The New York Times broke the news this Sunday that BuzzFeed received $50 million in funding for their Los Angeles-based Motion Pictures arm. Recognizing the massive revenue generated by the company’s video content, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti hired Ze Frank, “web video pioneer,” to produce a “rapid-fire” stream of everything from “six second clips made for social media to more traditional 22-minute shows” under the new banner. Eventually, the company will look to produce feature-length films and TV series, not unlike Netflix. Another thing BuzzFeed Motion Pictures has in common with the online streaming paradigm is an unsurprising affinity for data science. In […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Aug 13, 2014A study published last week in the journal Environmental Research Letters under the self-explanatory title “The energy and greenhouse-gas implications of internet video streaming in the United States” looks at numbers from 2011 to conclude that streaming services and servers have become much more energy efficient. As a result, streaming consumes significantly less energy and emits less carbon dioxide than the manufacture and distribution of DVDs. (This is all explained in plain language here and here). The easy-to-extrapolate conclusion is not only that streaming is the increasingly dominant distribution platform of choice but that that turns out to be a […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jun 3, 2014“There are two asteroids corrupting media,” bellowed radio host John Hockenberry at the start of the Tribeca Film Festival’s “Stories By Numbers” panel last week. The first, viewing patterns; the second, data streams. “Narratives,” he opined, pacing before Beau Willimon, David Simon, Nate Silver and Anne Thompson, “are becoming indistinguishable from vices.” It’s no secret that Netflix’s limitless entree into consumer preferences has informed much of its success in the realm of original content. Hockenberry noted that big brother Sarandos can scrutinize viewing behavior down to its utter minutiae: “what people skip over, what sex scenes they replay, is all fed back into […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Apr 28, 2014I’m a writer-director/producer with a couple of features under my belt. Since the last one was released (Burning Annie), the world’s economy collapsed, half of the studios’ arthouse labels folded, and the audiences for music, books, and film splintered into a million fragments. At the same time, smartphones and app-culture rose to dominance. My new film Laundry Day is in post. As I warily eye the world that I will be releasing my baby into, I’m somewhat alarmed by the large and growing divide between modern audiences and modern distributors, and how inadequate the trends of the moment are for […]
by Randy Mack on Mar 28, 2014It’s a strange time in the post-Netflix Original landscape. While more and more brand-name talent seems to be drifting from film towards premium cable, a new study reports that HBO and Showtime subscribers are dwindling — and potentially jumping ship to Netflix. Indeed, the streaming service has enjoyed a 4% rise in viewership over the last two years, whereas premium cable channels have lost 6% of their subscription base. So what does HBO, with its barrage of new and returning shows, do? Court viewers through the most public of streaming forums: YouTube. As such, Looking, which premiered on Sunday night, is […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jan 21, 2014It is perhaps indicative of how low-key this year was that when I first scribbled out a list of things that were “big” in 2013 I discovered that half of them were on last year’s list! In many respects 2013 proved to be a year of tentative advances and waiting, rather than one of incredible new tools to play with. Which is not to say that some interesting products weren’t announced and delivered. Sony shipped the F5 & F55, as well as the 4K upgrade for the NEX-FS700, and at the other end of the spectrum Blackmagic shipped its $1,000 […]
by Michael Murie on Dec 31, 2013At the Film Independent Forum a couple weeks back, Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos gave something of a provocative keynote in which he declared that theaters would “kill movies” if they continued to resist multi-platform, day-and-date distribution. Though Sarandos later backtracked, Indiewire picked up the ball and ran with it, soliciting responses from several independent distributors on the matter. Among the executives weighing in were Kino Lorber’s Richard Lorber, Emily Russo of Zeitgeist Films, and Matt Grady of Factory 25. Dylan Marchetti, President of Variance Films, raised an interesting point, noting that “[Sarandos] knows that any resistance here isn’t to […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Nov 6, 2013When Netflix announced this past July that they wanted to expand their original programming beyond wildly successful TV serials to documentaries, I figured an Alex Gibney commission wasn’t far off. Instead, the Internet was met with the puzzling news earlier today that the streaming giant acquired the very much completed, newly edited, festival-circuit debutant The Square. “Original,” it seems, lends itself to a different definition when Netflix is doing the talking. Though The Square is currently making a self-financed, Oscar-qualifying theatrical run in New York and Los Angeles, Netflix said in a statement that they will exclusively “premiere” the documentary […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Nov 4, 2013A filmmaker called me the other day, asking if I could think of some comps for his movie. You know, other movies whose marketplace performance would indicate that there is a paying audience for his demographically-similar picture. He named a title he really liked and said he was shocked to see via Box Office Mojo that it had done so poorly. Indeed, its reported box office was in the five figures. The very low five figures. “But that box-office figure is misleading,” I replied. “The film was bought by a company whose strategy is to release on VOD and digital […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 11, 2013Earlier this week I posted “15 Lessons for Producers from the Cannes Film Festival and Market.” With the festival and market now firmly in the rear-view mirror, the consensus is that it was a solid one for the international sales community, without, perhaps that one giant locomotive title but with an appropriately modest number of films hitting their ask prices. Tastes were noted to have shifted, with buyers wanting “more Jennifer Lawrence and less Sylvester Stallone.” And on the pure indie level, I noticed, as I wrote in my piece on producers, a new crop of American independents have figured […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 31, 2013