Finding an Audience: Distribution Notes for 8/7/09

Home Video

Richard Corliss makes the case against Netflix, but the primary point he has seems to be that it takes away the right to instant gratification that going to a video store brings with it. I don’t agree with him at all but it is interesting to see this sort of counter-intuitive thinking going on.

20th Century Fox wants to withhold its new release titles from vending kiosk rental service RedBox for 30 days after their street date out of fears that such low-price rentals are eating not only into more lucrative rentals but also sales.

Online/On-Demand

IndieGoGo and SnagFilms have partnered to make many of the former’s films available on Snag.

SpeedCine has officially launched (in beta) as a directory of movies to watch online legally. Matt Dentler rightly pegs this as very important to the online distribution category.

The new pay cable movie venture Epix has signed its first outside partner, adding Samuel Goldwyn to the mix and making its movies that will debut theatrically in 2010 and 2011 to its offerings.

Warner Bros. has signed a deal to make movies from Image Entertainment, Gravitas Ventures and others available on VOD.

Finding an Audience: Distribution Notes for 7/31/09

Theatrical

The debate continues as to whether 3D exhibition is still building steam or is leveling off as measured by per-screen takes and such.

Home Video

Studios used the Comic-Con get-together to try and drum up interest in their upcoming home video releases, an effort to staunch the bleeding that’s been going on in that category in terms of consumer spending.

CinemaNow is launching a new service that puts a movie – including the necessary video player software – on a USB drive.

Jimminy Christopher…RedBox is being called by someone the home video equivalent of the cheap second run theaters that – and I’m not sure the person quoted is aware of this – used to be all over the place but now are being squeezed out by shrinking home video windows. It’s a distribution point but lets not go nuts over this.

Paramount is plowing ahead with a terrible, terrible idea, that of staggering home video releases. Beginning in September with their Dance Flick release, the movie will be available for sale on Blu-ray but the standard DVD will only be available for rental. The Blu-ray is a packed special edition but the DVD just has the movie. The DVD will go on sale eight weeks later but it’s not clear if it will be the bare-bones edition or have bonus features. I remain convinced that offering DVDs with just the movie – and at a reduced price point – is the key to wringing a bit more money out of the format since that’s all people are getting when they buy a digital download and that’s a category that’s growing.

Online/On-Demand

Seems some movies that are available through Starz Play are being blocked from the XBox Live Dashboard, though it remains to be seen if this is intentional or just a technical SNAFU.

Epix, the new movie channel from Viacom, MGM and Lionsgate, has its first distributor agreement but it’s not on cable TV, it’s on the Verizon FiOS subscriber network. There’s talk of tiers being offered in terms of how much of the programming can be accessed based on what package people have and it may eventually be expanded to Verizon’s V Cast mobile service.

A handful of movies managed by Cinetic Rights Management are now available on Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” service, including the very funny Melvin Goes to Dinner.

According to Pew’s recent study of online behavior, 35 percent of internet users have watched a movie or TV show online in the last year, over twice as many as had reported doing so (16 percent) in 2007.

Finding an Audience: Distribution Notes for 7/24/09

Home Video

Disney, Lionsgate and Sony have all signed a deal with rental kiosk operator RedBox that will give movies from those studios preferential treatment in the growing number of red boxes at retail outlets. The deals also seem to have some stipulation about limiting RedBox’s ability to sell used DVDs at discount prices, but overall this is a good embracing of the reality of one of the few areas of home video rental growth.

On the other side of that thinking, you have Universal’s continued suit against RedBox, which might be the cause of some recent Universal titles not being available there at all.

Online/On-Demand

Sonic Solutions will integrate CinemaNow’s platform to to provide 3D movies to home viewers.

Disney is reported to be working on some sort of online destination for movies and TV shows that would be a paid site. Details are sparse but it’s believed the effort would build on some of the communities Disney has built for kids and teens, only with adult programming.

While the trial involved TV shows, it’s interesting to note that Cox Communication’s experiments with disabling fast-forwarding in VOD programming shows, according to them, that there was no discernible impact on viewer behavior.

Finding an Audience: Distribution Notes for 7/17/09

Theatrical

A story in the LA Times asks whether the declining per-screen averages for 3D movies means that audiences are falling out of love with the novelty of the exhibition. I don’t think that’s the case – I think that it’s more indicative of the format becoming mainstreamed.

Hollywood is hoping things continue as they have so far and that this summer winds up being a record-setting year.

Home Video

The New York Times looks at movie-rental kiosk operator Redbox and how it plays to the very head of the long tail in terms of title availability. Scott Kirsner recounts his first experience trying out a rental from a Redbox unit and finds it interesting but probably not something that will be habit-forming.

Consumer spending on home entertainment was down four percent in the first half of 2009, totaling $9.73 billion. Spending on DVD and Blu-ray discs dropped six percent, with a 62 percent rise in Blu-ray renting and a 91 percent rise in buying offsetting a 14 percent fall in overall disc sales. Digital distribution was up 21 percent. As The Los Angeles Times notes, though, the DEG report plays up percentages – which range from favorable to not that bad – but doesn’t show actual dollar numbers, which would have been a lot more depressing.

Online/On-Demand

Blockbuster announced it will integrate its on-demand service into Samsung HDTVs, Blu-ray players and other devices beginning this fall.

Consumer spending on online video is expected to hit $3.9 billion this year, with a report from research firm Strategy Analytics saying there’s more willingness than some would believe within the public to pay for such online video.

VOD adoption among the general watching public continues to lag behind DVR and web-based viewing for a number of reasons, including the fact that there’s no one simple way to view VOD content. There’s also a lack of real “oomph” because there’s no single advertising model either.

Sony is enjoying the success of its Playstation Network, which has turned into a major VOD player for the delivery of movies, TV programming and more.

Finding an Audience: Distribution Notes for 7/10/09

Online/On-Demand

It’s official: ABC shows have begun to show up on Hulu, beginning with select episodes of “Grey’s Anatomy.”

Cinetic Rights Management will release a handful of titles a month to their new Cinetic Film Buff VOD channel, with distribution then happening on iTunes, Amazon and elsewhere. CRM is also in talks to manage the title catalog of a number of distributors that are looking for ways to get some of their films out to these new channels.

YouTube has gone to Hollywood to make a new appeal to content creators and networks to put full episodes and other long-form content on the site, making their case based on YouTube being a solid place for audience discovery that also carries with it solid advertising CPMs for such content.

Finding an Audience: Distribution Notes for 7/3/09

Theatrical

The few remaining indie arms of the big studios are buying minimally, some of the true independents are picking up a handful and the others are just kind of sitting there doing nothing. Yes, the market for independent movies truly does bite right now.

Home Video

Rumors are circulating that Paramount, 20th Century Fox and Sony are in talks to merge the production, distribution and other backend operations relating to the DVD business in an effort to cut costs.

Online/On-Demand

The Supreme Court has declined to hear arguments relating to the opposition by a consortium of Hollywood studios to plans by some cable providers to introduce networked DVR functionality. That functionality would un-hinge DVR services from a set-top box with its hard-drive and, for all intents and purposes, put it in the cloud that is the operator’s services. The system will be slow – and expensive – to roll out but will ultimately be a cost-savings since it means they don’t have to pay all those manufacturing costs. PaidContent has more of the winners/losers in this.

Warner Bros. has signed a deal to handle digital release of films managed by Oscilloscope, making sure those movies get into online storefronts. New media distribution will happen after the films complete their theatrical run.

The limited broadband speeds in the U.S. still aren’t enough to effectively stream HD video content to homes but are being utilized to some effect as complimentary channels for Blu-ray content.

Finding an Audience: Distribution Notes for 6/26/09

Home Video

Redbox’s kiosks are taking business away from Netflix. It’s not that surprising since those kiosks very much serve the hits-driven head of the Long Tail consumer market and so are going to be attractive to the pedestrian traffic that their placement in McDonald’s restraurants and outside Walgreen’s stores draws in.

Online/On-Demand

You can now download and view movies being distributed by Cinetic Rights Managment on your Vudu set-top box.

Gigantic Group is launching an online streaming service that gives customers unlimited viewing access for three days for $2.99. The first movie being released is the documentary Motherland. The interesting part is that Gigantic can block the movies they release from being available in areas where the films are playing in actual theaters. That’s kind of a big deal and could go a long way in making distributors more comfortable with the arrangement since they don’t have to worry about angering theater owners.

Finding an Audience: Distribution Notes for 6/19/09

Home Video

Drooping DVD sales means the home entertainment market as a whole is down $2.6 billion in the global market according to Screen Digest. Part of the decline is from retailers engaging in price wars. But according to PriceWaterhouseCooper global entertainment spending is set to rise between now and 2013. Even then the U.S. is expected to lag behind the rest of the world.

Online/On-Demand

Stan Schroeder at Mashable has a great piece on what would be the needed features of a site that offers Hollywood films online. He nails a lot of the things I would think of on such a site and includes an important caveat: That the site will most assuredly be unprofitable for the first two years of its existence but that it’s worth losing some money in that time in exchange for building an audience for a service that could eventually truly disrupt pirate services and begin to fill in the gaps that are becoming evident in DVD sales.

Insight Research says streaming entertainment – from movies to music – will bring in over $78 billion in sales over the next six years.

Video-on-demand usage rose 21 percent in 2008 according to cable providers. A good portion of that, as Dentler points out, is the free offerings that are available but still it’s good to see orders rising.

Finding an Audience: Distribution Notes for 6/12/09

Theatrical

There’s a cool self-organized movement afoot called MobMov. Using the site – and being sure to get permission from property owners and others – people are able to organize what are being called “guerilla drive-in” experiences. Basically they find a movie, find a place to screen it and then organize people to the screening, which has the feeling of a drive-in/tailgate party mixture. Love this idea. Love it. [via Costa]

Home Video

Epix has finally launched in beta testing mode. The service is the long-gestating partnership between Paramount, Lionsgate and MGM that’s part basic cable channel and part online distribution platform, though it seems you’ll need to be a cable subscribert to access the movies online. The studios have stocked it with about 100 films right off the bat and, depending on how this turns out, more will be added later on down the road.

Theatrical-to-DVD windows have been wider in the first half of this year than they were in the same period last year, bucking the trend that’s been progressing for the last few years. Some of that is just because of how the calendar has played out but it seems that some movies that have generated long-term word-of-mouth based business at the box off, for example Gran Torino, have been delayed so they can continue to sell tickets.

Online/On-Demand

One of the new features of the iPhone 3GS (which I’m totally getting as soon as I can afford it) will be the ability to purchase and rent movies from the iTunes store directly from the device, which is kind of huge and could lead to a lot more spur-of-the-moment purchases.

Matt Dentler points to the latest story about how VOD is becoming the norm in terms of indie-film distribution. I continue to maintain that there needs to be adequate promotion of the films in relation to even this distribution in order for this model to truly succeed, but many of these studios don’t have the biggest coffers to dive into for marketing.

Best Buy has partnered with CinemaNow to make movies available for purchase through the retailer’s website as well as on specifically-marked devices sold in stores.

Finding an Audience: Distribution Notes for 5/29/09

Theatrical

More people play video games than go to the movies according to a new study from the NPD Group. One factor in the shift – and I hope Hollywood is paying attention particularly to this – is that current games are available in a variety of ways, whether as a physical disc or download. I have some questions about this study but they’re probably not going to throw off the results too much. The reality is that distribution is shifting and Hollywood has yet to leave the “denial” stage of any paradign change period.

Exhibitors are doing alright in the current recession despite the fact that ticket sales are generally flat largely because ticket prices are higher and the fact that some people are buying more concessions, where the real money is made. If that latter trend continues you can expect studios to start looking for a cut of that as well.

Home Video

A new report from Nielsen says that the drop in sales of physical DVDs is due to the recession and the tightening of budgets and not because there’s a tidal shift over to digital downloads. When they do buy they’re choosing value centers like Wal-Mart over electronics retailers like Best Buy. But “rental” is becoming an increasingly popular way to watch new release films, which is good news for those companies but bad news for theater owners.

Blockbuster is hoping that the addition of movie-themed swag to their shelves will bring people back to its brick-and-mortar stores.

Online/On-Demand

Matt Dentler points to a story on how Warner Bros. says its strategy of releasing films to VOD on the same day as their DVD is not hurting disc sales.