Funny Picture

I needed to turn an audition clip file into a DVD that a funder could throw into a DVD player and see the movie on their TV.

I wound up using iDVD. It's meant to be a super simple program for putting your home movies on a disc. But if you actually want to do something really simple, it's not that intuitive.

What I wanted to do was make a DVD that plays one movie file once, without a menu. I could not figure out how to skip having a menu. You can put a movie before the menu. But the menus all seemed to require a minimum of two movies after. So I had to put the movie (an audition clip) before the menu, then twice after the menu.

It worked, but it was ugly. Also, the menus themselves, in their efforts to look "professional," came off as cheesy.

Eventually, I was able to download 1.6GB of other menu options, some which only demand one video after the menu, and don't look as cheesy.

So now: hey, I can make my own DVDs now!

I'm having sync problems with some videos I've put on Vimeo for private distribution. Has anyone else had this problem? Anyone know a better site? (I don't think you can upload stuff to YouTube but restrict its availability.)

There seem to be more free online documentaries at Documentary Heaven.

This makes me suspect that documentaries may not be the most profitable side of the movie industry.

Bill Wyman writing in Slate:

The trouble facing the movie industry right now is the same one the music industry had to confront 10 years ago.

The easiest and most convenient way to see the movies or TV shows you want is to get them illegally.

[snip]

If the studios were smart they'd go to the mat and create a massive one-stop shop for TV and movies, find a price point they can live with and then set programmers loose to make the thing as easy to use and ubiquitous as possible. Instead they've been wasting their time strong-arming the cable companies to help them on a new crusade against illegal downloaders—an unwieldy process that doesn't address the root problem and won't work.

I just got off a long chat with the customer service guys at Zip. They've been totally caught off guard by the Canada Post strike, because who could see that coming. Now 9 days after the end of the strike, they still apparently haven't processed the backlog of movies that people watched during the 13 day strike and sent back after it was over.

After trying Netflix in the States, I'm trying out Netflix Canada. The selection is really terrible. Of the fifteen movies I have on my Zip queue, Netflix had only one, CRONOS. And my Zip queue isn't that obscure. I have INCENDIES (Canada's Oscar nominee this year); Antonioni's classic L'AVVENTURA (Cannes Jury Prize 1960); THE DESCENT; BAD INFLUENCE; Neal Jordan's A COMPANY OF WOLVES; DIARY OF A MAD HOUSEWIFE; Bertolucci's THE CONFORMIST; and I AM LEGEND, starring Will Smith.

Netflix.ca seems to be good for people who want to watch something. It's not for people who want to watch something in particular.

Although they do have all those VEGGIE TALES for Jesse.

I also had a technical issue with CRONOS. It looked jerky, as if only ever other frame was showing. (It looked step-framed.) My guess is that, rather than reducing the image quality when the bandwidth is insufficient, they just transmit fewer frames. It's pretty hard to watch. If you google "netflix streaming jerky," you get a lot of hits, but the solutions available are for PC's; if you're streaming to your brand new DVD player, you're hosed.

So far, this is very much not a cable killer. It could be, but it's far from there.

So we ran into a drawback on Netflix last night. Lisa and I wanted to show my folks Jacob Tierney's adorable comedy THE TROTSKY, but the film kept buffering. I suspect the problem may be that we're on a cable modem, and we're sharing a pipe with too many other people in the neighborhood, so bandwidth goes down in the evening.

So we tried to watch THE KING'S SPEECH on iTunes. But it looks like you have to download the entire movie in order to watch it. We got an error message trying to watch it.

This morning, it seems to have downloaded [UPDATE: no, it didn't]. But ITunes has an annoying feature: once you start watching the movie, you have 24 hours to watch it. Then it goes away. Since I had to start watching it in order to see if it had downloaded all right, that means I have to watch it tonight. If I'd rented it from my video store, Boîte Noir, I'd have a week. If I had rented a disc from Zip or Netflix, I'd have as long as I like. So this is a step back in convenience. Apple could be a little more generous, considering $5 is quite a bit more than I'm used to paying to rent a movie.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to unravel a mystery. Apparently the second generation Apple TV's don't have hard drives, just a li'l 8GB flash drive for caching. So how can you download and queue multiple movies on iTunes? (You have 24 hours once you start watching, but you have 30 days from when you first ask to download, though it seems the first day is lost actually downloading.) Or rather, how many movies can you cache? Can anyone explain or point me to a link?

(UPDATE: Tried to watch it this evening. No go. It's saying it will be available to watch in 10 hours 18 minutes. Since it's also saying we can only watch the movie in the next 10 hours, that's probably not going to work for us. It does not seem to have cached or downloaded anything. That seems dumb. So much for iTunes on Apple TV.)

Dad has Netflix here in New York, and has his Apple TV box hooked up to it. For kicks, I downloaded A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and then METROPOLIS. Then Jesse wanted to watch something so I found her VEGGIE TALES 'TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE EASTER, in which vegetables sing and dance and occasionally proselytize for Jesus. It took about 5 seconds to download and start watching.

Netflix (and, in Canada, Zip) sending disks to people by mail killed Blockbuster. Streaming, downloadable movies and TV shows is a cable killer. Seriously. The only reason not to dump your cable subscription now is because not all content is available from Netflix.

But can Netflix make most content available? Are their economics sustainable? I've seen articles (can't find one right now) that claim that Netflix is losing money on its downloadable video: they're paying far more in license fees than they can possibly get from their subscriptions.

I'm not an industry analyst, so I can't tell you. But if Netflix can afford to get up to, oh, 80% of whatever it is that people want to watch, the cable industry is done for. Who needs cable when you can just watch anything, any time?

Here is a quick, irresponsible back of the envelope calculation: 23 million customers times $8 a month is $2 billion a year. If they've got, oh, say, 10,000 movies and episodes, they can afford to pay $200,000 per. If that $200,000 is on top of ticket sales, DVD sales, and syndication on cable and broadcast, that's nice. It's that way now. But if Netflix means no one has a reason to buy the DVD (they can download it) or watch it on cable or broadcast, then $200,000 doesn't go very far. HBO isn't going to let its content go for that kind of money. Neither should Paramount or NBC.

On the other hand, if Netflix really is a cable killer, then it will be able to drastically boost its subscriber base, and charge more, too. If I'm paying $60 a month for cable and $25 a month for Zip to mail me disks, I would certainly pay $80 a month so I can download absolutely anything any time. If 80 million households pay $50 a month, we have $48 billion to play with, and the license fee can go up to an average of $2,000,000.

Hmm. Well, that ought to be enough to greenlight any number of VEGGIE TALES. But a tentpole picture can sell 10 million DVD units. What would Warner Bros have to get as a Netflix license fee if it's not going to sell $500,000,000 worth of DVDs of Batman 5?

I can feel the earth moving, but who knows where we'll end up?

A dear friend posted this Toronto Star column about American broadcasters streaming content into Canada, commercials intact.

The key determinant will obviously be money. Once U.S. rights holders conclude that it is more profitable to retain the Internet rights so that they can stream their programs online to a global audience and capture the advertising or subscription revenues that come with it, Canadian broadcasters may find that they can only license broadcast rights with the U.S. rights holders competing directly with them via the Internet.