Film Studios Picking up Game

I’ve always wondered what they’re going to call new media when it’s not new anymore. It seems really dumb to use the word ‘new’ in the official title of anything. It’s like New College at Oxford University. Sure, it was new once, but that was in the 17th century…. Mind you, the name New York still works fine. But that’s because New York was, and always will be, newer than the old York. Whereas ‘new media’ won’t always be newer than the old media – one day there will be some newer media and the current new media will be the old media…

In fact, it’s already well over a decade ago that the name ‘new media’ was first solemnly intoned by some tech commentator and people started breathlessly talking about the brave new world that was about to open up. So let’s look back over that decade and a half and see if anything has really changed, or is it just ‘same shit, different media’?

One thing you can definitely trace to the advent of the internet is the decline and fall of the major record labels. Recorded music is something that seems purpose-built for digital media. The package it is traditionally sold in (an album) is easily divided up into a number of small components (the tracks) each of which can be sold as a separate file. The file sizes are small and easily transferred. This combined with huge reductions in the costs of making original recordings (due to the development of technology like pro tools) allowed the introduction of new participants into the recording and distribution industries and the loss by the majors of their control of their market. As a result of this loss of control the huge margins the majors had built into their business model in the physical CD market could not be sustained, the price of recorded music came down, and the majors went out of business. They, of course, blame piracy.

In film and TV, the effect has not been as dramatic. Although there have been significant cost decreases in some areas of film and TV production, it is nothing like what occurred in the recording industry, and the reality remains that it still costs shitloads to make a film or a TV show. Additionally, file sizes and bandwidth limitations initially restricted the online proliferation of professionally produced audio-visual content (again, this is in comparison to the music industry). However, the invention of BitTorrent and other types of peer-to-peer technology which dramatically improve download times for large files, combined with the initial reluctance of rights holders to change the standard distribution models, did facilitate an explosion in online piracy. The outcome of all of this in the film industry is that most of the studios are still in business, but the distribution models look quite different to how they looked a decade ago. In the TV industry, there has been a marked decline in expenditure on production funding by broadcasters due to advertising dollars having to be spread across a whole range of new platforms.

Looking at film, there have been some radical changes to when and how we view movies. The old distribution model of staged releases geographically and across different media had long been complained about. Why should we in NZ wait six months after a film’s release in the US to see it here? And if I want to watch a film on DVD why do I have to wait months after its theatrical release? What the internet did was allow the consumers’ voices to be heard. The ubiquity of the internet, the power of social media and the real-time nature of online connections broke down the geographical barriers. And the availability of infringing copies of films on a plethora of sites meant that people had access to content whether it was legitimately available or not, so far better to make it legitimately available and reduce the need for people to obtain it illegally.

In some senses, the promise of new media has been a little hollow. For a filmmaker, the internet opened up the possibility of new and cheaper models of distribution and the opportunity to cut out some of the participants in the value chain thereby returning a greater share of proceeds to the people that made the film (even including you guys!). But apart from a few exceptions, most have found it hard to break out of the traditional structure. Part of the problem, I think, is the somewhat obsessive focus on theatrical release. However, that is not to say that things aren’t changing. I was at the Toronto International Film Festival last year with film guru Ant Timpson and his film The ABCs of Death (which I was the lawyer for). And at TIFF that year there was a big focus on new media distribution strategies – principally premium per-view cable and video on demand (VOD). In the US now, a number of filmmakers and distributors are releasing films to VOD services at the same time or very shortly after the initial theatrical release of the film at a premium rate (anywhere between US$10 and US$25). This is called ‘day and date’ releasing and recognizes the existence of people who want to see a film as soon as it comes out, but either don’t want to or can’t go to a cinema. And taking it further, there are now many films making a lot of money on this kind of distribution model without a theatrical release at all (other than festival releases). Our film, The ABCs of Death, is one such film. And it has been phenomenally successful, in six months it has recouped its very modest production budget 15 times over and is returning money to the filmmakers and participants.