Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Obscure movies face a great future

Bryan Reesman may not have heard about NetFlix, iTunes, Amazon, eBay, U-verse and The Long Tail— or at least considered how they relate to the present and future of home movie entertainment. If he has, for some reason he didn’t mention any of these online digital outlets or concepts in his article “For Obscure DVDs, a Precarious Future” in today’s New York Times. Instead, he focused on the sad (in his view) demise of video stores across the United States and the difficult road faced by independent filmmakers wanting to include their titles on actual shelves in mainstream stores like WalMart. In the article he wrote:

The Digital Entertainment Group, a nonprofit trade consortium, reported for the first time in 2006 that overall DVD shipments were stuck at about 1.65 billion units, roughly the same as 2005, after years of rapid growth. According to the weekly DVD Release Report, combined DVD releases dropped to 12,887 in 2006 from 13,712 in 2005.

In effect the video market is glutted. For big studios that means more jousting over future formats that may restart sales. But for specialty companies that have traded otherwise unavailable horror, action, art-house and exploitation titles, the glut has meant a struggle to survive.

Netflix rental

Multimedia content, including videos, is increasingly being distributed via digital means. In his article, Bryan makes no mention of Netflix, iTunes, or other online video distribution channels. Netflix announced in January 2007 its new initiative to offer movies from its 70,000+ archive of titles as instant downloadable videos. The prospects for obscure movie titles living on in the era of the Internet-powered long tail is better than ever. According to the Netflix press release:

“We named our company Netflix in 1998 because we believed Internet-based movie rental represented the future, first as a means of improving service and selection, and then as a means of movie delivery,” said Reed Hastings, the company’s chief executive officer. “While mainstream consumer adoption of online movie watching will take a number of years due to content and technology hurdles, the time is right for Netflix to take the first step.

It likely is, however, a bad time invest in a bricks and mortar video store. This process of entertainment digitization will take time, and won’t reach everyone right away (the digital divide is real) but the future prospects seem fairly clear. According to Reihan Salam:

For Netflix, the heat is on, and it has responded with something called Watch Now. Like a magical movie faucet, the service streams video straight to your Web browser. Right now, about 1,000 of Netflix’s 70,000 titles are available for instant watching.

Though Netflix doesn’t offer unlimited streaming, you still get a hefty amount of watching time—roughly one hour for every dollar you pay in monthly subscription fees, at no additional cost. Three-disc subscribers who pay $17.95 a month, for example, can supplement their regular DVD watching with 18 hours of online time. If you need to watch more than 18 hours of streaming video per month, I can assure you that this problem will solve itself when you go blind.

It’s a great day to be a movie fan and digital consumer, especially if you want to be discriminating and intentional about the video content you consume along with your family at home or on the road. More than ever, there is little need (except with sports games and other live events) to “tune in” on a specific date and time to watch a favorite show when it airs. Disruptive technologies march on, and the ripple effects grow more pronounced.

Via Cynthia Brumfield in IP Democracy.

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