still in need of such a system.
In fact, that was just one possible use of micropayments, and I thought I was launching it too late. Most of those concepts, from digitization to curation to micropayments – had been dreamt about since the 90’s or earlier. As we’ve now gotten further along with blockchain technology and other alternate ledger-based systems, we’re finally getting closer to the tech we need to truly “revolutionize” the film world. Which brings me to The Faithful’s upcoming launch this Friday.
During a recent panel for the Brooklyn Filmmaker's Collective, I reconnected with Annie Berman, a filmmaker I'd met a long time ago and learned more about an experiment she's trying with her new film The Faithful. More details on the film below, but what intrigued me about her experiment, is that she's using Cinnamon, a web video platform based on Coil, which is a web monetization platform using an open-source protocol called interledger, which allows people to pay micropayments to creators they like on the web. That's a mouthful, and you can read more about how that works from the Coil site. But as you can guess from the above diatribe, I'm a big fan of the future of micro-payments. In general, this iteration is a set of ideas for the future of the web - that I can pay a small subscription fee to a service like Coil or Cinnamon, and then my fee is split among artists that I visit, or easily leave a tip for them from my fee, etc. instead of having to rely on advertising, etc. As this idea progresses, and we aren't there yet, we can imagine things like paying micropayments to artists who helped contribute to a work, based on actual viewership or listenership - so maybe the trumpeter in a jazz band gets a micropayment every time I listen to their band's song, or a sample of it, or the same could work for your crew, or for footage you license, etc.
But Annie is living today in 2020, where technology and the web is painfully slow moving (and she recognizes this – unlike me back in 2007) and she needs to get people up to speed with this idea and the technology, so she isn't leading with this aspect in her press materials, although I am here. If you visit her site below and watch the film, it should be a pretty seamless experience, much like renting something from a Vimeo or iTunes. But behind the scenes, she's helping to further the usage of this technology, and help add to the lessons learned, and she's also getting a lot more data than she'd get from your typical middle-man. That's why I'm giving her a bigger PR push here than is the norm for my newsletter - because I'm a big fan of the possible future(s) she's contributing to, and having heard about the film, I'm excited to see it this coming week.
Details from the filmmaker follow:
The Faithful is a stirring documentary 20 years in the making that explores fandom, the legacies of Diana, Princess of Wales, Elvis Presley, and Pope John Paul II, and the participatory nature of fan culture. In her pilgrimages to the Vatican, Graceland, Kensington Palace, and beyond director Annie Berman captures the evolution of fandom from the dawn of the digital age to today, all while reflecting on her own relationship to images, memory, and legacy.
In terms of rollout, Berman and her team decided to do something different: Blowing up the premiere concept entirely and bypassing the traditional gatekeepers. They’re pioneering an alternative approach to feature film distribution that they feel will benefit other indie creators. With the support of Grant for the Web, they created their own online screening platform for The Faithful that bypasses traditional gatekeepers.
To join the live premiere event, viewers pay on the site (tickets go on sale next week), watch on the site (on their TV, laptop - whatever tech they want) and interact with the filmmakers at the-faithful.com As the first feature film receiving a Grant for the Web, they’re excited to see how they can make alternative film monetization models a reality. Following our release, we are committed to sharing this model with the filmmaking community in order to strengthen the independent, direct-to-audience distribution ecosystem.
Join them for their premiere and see what makes The Faithful so fateful: tickets on sale at http://the-faithful.com/. They’ve offered our readers half off, to the first 25 tickets purchased via Promo Code: NMN50
Additional screening dates: *all showtimes include a live discussion with the director and special guests **a ticket allows entry to any or all of the showtimes: March 19, 2021 at 2:00pm EST; March 19, 2021 at 7:00pm EST; March 20, 2021 at 2:00pm EST; March 20, 2021 at 7:00pm EST; March 21, 2021 at 2:00pm EST; March 21, 2021 at 7:00pm EST
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Film
More Buy-Back Clause Shenanigans: I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that CODA, which sold at Sundance for $25M to Apple, was having issues where distributors who had pre-bought rights were refusing to give up their rights to Apple and accept 10% margin buy-outs. Now, the same issue has hit Dev Patel's directorial debut, Monkey Man, which Netflix is buying for $30M (Deadline reports). Buried in the article is this paragraph: "Our understanding is that the streamer would have preferred worldwide rights but a number of buyers with signed deals wanted to hold onto the buzz project and got to do so. However, one buyer told us they had to “sadly” relinquish the project due to a local dubbing issue that came about from the Netflix acquisition. We hear there were also distributors that loved the project at previous markets but didn’t ultimately get it because they didn’t want to sign “buy-back” clauses." This is another Endeavor Content deal, and it seems to be the new norm- you've bought it, unless you haven't. Expect for this one to blow-up a bit more, until everyone settles on bigger buy-out payments.
POV Launches Otherly - Kudos to the team at POV, who built and launched the new Instagram Stories series, Otherly. We need more experiments in storytelling like this, and I like what I've seen so far. The series runs March 15-April 2nd and features work by 7 filmmakers. From POV: Otherly is a series of seven short documentaries premiering on Instagram stories. Each Otherly film has been imagined by women, nonbinary and genderqueer creators about themselves and their communities. Each film premieres on the Otherly series Instagram Stories, where it will be available for 24 hours and then saved to highlights.
Reinventing the Oscars: All of my film friends are trapped in the myth that the Oscars still matter... to anyone but the rest of us. They don't. I mean, yes, of course, they help a filmmaker's, actor's or other crew's career and all that, and the films featured this year are the usual crop of decent arthouse films. But they have lost all of their weight with the public, and very few people actually pay attention to them anymore. Anyway, Bob Lefsetz published his thoughts on how to make them more relevant, and most of his ideas are pretty swell. Check it out.
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Branded Content
Anheuser-Busch Launches "Not a Sports Show" on Ficto: AB is launching a new sports show, that's "not a sports show" with Lil Rel Howery (comedian, Get Out, Judas and the Black Messiah) as the host and a lot of great guests. I'm not sure how many people are watching Ficto, but this show may bring some fans. Variety argues that the niche audiences - and access to data, were part of the reason AB chose Ficto over bigger SVODs. Anyway -no sports...and no ads. Check out the press release and the trailer.
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Miscellany:
Amazon's E-Book Monopoly Squeezes Libraries - Want to read the new Mindy Kaling, or Dean Koontz or Dr. Ruth e-book on a library platform like Libby? Tough luck. Turns out they are among many authors published now by Amazon, and Amazon won't license their e-books to public libraries or such systems. This isn't just about money -libraries actually pay more than consumers for the rights to distribute books, even e-books (with onerous terms) - it seems to be more about quashing competition, and the idea behind public access. WaPo has the story (h/t Redef).
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