The recent announcement from LG that they are partnering with Plex, has catapulted one small company into the big time.
So what is it? Just another step towards the "boxless living room".
iTunes rocked the ossified music industry. Now Apple's announcement that it will sell a range of TV shows for 99c suggests that it could do the same for the torpid screen distribution industry.
But a range of commentators feel that Apple as the destination for screen content is not a good thing. They see the mega-aggregator's ability to dictate terms of trade as unhealthy.
So it's good to see Amazon matching Apple's "TV shows for 99c" offer, even if Amazon is making a loss at this price and can't sustain it.
It's sending a signal to content creators - iTunes isn't the only game in town.
Amazon's gamble
Interesting to see how Amazon's pricing works out - at 99c per ep, you can download Glee cheaper than buying the whole season on DVD. Amazon will sell the DVDs for $35.49 from September 14, but you can download right now for around $21.78! How does that work?
Note - the Amazon download service is not available here. Do you ever feel left out in this country?
Just when you thought the Dogs had dozed off, out comes an iPhone app.
The Jetlag Travel Guides are originally a print series of Lonely Planet spoofs. They take you through the pleasures and pitfalls of roughing it in places like Gastronesia and Costa del Pom.
The iPhone app Jetlag Lite contains one free guide, unlocking the rest is $4.95.
You can browse content on Working Dog's website, which is typically quirky. It looks like it might have been designed by Russell Coight!
It contains online versions of some of the Jetlag titles, but no reference to the app.
The Jetlag.. app will be great in-tram entertainment for fans of Working Dog.
Technicolor is re-inventing itself to meet the needs of the digital screen content industries.
Vince Pizzica is an Australian who works out of Paris, heading up Technicolor's Strategy, Technology and Research. He recently visited Melbourne.
He told me that after a period of uncertainty about the direction of the company, it's now focussed on the creation and delivery of premium content. Technicolor is a multi-faceted company, supplying hardware, software, doing research and providing services to the screen content industry.
There must be a quick way of saying
"short-film-that-was-generated-by-an-open-competition-and-is-now-being-used-as-incognito-viral-branded-content-for-a-corporation.."
Whatever it is, here's a really good one.
This Saturday, Australians vote in an election that has become a referendum on the fate of the media and ICT sectors in this country. It's as simple as that.
The Coalition won't retreat from its promise to scrap the fledgling National Broadband Network (NBN) should it win power.
Tony Abbott has fudged his way around the issues, using his "I'm no tech-head..." copout. His alternative to the NBN's fibre-to-the-home - a combination copper, wireless and fibre-to-the-node, has been met with skepticism by industry commentators.
The stakes were raised yesterday's by the announcement from NBN Co's Mike Quigley that it will deliver speeds up to 1Gps will - ten times faster than originally announced
These type of performance will put Australia in the same league as South Korea, Japan and Singapore, which already offer speeds of up to 1Gbps.
This is exactly where we should be, given the country's history of punching above its weight in the online/media space.
Deb Verhoeven, from the MediaWave Expert Group, has some strong views about a vital part of Screen Australia's latest funding guidelines.
Screen Australia's recent announcement of a new raft of policies designed to support the marketing and specifically the distribution of Australian films in the global marketplace is a groundbreaking initiative given the government's historical reluctance to fund this sector.
Of particular interest is the 'Innovative Distribution Partnership' program which will disburse grants to companies already experienced in online and ancillary distribution.
Three to four lucky companies will be funded for two years to release slates of projects across new and emerging delivery platforms.
Ruth Harley, in launching the partnership program at 37° South, described how it would help ‘take advantage of the new models that are allowing access to expanding markets’. The new funding initiatives she said, reflect Screen Australia’s role in encouraging ‘new thinking and activity around how we can share Australian content with audiences’.
Gavin McGarry - Pirates for the cause of Good?
Nathan Mayfield - Thoughts from the Hoodlums
Josh Shore - Illuminated and Dreamcatcher think big
Suzanne Stefanac - Crowd sourcing production
Jeff Gomez - Transmedia Golden Age
Every conference has its “sleeper” session. At the XML Film X-tended conference day, everyone agreed that transmedia has reached the tipping point and (going forward), media properties will be evaluated in terms of their ability to generate revenue across a range of platforms.
Then out of the blue, Gavin McGarry, last speaker at the end of the day when most people were heading to drinks, got the crowd’s attention.
Jon Reiss is the director and producer of Bomb It a successful indie film about graffiti art.
Based on his experiences with this and other projects, he wrote a manual for DIY distribution, called “Think Outside the Box Office”. He now teaches his methods in workshops around the world.
In Melbourne last week, Jon worked with a group of Melbourne content creators at AFTRS. Some of these people were pretty familiar with the new distribution landscape, but everyone benefited from Jon’s matter-of–fact-treatment of the new realities and opportunities for low-budget content creators.
Crowd-sourced funding, crowd funding, fan funding - different names, same idea. You get friends, fans and followers to invest small amounts in your project until you have enough money to make all, or part of it.
MediaWave featured an item on Australia's first crowd-funded feature, The Tunnel last week.
Essentially, it's a bit like a charity drive. Remember the old "thermometer" outside the church hall? Once it got to the top, they rebuilt the knave or vestibule or whatever they rebuild in churches.
Except that churches are charities and content creators aren't. More of that later.
And then came that great big enabler of everything, the Interwebs, making the gathering money online a lot easier than rattling tins on street corners.
The first crowd-funded film is attributed to French producers Guillaume Colboc and Benjamin Pommeraud who raised $50,000 to make their film Waiting for Yesterday in 2004.
The phenomenon took off in the US in 2009, where Kickstarter provided a clean and easy shopfront for crowd-funding. Australians can use Kickstarter, but it involves getting someone with a US bank account to work with you.
Others have followed (IndieGoGo), but the model is essentially the same.
Last week we published a list of the top ten (estimated) YouTube revenue-earners.
This week it's The Top 10 Webisodes, compiled by a company called Visible Measures.
The difference between the two lies in the definition of a webisode - the content on this list is produced eps, rather than the more free-form material featured last week. In fact one of them comes from Starz Media - a major US producer.
Still some amazing numbers of views - over 64mil for that Annoying Orange and interesting to see a couple of stayers in Red vs Blue and Happy Tree Friends still pulling big audiences.
Nice to find an international story that isn't US or European focussed.
EH! Filmes is based in Rio. They are using a blog to create resources around their latest film Como Esquecer (So hard to Forget) while it is still being shot.
My Portuguese isn't that great, but there are interviews with cast and crew, footage from location, pieces of the soundtrack and more.
They transformed positive comments about the site from Facebook/Twitter into a teaser that became news in itself.
A bit like The Tunnel, they got coverage in the mainstream media and ended up with 100,000 followers. A good number, bearing in mind that there are 147m people in Brazil.
The missing peice seems to be crowd-funding - or maybe it isn't legal in Brazil?
According to iiNet (the only ISP to get into bed with FetchTV so far) their trial of 100 households has resulted in 95 of them taking up a paid subscription to Fetch.
According to iiNet, movies were a major selling point.
They say that foreign-language programming is finding a market - perhaps as a cheaper alternative to giant satellite dishes that many non-English speakers use to get content from their home countries?
Kylo is eerily reminiscent of Joost.
Remember Joost? The early content aggregator backed by the people from Skype in 2007.
It didn't work out, but it was a glimpse of things to come.
So now we have Kylo causing a few ripples amongst the contentscenti.
Star Wars Uncut is a fan-sourced remake of Episode 4 - A New Hope.
Started last October by Casey Pugh, the film is a full-length recreation of the George Lucas classic.
Fifteen second segments were created by 430 directors, using everything from stop-motion with vegetables to quite sophisticated CGI.
Skeptical about independent content creators making money out of YouTube?
A study by TubeMogul, a video advertising and analytics company, made an estimate of income from banner ads only for the top 10 YouTube indie content stars.
Movie Extra is running a webisode competition with a $50k production budget on offer. Winner will produce a seven-part series.
Called WebFest, the comp will be judged by members of theirFacebook page and an industry panel.
WebFest could be seen as the Web version of Movie Extra's Project Greenlight, which was a feature competition with a $1m budget.
Chris Berry is managing this one as well.
The money is put up by the Movie Network, as part of its required Australian content spend.
The groundbreaking LAMP project at AFTRS wound up in June. Now some of the people who worked there have reappeared in a new entity called Story Labs.
Gary Hayes, former LAMP Director, is one of the initiators of Story Labs.
Looks like an ambitious and wide-ranging program of workshops, mentorships and so on.
Can't see a timetable of activities yet.
Have a look at the video below for an insight into how major players like Time Warner are using the iPad as a content platform (not to mention a remote control).
Speculation about where YouTube is going has been spurred on by three new developments.
Increasing the upload limit to 15 minutes.
This is puzzling the pundits. It seems like such an arbitrary amount - it's only 5 mins more than the old limit, it doesn't fit any format. Word is that it's a publicity stunt, but expect to see limits progressively increased.
Partner Grants
As reported last week, they are funding selected YouTube uploaders to develop original content. But fine print says:
" Funds from YouTube Partner Grants will serve as an advance against the partner's future YouTube revenue share."
A bit like the old record company "advance against royalties" idea.
Thanks to sharp-eyed MediaWave Expert Brad Giblin for the tipoff.
Australia's Secret Talents competition.
In partnership with Vodaphone, it's a free-for-all talent quest, winner judged by popular vote. Essentially, Idol in 90 secs.
Taken all together, YouTube is moving inexorably in the direction of a vertically integrated content channel with Google providing the advertising revenue smarts.
BTW, the YouTube Blog reports that Australians uploaded 1500 pieces for the Life in a Day project.
