New Distributors and the need for a universal media license

Screen international and ScreenDaily.com editor Michael Gubbins hosts this Power to the Pixel Panel with Sara Pollack the film manager of YouTube, David Straus & Joe Neulight from Withoutabox, Kelly Devine working on the Reframe project at Renew and Paula Le Dieu with Magic Lantern and who has worked with iCommons the international wing of Creative Commons.

Michael points out that in some ways we have a new system of gate-keeping and then David Straus points out that more and more filmmakers are starting to be empowered as distributors. Then Joe Neulight gets very defensive about how slow things have moved in the past two years and promises for more Withoutabox services for self distribution in the spring.

Then questions from the audience reiterate the new gate keeper contradiction as well as provide a call to action to have meta data about movies contain alternative audio tracks for the blind and captions for the hearing impaired. I thought this was an interesting point because ideally most content and user interfaces would be able to work either with no audio or with only audio. This is the kind of thing digital media should promise if people can do their jobs and get it all designed right.

Now the panel was called, "new distributors" which is a great name but Withoutabox kept talking about "self distribution." Wait a minute, what are the new distributors doing if I still have to self distribute my work? Here is the thing. I’ve learned through Four Eyed Monsters Distribution effort. There is no such thing as Self-Distribution unless your selling DVD-R’s of your movie in the subway.

The second you make 1,000 dvds from a replication company or decide to use a fulfillment company to ship your DVDs or an e-commerce solution to collect the money online it’s no longer truly self distribution. It’s simply having made a deal with someone that is facilitating the distribution of the film. But what people mean by self distribution of course is that you hold onto your rights. That way you can do all of the things a distributor would do and essentially have your own distribution company powered by various distribution services available to anyone.

This is good because it’s a democratic approach. It’s an empowering concept because with enough commitment anyone can do this. And we have. So we are glad this is possible. But should this be the answer for the business model of the future?

David Wachs of Break Through Distribution said it himself in Peter Buckingham’s Q&A session, "we found that most of the DVDs sit on the shelves."

This is a very good point and even with our pretty large audience base online we’ve still had a hard time selling DVDs on the web. We think it will go a lot better once we are in retail for our demographic.

See the problem with holding onto your rights is that you are also holding onto the incentive for others to monetize your film and make you money. You shouldn’t give all your rights stupidly away, but you should find smart ways to provide companies with some of the rights to your film. And eventually I think it would be amazing to entrust the rights to your film in a universal license.

The Universal License Concept as it stands at the moment:

In the future I hope that instead of a filmmaker distributing their work themselves or having a company buy all the rights and distribute it, a piece of content will be able to distribute it’s self. The content literally needs to grow legs and walk away from the creators and lawyers that too often keep it tied down.

Now and then the content should write home and send money that it’s made back to it’s parents. Once a license exists that you can attach to a piece of content that defines how others can distribute it defining the financial splits for various types of distribution, then I think there will be an explosion in innovative ways to distribute high quality content. There will also be an explosion in new user habits that will take us the rest of the way out of the DVD era and help the film industry narrowly avoid the fate of the music industry now that it’s in the post CD era.

If you enable any new company to easily become a "new distributor&quo
t; then the services and monetization solutions will be created that will help the content owners find audiences and make money.

So the missing link is that there will have to be a standard way of publishing complete works online in high res along with a license that lets any 3rd party service monetize the work and send money to the payee information on the standard license on the work.

The proof that this is necessary is in how all of the "new distributors" on the stage have a problem getting enough good content. Lack of compensation and sluggish paperwork are the things that prevent good content from appearing in places where it should. So a universal license you put on content can eliminate needing to go through paperwork and create accounts on thousands of platforms.

Now currently the answer is to have non-exclusive agreements that give a website rights to do whatever they want with a film and if you’re lucky sometimes they will share money if they monetize your content. But the split is really bad considering how little they do and that you are the one that made the content.

Once we have a universal license the environment for monetizing digital media will mature and the majority of proceeds will go to the creators which will instigate more culture being made by those that prove they make relevant culture.

A universal license for media starts to sound like a pretty involved thing. But we know one thing. We need a world in which it’s legal to give a copy of a movie you like to a friend. And we also need a world where any company can become a professional distributor monetizing content without first having to go out and get a catalog of content.

A new subscription service putting content on cell phones in a foreign country, a new micro cinema network, a new company that gives you access to content but also lets you invest half of your monthly subscription fees into new works from your favorite artists. It’s in the interest of audiences and content creators to let other companies innovate new ways to bring the two of them together.

It should never be one company doing all the innovating. We see problems today with waiting for YouTUbe to have higher quality video while the technology exists today to get HD videos to the end user via Bittorrent Technology that YouTube doesn’t have the infrastructure to adopt.

In a universal media publishing standards environment, open source communities as well as companies could be implementing these solutions. So I propose Creative Commons gets a grant from someplace to get together a team of experts in their fields to spend a few days together in a room and draft this universal license.

It needs to be designed in a way that can likely be adopted by independent media. It might be sort of like drafting the constitution of the united states and there might be a few fist fights over how it should be made. I don’t think the people working on it should be representing any companies cause that will corrupt it’s design. It should just be people that happen to have the experience needed to make this thing in a way that is fair to filmmakers and gives enough incentive to new distributors to create platforms and services that do a good job monetizing content.

Susan and I hope to make a second film that will be done in a couple years and we want to see this system up and running by then so please, jump on it. Do you think this is possible? Please post comments below.

A new aggregator for aggregators – Reframe – Kelly Devine

Kelly Devine talks about how Renew Media has a new project called Reframe which is basically an aggregator for aggregators. The need for this comes from the fact that when someone like Amazon or iTunes or Netflix is trying to have everything that ever existed they need to add things to their systems in chunks rather then one by one. So a smaller collections can be added in bulk to the big pool. Reframe is trying to be one of those smaller collections but first they need content to be in that small colleciton.

The first aggregator they are aggregating for is Amazon and they’ve managed to get much better deal terms then a filmmaker could ever get as a stand alone piece of content. So good for them. Power in numbers. Just like unions. But at the end of the day, what they are doing is just another quick fix to make them and some filmmakers a little bit of money but a couple years from now it will be looked back upon as an experiment that lead to a more sustainable solution.

The spirit of renew media is a good one so I hope to see their role evolve over time to things beyond 2 inches in-front of our faces.

YouTube's role in the future of film

Sara Pollack addresses briefly what I hope will get a lot more attention in the future. YouTube’s Discovery tools. The most enticing thing to filmmakers that YouTube has to offer is an audience base.

But the reality is that often times amazing videos sit there with only 50 to 200 views. So I’ve been telling YouTube ever since Spencer Cooks in their PR department contacted us a year ago that they need to improve discovery tools on YouTube.

YouTube needs to use your friends and the favorite tool to come up with a pool of videos a user is very likely to enjoy. The idea is that if your real friends liked it then you probably will too. Susan, Brian and I explained to Sara over lunch that then as you rate videos software can learn which friends really have the same taste as you and friends who like things that you dislike can automatically stop influencing the suggestions to you if that continues to occur.

This is kind of like amazon and netflix suggestions but different because it’s based on your friends rather then the entire population on the site. Thats the key thing that very few sites seem to understand just yet. The other thing we always tell youtube when ever we get someone listening to us is that the revenue needs to be higher and we think that can happen with a better user generated advertising echo-sphere.

So instead of banners for products that take you to standard produced commercials, you could have videos made by real people and creative filmmakers that are inspired by a product and make an ad for it and submit that ad to the company. Almost the same way you request friendship from someone and then wait for approval.

The company could then approve the ad if they wanted to and agree to a certain price per view and then any other youtube show could use that video as an advertisement and get revenue for encouraging that ad to be viewed. But more importantlly people would come to the video on their own accord if either it was really creative or if it was really informative. Then the company could also put it on their site and the more the video does it’s job promoting the product the more the person that made it gets paid.

This way advertising on youtube won’t be just for mainstream products but also for smaller more niche products and services. And advertising 101 tells us that targeted niche advertising is more profitable. But of course it’s hard to manage such small business deals unless of course you are google. They run google ad sense so they already know how to manage millions of niche advertisements.

So all in due time I suppose. I’m pretty sure this is where YouTube is headed and when video sharing becomes old news it will be the reason YouTube sticks around. It won’t be the beautiful place it once was but will be a good place to watch ads. But I think we all know a new haven of video discovery and sharing will emerge. My only hope is that it’s using the back bone of an open platform but that also manages to get compensation back to the creators.

Because in the end, for the record, I don’t think that the future of all content creation should be funded by ad revenue. I think it should be subscription services and maybe secondarily ad revenue. The reason why is eventually there will really be no way to interrupt a user even in the most subtle way like a banner popping in as the video plays. All of that stuff will be removed so the content industry shouldn’t create a system where we rely on ad revenue.

Passion in the digital era is everything & Creative Commons

Paula Le Dieu from Magic Lantern talks about how personal story telling and passion can go very far despite pressure to be a be formal and rigid and act like a business person. She basically explains that it’s good to be a loose cannon. Cool, I like that. She then gives a basic explanation of what Creative Commons is and mentions her involvement with iCommons.

I think the next step for creative commons is to create a voting body of people that are using creative commons for real world media distribution. That way instead of a fixed license it can be a dynamic license that is subject to change. That way with each new edition they can upgrade already licensed work to a new smarter better license.

So what needs to get better about creative commons licenses? Payee info. They theoretically are starting to do it with Creative Commons 3.0 but I don’t see anything robust enough yet. What I want is a license you put on a film that allows anyone to exploit and distribute your film pulling it from it’s online digital master and converting it into what ever format they. It might be a micro-cinema network or flash based ad revenue video site or their bit-torrent based subscription fee distribution platform. There are so many digital distribution players out there that I think we need a license that can define the split so we can just post once and have the different sites pull down the video rather then us sitting around uploading to hundreds of sites.

Also there needs to be a pass through ability so if something with a license on it gets used in a another piece of content then there needs to be an automatic way to pass proceeds back to all of the creators.

Paula also talks about DRM and points out a lot of it’s problems. I made this slide a few months back to show to the Directors Guild of America.

Paula explains the main reason DRM is bad is that it’s a hurdle between your work and your audience. But more importantly from a film industry evolution perspective, DRM that aims to lock down content or force content to only get to individuals through certain paths is a problem.

Content needs to flow freely basically because we don’t have a choice in the matter and it’s going to anyway. So we have to encourage it by removing all copy protection and DRM and instead building social tools that encourage people to voluntarily share their view history with their subscription service they pay X amount of money per month to that then pays the payee information on the license of the content.

Thats the model in my mind and I’m going to keep re-iterating and re-explaining and re-fining the details over and over until I see it getting built. Keep an eye out for my Montreal Presentation on Subscription models I’ll be posting soon.

New Media Philosophy 101 by Withoutabox

New-Age theme and awkward delivery aside, there are some good ideas in there. Some attending the conference really enjoyed Joe Neulight & David Straus’ presentation. Some really needed to hear what they were saying. Others were rolling their eyes or yawning the whole time. Personally, I felt a little embarrassed for them. I felt like the reason they stayed focused on abstract concepts was due to the fact that after all this time they still don’t really have anything to new to show us.When Withoutabox created the film festival submission system it was completely revolutionary but now a ton of time has passed with no new products to help filmmakers.

So it was unfortunate that at this talk they had no site demo or new tools to announce. To make matters worse, the tools they talked about in their digimart presentation 1 year ago still haven’t manifested.

Withoutabox did however mention that they’d have a dashboard for filmmakers to use to distribute their work across the web soon. Whatever thats worth.

I’d love to see new innovations from them and we are all on the same team but I feel we have to keep each other in check sometimes.

To credit Withoutabox, they did help us out big time in April of 2006 when they sponsored our self-distribution research. They enabled us to move out of Susan’s parents’ basement and back to NYC. David Strauss’ enthusiasm is pretty impressive and Joe’s Understanding of New Media is very on point and even provided us with great feedback on our film when we were working on our final edit.

Actually, the Heart Map we hired Brian Chirls to create was a project that we brainstormed partly at Withoutabox’s offices in LA. Also I plan to use the film festival submission a little bit more in the future. But film festivals and the way films get to them needs to evolve which I talk about in my post about the Adventures in Self Distribution video which was the last panel of the day.

Michael Gubbins sets up the New Distributors Presenters

Michael Gubbins from Screen international talks about how the rest of the world thinks your crazy when you rant and rave about the new media revolution. I concur.

The Digital Revolution – Peter Buckingham + my thoughts

Peter Buckingham breaks down the Digital Media Revolution. The difference between having no physical limitation with digital vs having a limited number of films reels you can ship

like limited theaters, limited DVD shelves and limited TV channels. He then explains the power of digital and the long-tail. He also explains we are at a cross road where either we seize this moment for a more democratic system or we let the choice continue to be limited by big media companies.

Ira was a little more practical and Peter Buckingham zooms out and speaks much more generally. In some ways they cover the same ground. The audience was fairly pumped about Peter’s talk.

It’s pretty cool when Peter makes it seem so dumb that the film industry is based on withholding content unless a viewer coughs up money and how DRM just gives the people that do cough up money a difficult time. It’s also cool when he makes fun of the theatrical industry for having such low attendance.

Then there is a pretty lively discussion with the audience. In response to the first question Peter says he disagrees with Ira saying that the DCI vs iCinema standard war is like Beta vs VHS. But of course, that is a kind of stupid concept since the point of digital is that it’s scalable and everyone who has ever touched a video projector knows that you can throw a variety of signals at it playing back whatever quality you happen to have.

Photo by Jen Chan

But I could understand a distribution network wanting to have quality standards the creators and audience can count on. But more importantly people need to start thinking about the universal publishing standards for feature films and be thinking beyond just theatrical. I spoke to Ira about Peter’s comment and asked him what he normally gets from content owners before he converts into iCinema for his network. He said often tape but sometimes a digital file. I asked him if a 1920 by 1080 24p H.264 file on a server would work and he said yes and that they’ve done that before. So in my mind iCinema and DCI are just other networks out there and I’m sure there will be more. And I think the way to get to those networks is to post your material in full res and let them do the conversion just like any other digital distributor who needs to store a digital clone of your work, monetize it and send back checks to the published payee info on the content.

See in my view, watching on cell phones, your home theater, your local cinema, or a huge premiere at a festival all are kind of blurring in terms of technology and licensing.

Photo: The above childs playroom was recently transformed into a home theater

Proof of this convergence is that h.264 is the same codec that plays back a YouTube video on your cell phone, the same codec that plays back a TV show on your apple TV and the same codec that plays back in full resolution at your local movie theater using the iCinema standard.

And the cost of all this technology is coming down. A full system for a home theater experience doesn’t cost that much more then a few iPhones. And getting a top of the line home theater system does the job pretty well for a micro-cinema movie theater space. And even the top, top of the line servers and projectors have costs that have dramatically decreased over the past few years.

So what really matters? All of this technology and play back devices? Not really, at the end of the day content is more important. All these platform and playback problems will be solved. Individuals will have devices in their pockets to watch any video that exists, at home people will all have HD home theaters, local neighborhoods and villages in third world countries will all have digital cinemas which have access to any video that exists.

The important thing to remember is that technology is not the value here. The value is the content. Thats what matters. And thats what is threatened if we get too wrapped up in the technology and DRM and create platforms that only have room for the mainstream content.

You never know where a well crafted story with integrity might come from so the important thing is to make technology open and democratic to all content. But even more importantly make the compensation for content that does well be the same compensation system for all levels of production. That way if something sprouts up as a hit from left field. That creator will see proceeds to go make more material with. So in a system like that, when you watch and forward to friends because you like it, you are putting down your vote to see more from that creator. Again, I think theatrical needs to be looked at as having the same dynamics of web video in terms of being able to have something culturally relevant explode.

So to have lots of content with integrity, we need solutions that get creators paid. And thats the discussion to be having. Not the codec or the projector, the incentive for creating the culture that these devices will display.

I’ll get even more specific in future posts on solutions for getting creators compensated.

Theatrical is Broken – Ira Deutchman presents solutions

Quicktime | YouTube | Mp3

Ira Deutchman kicks off Power to the Pixel with a talk about what is wrong with the theatrical distribution system. He then continues with some solutions for how theatrical can be fixed. He talks about the advantages of digital distribution and explains what emerging pictures is doing to help pioneer this new space.

One thing that could use more emphasis is how social software applications can be used to integrate audience demand with theater programming. Users of social networking services like Spout.com are already using software to keep a list of movies they are interested in seeing. It’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which movie goers get notified when films they want to see in a theater are going to be playing near where they live. If theaters had access to information about the local demand for films, they could schedule their programming more intelligently. Online Social Networking technology is a medium through which theaters can inform people of when the movies they want to see in a theater are going to be playing. In addition, the notifications can be one click away from where the movie goer can buy a ticket. Movie goers could opt to join a public RSVP page where other potential attendees can see who’s planning on attending the show, adding a more social element to the event.

I think Spout.com and Flixter.com are both good candidates for being the company that really starts to connect some of these dots, since both of them already do some of it. A back-end for theaters to use which provides them with information about demand, a way to notify the audience, and handles ticket sales could be added to either of these services. But thats at the moment. Really I hope in the long term that open source social networking, universal video publishing licenses and innovative digital distributors can all work together in three tiers to solve all of these problems.

Power to the Pixel Director Liz Rosenthal Introduces the Day

Liz explains how the day will unfold and thanks her crew and sponsors. She gives a good over view that will be helpful to watch if you are considering watching all of the power to the pixel videos.

Brian Chirls and I were just getting acquainted with our laptop recording device and finding left over space on almost empty tapes and had to adjust the shutter in the middle of this clip so sorry about that.

Liz did a good job lining up sponsorships from Skillset, Film London, The London Development Agency, The UK film Council, Digital Horizons, FDMX, Sohonet, WiseGuy PIctures, AllCity, Screen International, Shooting People.

And I have to say, Tishna Molla, Josephine Lott, Ella Weston, Katy Swarbrick were all very friendly, helpful and all impressively attractive as well.

Formats available: MPEG-4 Video (.m4v)

Tags: power, to, the, pixel, liz, rosenthal, confernce, new, media, digital, film, cinema, 2.0

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