HOLLYN-wood (Norman, that is)

So, do you know that seeding videos on the web can give you amazing brand recognition? Do you know that the Numa Numa video, for instance, as had over 19,000,000 views? Now, if only you could trap that magic, you could make some real money from it, eh? (or at least, according to the recent South Park episode, some Imaginary Dollars).

[Moving out of Heavy Irony Mode now.]

Well, not so fast. The real problem with monetizing all of that web activity is that you can’t reliably measure it yet. It’s easy to get clicks, sure. And it’s easy, if you are controlling things, to measure how many people are watching your video, how far they watched, and other data.

The problem is aggregating that data. As Ken Rutkowski is fond of saying, there are 3 M’s to web success — Move (that is, bringing people to your site), Measure and Monetize.

Well, Viral Video Chart, is a web site that is trying to do something about that.

This site is designed to monitor occurrences and viewings of videos on YouTube. At present it doesn’t check the other web sites, meaning that Viacom’s products won’t show up that much.

But what it does do so far is pretty interesting. For one thing it tracks the shape of viewer interest. So, for instance, on the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal HD trailer page, you can see that viewing of the trailer peaked on May 21st, the day before the film opened (the chart to the left links to a blowup of that chart — I know that it’s hard to read here). By the following weekend, it had dropped to virtually nothing, and has been bouncing around on the low end of the scale since then — not too different from its box office numbers.

This data is not dissimilar to the numbers that Moviefone collects and sells, pegging potential box office to the number of people who call to get information on showtimes and people who do searches on the films on its website.

The possibilities are huge here, if you’re interested in making money. On today’s main page for Viral Video, you can see that three of the top four performers are I’m Voting Republican, Barack Obama’s Speech on Father’s Day and John McCain Debates Himself on Supporting Bush which certainly speaks to the way in which the public is getting information on the Presidential race today. It’s no secret that one of the reasons for Obama’s success this year has been his use of the Internet. This information just backs that up.

And that is the main point here. We are getting more and more sophisticated at turning the wild wild west of the web into something graspable, something marketable, and something comprehensible. Sure, it’s still possible to lose an entire morning going from one link to another. But social networking companies like StumbleUpon are attempting to bring some order to this. What good does it do to have a zillion videos on YouTube if you can’t find the one you want? How good is the web for research if you need to rely solely on Google to find information?

There will be some — myself included — who will mourn the disappearance of that wild web experience. But there will some — myself included — who will be happy to see just what we’re doing with it, when and how. That’s what measurement is going to do. And it’s only beginning.

For those of you who’ve been watching Big Time Movies instead, let me explain what Quarterlife is/was. Producers Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick created an Internet-only, self-referential series about a group of twenty-somethings who hang out and get crazy when one of them starts keeping a video blog on a website called “quarterlife.”

The series did well enough on YouTube that NBC phoned up the two producers. They knew their phone number because they had previously teamed on such mainstream television shows as “thirtysomething,” and “My So-Called Life.” So they weren’t exactly unknowns. Anyway, the show went on. They called it “Quarterlife” (no sense in screwing up a good thing, right?) and it lasted exactly one episode. And now Herskovitz talks about the process and what he’s learned in a long interview on Debra Kaufman’s new but increasingly valuable blog mobilized.tv. (As an aside, Debra is a journalist with years of experience in publications like The Hollywood Reporter, TV Week, Film & Video, Editor’s Guild
Magazine, Wired,
The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and American Cinematographer.)

When the show tanked there were tons of think pieces about how Internet content couldn’t move into mainstream media. Which, to me, sorta missed the point. Nobody ever said that Internet entertainment was the equivalent of mainstream entertainment. The translation from one to another isn’t just as simple as adding 19 minutes of running time. There is no real equivalent to the Numa Numa guy on network television, and there’s no real equivalent to the complexity of “Lost” on the Internet. There are some mobisode series that are interesting and plot-detailed, but the very nature of watching for three to five minutes and then going away for a week or two or three makes the type of twisted plot and timelines very hard to do. Lost actually has a pretty interesting web presence but it comes from doing added and different types of content, rather than trying to replicate their winning television formula.

And that’s the real thing that Quarterlife teaches us. Translation isn’t what new media platforms are all about. Addition is what makes sense. There are a lot of different types of screens out there. We need to take advantage of each in their own ways.

Trawling around on YouTube this evening I realized that I’m probably the only person who hasn’t done a cover to Tay Zonday’s Chocolate Rain.” Like the Star Wars Kid before him, the power of the Internet Meme has stretched to John Mayer, Tre Cool, and a host of much much lesser known YouTubers.

But the coolest one of all has to be this version from Pittsburgh metal/hardcore band Ryashon.

The indication of a true Internet meme is when it goes beyond water cooler talk (or, in today’s word, beyond “Twitter Talk”) and becomes acted on. Once it gets participation on a large scale then it’s on its way.

A few years ago there was the guy (Noah Kalina) who took a picture of himself in the same position every day for, what?, two years and then strung them together into a short video. Within days, dozens of copies and parodies had popped up on YouTube. There was another one, posted by a guy named Matt Harding, that also took over. It showed a guy dancing madly in about three dozen different cities. Cut to music, it was actually a self-referring comment on Internet memes — with tons of energy it started popping up all over the Internet world. You can see “Where The Hell Is Matt?” by clicking here.

What makes one clever idea take off, while a thousand others die a self-conscious death?

To get a sense of what I mean when I say “internet memes” check out this really nifty Internet Meme Timeline, where such societal momentary crazes are published on a linkable timeline all the way to 1996 (can you say “Dancing Baby” and the page full of dancing hamsters anyone?) Of course, one of my personal favorites is “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” which has a certain geek appeal.

=============== ADDED COMENT ===============

Randy Riggs, over at Mental Floss, has a discussion about Internet Memes in which he makes the following hilarious, but completely true, observation:

When Ted Stevens, the elderly senator from Alaska, infamously referred to the internet as “a series of tubes” during hearings on a 2006 net neutrality bill which he himself had sponsored, he unwittingly entered into a kind of irony vortex. Stevens had simultaneously proved himself clueless about the web — at one point saying “an internet was sent by my staff” in reference to an email — and had also created an internet meme, his “tubes” comment earning him a place among such hallowed meme icons as the Numa Numa guy and “2 Girls 1 Cup” (not to mention President Bush’s infamous neologism “the internets.”)

I don’t know about you, but I constantly refer to the Net as “the internets” (to the consternation of friends of mine who weren’t aware of the famous — to me — Bushism) and I’ve also dropped the phrase “series of tubes” into conversation, with equally blank-faced results.

USC’s film school has an extraordinary group of students attending. One group, the Women In Cinematic Arts, is holding a great conference this Saturday that is open to the public. It’s called the “WCA Industry Forum 2008: Making Your Vision A Reality.” It’s an all-day event and pretty cheap, even if you’re not a member. It will have panels on:

• Creating and Delivering a Television Series
• Navigating the Studio System
• Independent Filmmaking
• Preparing your Film for Film Festivals
• Increasing Production Opportunities for Women, and
• Trends in Alternative Media

I will be moderating the last panel, which is subtitled “From Your Cutting Room to YouTube” at 2:45. It’s going to be really interesting with these great panelists:

Kim Moses – Director: The Ghost Whisperer and principal in Sander/Moses Productions.
Fonda Berosini – Participant Media
Ken Rutkowski – KenRadio
Jesse Albert – Agent: New Media & Branded Entertainment, ICM

We’re going to be rambling over a range of topics from “What the hell is alternative media anyway?” to “How do I break into new media?” to “How can I get online distribution for my shorts?” It should be an interesting hour, and the rest of the day looks fabulous.

You can find more details about the program, and registration, at the Women In Cinematic Arts site.

Tomorrow morning, I’m off to Atlanta to take part in a very very cool project with Nokia, Verizon and the Center For Disease Control (CDC) and it makes me think of Robert Scoble.

Whoa, let me explain.

At this year’s World Economic Conference in Davos, Robert Scoble took his Nokia N95 camera and combined it with qik.com software to create a live Web stream that could be seen by anyone on the web. In a discussion with John C. Dvorak on Tech5 on January 31, 2008, Scoble talks about how streaming the interviews that he did there live, at a remarkably low cost, enabled him to field questions from his web viewers that he could turn around and ask his own interviewees. He wasn’t breaking news live (though it would have been possible) but he was certainly creating more democratized interaction between the attendees at Davos and Scoble’s own viewers/listeners

That’s actually one small use for the technology. What I’m doing in Atlanta is more akin to news gathering.

I’ll be working as a remote producer with a group of students who will be out in the streets of Atlanta, creating content for a PSA (Public Service Announcement) for AIDS Awareness Day. The three students in my team (there will be five teams altogether) will have spent Tuesday in an all-day session with representatives from the CDC, as well develop a few PSAs for them to shoot on Wednesday. Then, as they shoot them, they will send them back to me and a student editor, who will begin editing them together. By 7pm that night, the hope is to have 2-3 PSAs from each of the five teams, that will be complete and ready to put onto Verizon’s network, so everyone in all of the groups can see them.

We’re calling them Personal PSAs (PPSAs) because of the intimate nature of their capture and their cell phone distribution mechanism.

Read the rest of this entry »

Blog Stats are pretty interesting, all in all (well, only if you don’t have anything else going on in your life). I don’t mean the number of hits — I’ve never been able to figure out quite what they really refer to (I feel the same way about those silly preview cards that we always hand out at screenings, but that’s a whole separate blog post). But as a general trend, or for loose interpretation, they can be interesting.

I was surfing around the Sitemaster stats for Hollyn-wood, and found some cool “facts.” For one thing, about half as many of you are using Firefox (29.3%) as are using Internet Explorer (51.5%). Safari is down around 18.2%. That means a sizable percentage of you, more than half, are still on IE.

Combine that with the second chart — 68% of my readers are on PC platforms, and 31% are on Mac — and it’s clear that a large group of Mac users are not using Safari at all, but are on Firefox, since the total number of Mac users (31%) is almost double the Safari percentage (18.2%). Compare that to the PC/IE combination — 68% are PC People, and 51.5% are on IE. That means that, of my readers, brand loyalty is much lower on the Mac than on the PC.

There are those who would say, quite properly, that the Mac users might be more tech savvy on this forum, and therefore willing to try something that doesn’t come right on the box. In fact, there may be something to this, because my other statistic, is that the largest number of people come to this site searching on terms like “cell phones” or “pink cell phones” or “small phones” and get my post about a survey which showed that more and more people were giving up their land lines in favor of cell phones, and what that implied for distribution of content. The post, entitled, “Why It Would Be Good to Own Stock In Mobile Content Companies” continually gets the most hits on my site and, I presume, are responsible for the number of people who click onto the site and immediately click away (average reaction time — 1.6 seconds).

Still, I am intrigued by the Safari numbers. Personally, I almost never use Safari. I find Firefox more reliable at reading websites. Combine that with this news item from CNet about a contest in which the Macbook Air was hacked faster than a Windows or Ubuntu machine thanks to a security hole in Safari. Nope, I’ll stay away from Safari.

And so do a large number of Mac users, at least on my site.

No, that isn’t an obscure sociological term about personal interactions. It’s an obscure technical term. In the video world it refers to the way in which an image is projected on a screen.

In a nutshell, the way it works is this. For a typical US television set, each frame of image is divided into 625 (whoops, my bad, I mean 525) lines. All of the odd numbered lines are scanned across the television screen in 1/60th of a second and then, while the image is still sitting in our brains, all of the even numbered frames are scanned across the screen. The brain combines each of these fields (as each of the groups of scan lines is called) into one full image. Voila. A frame.

Note that this is very different from film, in which the entire frame is displayed at the same time.

The various flavors of Hi Definition can be either interlaced or not (this last is called “progressive”). That is what the letters “p” and “i” mean when someone (who is usually try to sell you something) tells you that “This set is 1080i” or “You’ll like this better because it’s 720p.” Note that, in both cases, you should run for the hills — or, at least, the closest Internet station to help you survive the bullshit meter.

So, why am I giving you this long-winded lesson in tech terminology

Will Richardson who is a film director/editor for The Heliconia Press (a sporting publisher and DVD content creation company) publishes a great blog called The Video Animal. Recent postings include a series on HD on The Cheap, which are well worth reading. His most recent posting is the start of a new series entitled How To Post Video On The Web. This part is all about interlacing, and describes how to get rid of it. His approach to defining “interlacing” is a little different from mine, and mashes it up with a concept called “persistence of vision” which the theory that describes why the human mind can see a series of 24 or 30 still images in one second, and perceive them as one fluid moving image.

But his description of how to get rid of the interlacing when posting something to the web is clear and concise. He also recommends reading Adobe’s guide to compression, which I highly recommend reading if you have trouble sleeping at night. Seriously, though, you’ve got to love a technical guide when it contains the following line:

Compression technologies take advantage of the strengths and weaknesses of human senses by reducing data that isn’t likely to be perceived.

Now that’s riveting reading, isn’t it?

Cockiness aside, take a look at this series from Will, who has a fine and friendly writing style to help you through these difficult subjects. And you’ll also learn quite a bit about filmmaking on the cheap from him.

Reuters reported today that Toshiba Corp is planning on shutting down their HD-DVD format for hi-def DVDs, admitting to the world what everyone else has been saying since Warner Bros announced in January, before CES, that they were planning on releasing their DVDs on Blu-Ray only. Between that, Wal-Mart’s decision yesterday to go all Blu-Ray and Best Buy’s and Netflix’s earlier announcements that they were going to sell/rent Blu-Ray as well.

The real question is — who cares?

I know that the studios would love to have a new DVD format, so they can resell all of the DVDs that you all already bought on standard def DVDs. However, I also know that, tempting though it may be, I don’t know many people who are dying to buy a Hi Def version of ANIMAL HOUSE to replace their perfectly good regular ordinary DVD.

Here’s how I look at it. 90% of the market out there couldn’t really tell the difference between DVD and Blu-Ray if they looked at the boxes the disks came in. In general, HD doesn’t pass the “Mom test,” in which you ask yourself if your Mom would care if we improved her technology. The day that I hear my mother tell me that she really appreciates the increased resolution and crisp 5.1 Dolby sound on Blu-Ray disks compared to her four year old DVD player, is the day that I retire from the business and start tending bar in the Caribbean. For most people there is very little motivation to shift to the new format. You can, conceivably, make it attractive — by making the player cost extremely low and providing such cool extra features that Mom and Dad will swallow the cost of replacing their existing DVDs (an extra special — it will wash your dishes while you watch the aforementioned ANIMAL HOUSE would work nicely for most people). But it’s dubious that you can make any money on that model.

You will, of course, get new purchasers of DVD players and material to move over, but that will be a gradual process.

So that takes care of most people. What about the geeks?

There will always be the Toy people. If it’s new, they’ll want it. And some of them will be willing to pay a premium for it. But that isn’t much of a market.

And the rest of the geek market — well, most of them are looking at their media online or through their iPods and Apple-TV type devices. Many of them are downloading the material legally and illegally. So, where is the market in that? It’s there in some small quantity but, once again, is it enough to base an entire market on?

What we’re left with, if you follow my argument, is a small market of high end people who aren’t so high end as to pull their content off of the web, combined with a slightly larger market of people who have to buy a new player anyway, haven’t accumulated a bunch of standard def content already, and will be completely price driven.

I know, I know. I am leaving out the (I’m told) increasing number of people who love to watch movies on a big ass television with their friends. But I’m waiting to see if those people really exist. Frankly, I think most of them are watching football and NASCAR, but that may just be a prejudice on my part.

Needless to say, I’m not racing out on this news and buying shares in Sony.

Apple announced at MacWorld, way back in the dark days of last month, that they were going to start renting movies through iTunes. I discussed the pricing strategy back in earlier post, but I’ve recently started thinking about another aspect of their plan — the timing strategy of the rentals.

Let me take a detour to set this up.

Back in the early days of video rental stores, we rented by the day. Rent RASHOMON for one day and you paid “X” dollars. Keep it a second day and you paid “2X” dollars. Pretty simple. So, cheap bastard that I am, I would rent a film and return it the next day. A pain in the butt, but there wasn’t much of a choice.

After a few years, video stores realized that they could make more money if they charged slightly more money but let you keep the rental for a few days without paying additional fees. People like me would rent more than one movie at a time, so we could watch a few over a number of days without constant trips back and forth to the rental store. They also continued to make loads of money on people who kept them past the few days and called that fee a “late fee.”

Gradually, the rental period got longer until my local 20/20 (which has a fantastic selection of Criterion and foreign films) allows me to take out films for a week (except for new rentals) and even gives a discount for people, like myself, who rent three movies at a time. It’s a great rental model. Netflix, of course, takes this another step forward — you can have a movie for an unlimited period of time without late fees, but you can’t have more than a specified number at a time and you have to pay a monthly fee no matter how few movies you rent during that month. Brilliant.

Enter Apple, with their online downloaded movie rentals. Their policy (which, I suspect without a shred of evidence, is driven by the film distribution companies with whom they’ve made deals) is that you have 30 days to start viewing anything that you rent. However, once you start viewing, you have 24 hours to finish watching the film (time spent on PAUSE doesn’t count in this).

And here we come to the great divide.

For me, I don’t start watching a movie unless I know I can finish it. If a movie is three hours long, I better have three hours to watch it or it ain’t gonna happen. So, Apple’s policy makes perfect sense for my viewing habits. I’m a storyteller so I can’t see how I can have the actual storytelling experience if I’m taking a big, long, intermission somewhere in the midst of the film — especially because it’s an intermission that the filmmakers didn’t plan. The same holds true in a slightly different way for television. If there are commercials in the program, I show no reticence in picking up and meandering over to the refrigerator or the bathroom or the phone for a brief interlude. After all, even though I usually whizz through the commercials at Tivo warp speed, the original creators of the show knew that there were going to be a ton of ads in the exact place that I’m stopping.

But viewing something that wasn’t meant to have breaks in it — like an HBO or Public TV show or a feature… that’s a different story. I won’t stop it.

I feel that I am definitely in the minority now. My daughter, and many many other people, watch a movie over several days. I spoke to her last month and she had just finished watching the Krystof Kieslowski trilogy — BLUE, WHITE and RED (three truly awesome films) and was in the middle of watching THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE. She had watched the first part the night before, was going to watch some more that night, and probably finish it the following night.

I don’t get it, but it’s clear that more and more people are viewing media that way.

For them, I’d think, Apple’s policy is a non-starter. If you put the film away until the next night, and when you return to it then it is completely gone from your iTunes or Apple TV, you simply can’t watch media the way you want to watch it.

In a funny way, Apple is trying to create a new media opportunity, using an old viewing model. They are trying to distribute film in a new way (well, relatively new anyway) using the old movie theatre model. That is, you’re going to sit in one place and watch this film pretty much from start to finish.

Of course, that’s why I suspect that this is really the result of the studios license arrangements, rather than Apple’s idea. They fear losing control over their intellectual property and so, in a typically short sighted move, retreat to the old model of movie viewing, thinking it will prevent piracy somehow.

Ironically, Fox (which is one of the studios that is permitting iTunes rentals) is also the studio that is, in selected cases, putting a iPod version of their films onto a second disc in their store DVDs. This enables the user, after authorization through the iTunes store (hmmmmmmmmmmm, interesting) to upload that version of the film to their iPod, computer’s iTunes, or (I’m assuming) Apple TV. I understand that, once you’ve bought the DVD you’ve bought it, which is miles away from renting it. But the slightly innovative thought process behind putting this H.264 version in the DVD package is a different manner of thinking from the one-day rental mindset.

I expect that Apple will slowly change this rental policy. In the meantime, I find it interesting to see what this reveals about our film viewing habits.

How do YOU watch your media? All at once, or in bite-sized chunks?

DigitalContentProducer has a great recap on a panel that I was too stupid to realize was being given up here at Sundance yesterday — on the evolution and monetization of Internet Content. It’s well worth a read and I hope that the festival puts it up on their Podcast site soon (all of their recently uploaded podcasts are filmmaker interviews).

The panelists included people as diverse as Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, Veoh.com’s Dmitry Shapiro, Joost.com’s Mike Volpi, and the NBC Universal/NewsCorp’s Hulu.com’s Jason Kilar, as well as MPAA’s Dan Glickman, Phil Lelyveld formerly with Disney, and MTV Networks/Comedy Central/South Park Studios Digital Media representative Erik Flanagan.

Some great points that were covered, according to Craig Erpelding’s article, included a general sense that the lack of reliable and good broadband in the United State is creating massive stumbling blocks for content distribution. (We really are a third world country when it comes to the Net).

veoh.com’s Shapiro noted that, according to his statistics, 40% of his content is consumed during network Prime Time hours. If this is true across the majority of content sites then this is major problem for the traditional television model and their advertising dollars — it is clear that viewers are shifting their delivery means from the television box to internet delivery. Satellite and cable providers — take note! Network executives — start changing your plans for television’s future, because there might not be much of one as we know it today.

Erpelding further notes that:

The panel listed the most powerful/important/influential companies currently running today in the market are: Google/YouTube, Bittorrent (due to the possibility of HD delivery and higher quality viewing experiences), and FaceBook.

I know that the networks today are working hand-in-glove with the social networking sites. It would appear that they must move that strategy front and center.