As platforms, products and consumption patterns evolve across the international marketplace the route to the movie consumer becomes ever more complex and spans traditional and new movie players.

SPEAKER: Kerry Hutson (US), Director of International New Media Licensing, NBC Universal

In this presentation Kerry Hutson will discuss what is driving the industry growth and digital adaptation and how they are being integrated into the film value chain.
Kerry Hutson will also talk about how the business models are evolving to reach changing audience demands and the NBC Universal approach to the international digital landscape.

The site I’m referring to is The Auteurs, a movie streaming service and social network, whose social object is auteur cinema. In Danish that’s Lars von Trier, Carl Th. Dreyer and Christoffer Boe. This in turn means no 007, no Frodo and no Bridget Jones. But if you belong to the cultural sub-species that thrive on exceptional cinematic experiences, earmark a portion of your salary for film festival tickets or love to cuddle up in front of TCM cable classics, then you’re going to love The Auteurs.

It came out of hiding and into public beta 10 days ago. In their own words The Auteurs is “an online movie theater and gathering place for film lovers.” This description could perhaps be fitting of some BitTorrent clients also, but The Auteurs is playing on the right side of the street in several respects.

• The site is a visual and navigational pleasure to visit. Great design.
• Online distribution rights for every streaming movie have been cleared (but downloads or embeds are not possible.)
• The site hosts some of the best auteur material that can be hard to find anywhere else than on back shelf DVDs or in cinematheques.
• The streams are fast and the content high-quality, quite good enough to be shown on your home cinema set-up.
• The social networking service is also well designed with easily customizable profile pages targetting the film aficionado.

In short: The Auteurs doesn’t have pirate written all over it and you can easily browse and watch with a clear conscience. And as this short introduction video they remind us: It’s (mostly) free!

Hard work is obviously the foundation of this launch, but so is partnerships and business models. Drawing most attention to the public launch was the fact that The Auteurs has partnered with The Criterion Collection, a highly respected publisher of art cinema DVDs, to develop their new online cinematheque. Besides looking alike, the two partnering sites share a monthly selection of movie content. Some back catalogue movies that Criterion charges $5 to stream on their own site are made free to view on The Auteurs site – a move that has understandably garnered some critique during the past weeks, but it’s probably an issue hardly worth mentioning once both online libraries grow in size and users learn to benefit from the situation. This introduction video has more details on the Criterion ‘Rent before you buy’-scheme.

Other partners behind the launch are Costa Films and Celluloid Dreams, independent movie producers and distributors, working as strategic players in the continuous hunt for online distribution rights to art-house movies around the world.

However, the biggest challenge is probably not attracting international interest to the service, but distributing full site access to an international audience. We know this issue only too well from Hulu.com. Unfortunately, right now there are only few territories outside North America where you can watch most of the movies on The Auteurs. In Denmark (as in many other countries) we have to satisfy with the free selection from Criterion until further notice. But hey, that’s still a dozen high-quality movies for free every month!

And if everyone who reads this blog asks Santa for more free auteur movies, it might actually come true in a not too distant future. CEO and founder of The Auteurs, Efe Çakarel, seems to be buzzing around the globe, preparing deals and clearing rights issues so that more people can access the full library of auteur goodies. He is said to have been in Copenhagen just weeks ago, so who knows if we’re to become the lucky Scandinavian test subject?

Through the social forum I asked Melissa Miranda of The Auteurs’ team to work hard on the international rights issues. Quickly she replied: “We are!!! We’re going as fast as we can. Some distributors were waiting to see it launched first, so with the success of the last 2 weeks, the dominoes should begin falling.” That’s of course ‘global dominoes’, she reminded me, and we know who’s always first in line; the UK. But then Denmark!

I have $10 riding on it anyway…

Until then: Merry social cinema and look me up when you get there!

More Auterisms?

MUBI blog: MUBI partners with Sony and brings art cinema to the PS3 [May 2010]

indieWIRE: The Auteurs is now MUBI [May 2010]

The Auteurs: We Won a Webby! [May 2010]

Poder 360°: The Auteurs betting good films will translate into good business [April 09]

MIT Convergence Culture: “The Canon Goes 2.0″ [December 08]

NewTeeVee: Criterion Collection Does Web Video [November 08]

TechCrunch: New Indie Film Site To Make a Splash at Cannes [May 08]

Bestselling artists like Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails and Franz Ferdinand have recognized this and smaller artists simply depend word-of-mouth to survive. In an interview with Torrentfreak, UK folk duo ‘Show of Hands’ puts it like this:

“You may call this process ‘piracy’ if you wish – for me it is an act of generosity and it both increases our audience size and record sales. And as I always say on the night – if you’re going to do it anyway you may as well feel good about it!”

Steve also says the band rarely objects if someone wants to film their performances as it’s yet another way of using technology to reach out to their audience.

“I believe the official term is ‘viral marketing’,” says Steve, “and we depend utterly upon it.”

“Don’t fight it – embrace it.”

Blip.fm
For years users have embraced online music players like Last.fm and Pandora for their social streaming features. Many a new music inspiration have been found here and afterwards downloaded – either legally or not.

The new kid on the social music block is called Blip.fm and it adds a little something to the genre. Iain Tait has reviewed it thoroughly on his blog and writes:

There’s something about the immediateness of Blip.fm – the fact that it’s what people are listening to ‘right now’. But not just what they’re listening to, it’s the particular tracks that they’ve chosen to share. Along with a short comment.

It’s the combination of comment plus track that makes it interesting. Or at least it is for me. It just gives a modicum of context. Just enough to make the track feel more connected to the person.

If you’ve tried Twitter – this is Twitter with music. The community is based on followers/friends with whom you create a constant feed of recommended music. “What are you listening to right now and why?” might be the tagline.

That spells word-of-mouth, recommendation and viral marketing possibilites. Piracy? Well, Blip.fm is only weeks old and maybe it’s not quite legal around the edges. It has all the no-copyright-infringement notices in place, but where does all the music on the site stream from? “Songs are hosted all over the internet by different servers and websites,” it says. Ok.

And who cares basically! Artists and users alike could just embrace this musical lifestreaming service and acknowledge the mutual benefit they get from it. I just joined today (thank you Ingvardsen for the Twitter-invite) but I’m loving it already.

“Drop the copies, save the originals” is the tagline of a Danish campaign against copyright infringement. Could it be that the two are not mutually exclusive?
This blog comment sounds like a new campaign video:

So me and my friends are out at a fancy restaurant and I get some über house specialty. I **LOVE** it so much and just rant about it. My friend asks to try it and as I’m about to give him some, the maître d’ named Riaa comes over and tells me that isn’t allowed. He says if they want to try it they will have to order it for themselves.

Hmmm… Wait, that would never happen…

A little more?
CNET: Piracy as a core business strategy

Having the protagonists being mute – or of very few words at least – is just one of the brilliant choices Pixar has made. It brings a silent film quality to it where expressive acting speaks louder than words. This is of course even more impressive since it’s an animated movie and every turn of mechanical limbs has been breathed life into by countless animators.

What I’m trying to say here, and it might be a pretty lame observation I know, is that it’s amazing what stories and feelings can be conveyed by today’s digital animation, by computer generated moving pictures.

My mother-in-law was quick to turn down a ticket, when we offered it to her: “Cartoons don’t interest me.” Well, anyone with that opinion should take it up for revision. These aren’t “just” cartoons (though the short animation, Presto, being shown before the feature actually is – and it’s hilarious!), they are works of art, movies of high quality and engagement and some of the best stuff being churned out of Hollywood at the moment. Yes, they are 100% digital animation, but in the skilled hands of Pixar we forget that it’s primarily a kid’s magnet and emerge from the cinema with a great movie experience.

Enough praise for Disney vessels with huge budgets. WALL-E made me think of animation achievements in general and of new Danish animation in particular. We’re a small country, but we have some great animation talent and don’t flinch at daring scripts. Let me run you through some of the upcoming premieres on the Danish animation scene.

In one month Denmark launches it’s first manned space flight in Journey to Saturn. Even though the mock-Hollywood trailer might trick you, this is not your regular Armageddon-type sci-fi caper. It is based on Claus Deleuran’s classic comic book from 1977 – a delightfully insane space adventure, heavily pointing fingers at the welfare state. Animating the odd space crew is A. Film, the company that brought us the politically incorrect Terkel in Trouble, and I know they’ve wanted to do this particular piece for a long time, so expect some true-to-source planetary provocation.

For the autumn holidays we’re getting something slightly more aimed at kids, but it’s still throwing those who remember the 70’s a bone or two. Sunshine Barry and The Disco Worms is the English title denoting a cast of cute earthworms with a case of Saturday night fever. Even though this is Radar Film’s first venture into feature length animation, their earlier work shows real promise and the director, Thomas Borch Nielsen, and co-producers, Crone Film, have made successful children’s movies before. Toronto Film Festival has also taken a liking to Barry & Co. and handpicked it for their Family programme. Exciting – and congrats to the crew! (Btw, there’s an interactive Disco Worms web page and a Facebook-group too.)

Showing up in the horizon is Anders Morgenthaler’s The Apple and The Worm. It’s been pushed to a spring 2009 release and the web isn’t exactly brimming with information on the title, but it looks like something of a different direction from the director that gave adults a rough animation ride with the critically acclaimed Princess. This time it’s a story of a proud apple that has a wormy visitor and learns some philosophies of life in the process of trying to get rid of it again. It has previously been performed as a children’s play with some success. Observing Morgenthaler’s satirical comments in everything else he does, I expect some surprises in the fruit salad.

The blog moral: Go watch some digital animation, whether Danish or Disney, box office or on-line, there’s plenty of brilliant stuff out there! You can always bring a kid if you feel a little insecure among animated characters. Just don’t be a Bob Hoskins… (too(ns) subtle?)

More inspiration?

The current issue of EKKO comes with a DVD-selection of short animation from the National Film School of Denmark.
Users contribute own animation to a weekly episode of Channel Frederator.
A personal favorite: David Lynch on virtual acid = We Are The Strange.

This kind of parallel entertainment distribution across media platforms is a strategy gaining in popularity as revenue from video game sales are actually surpassing that from box-office ticket sales. It’s speculated that the two media platforms are actually competing for the same audience.

The Wanted MMO is free-to-play, however. Rather than being a parallel revenue-maker, it’s a FIG. Swedish game developers, Stillfront, specializes in FIGs and in the press release announcing WantedTheGame, they explain:

“Fan Immersion Games (FIGs) are casual, massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) that are free to play yet also include opportunities for players to buy advantages and premium accounts using micro transactions payable via SMS messages and credit cards. These games deliver high fan engagement through their story-driven design and community elements.

According to the Casual Games Association, the North American online casual games market is estimated to reach $690 million with worldwide revenue of over $1.5 billion. DFC Intelligence states that the worldwide online games market is forecasted to reach $13 billion in 2011.”

So even though it incorporates a microtransaction model enabling players to buy and exchange weapons and hit orders, the Wanted FIG is not primarily launched to secure game revenue but create awareness about the whole Wanted universe and get people in line at the box-office.

Two weeks ago the Wanted brand became even more immersive when the game was officially ported to the iPhone. Besides taking advantage of the iPhone tilt-function for navigation, the mobile edition has in-game benefits for players who log in on a regular basis. Regular immersion is rewarded so to speak.

I would love to hear from anyone who’s tried the game. Wonder if it has an impact on the Danish premiere as well. I doubt it.

Must know more?

Wanted FIG is not enough. A video game is coming out later this year.
Age of Conan MMORPG will tie in with Age of Conan movie scheduled for the future.
MMO and movie are potential untapped opportunities for BioShock, the video game.