Category Archives: Online Media

Australian branded content drama The Horizon hits 21 million online views

Australian brand funded online drama series The Horizon series has hit more than 21 million views on YouTube.

The show which depicts the lives of a group of Sydney gay men hit the number following the US launch of its fourth season. The third season has claimed four awards at the 2014 LA Webfest following a successful run online.

The show is averaging 40 – 60,000 viewers daily say its creators, and now boasts 73,000 ongoing subscribers to its YouTube channel. Brands behind the series include General Pants, NSW health promotion agency ACON, and DNA Magazine.

The series is produced and directed by former Packed to the Rafters writer Boaz Stark, and is backed by producers Brian Cobb and Jacob Inglis and Executive Producers Tania Chambers and Rob Cannella.

Series 4 features a number of Australian stars including Belinda Giblin and Barry Quin with cameos from Gretel Killeen and Jonny Pasvolsky as a vivacious nurse and a caring Priest.

“We have found some great ways for people to be involved with The Horizon series five and six, through pledges towards the production costs, which will then enable us to offer various opportunities like a walk on role or name your own character, as well as executive producer titles to those wanting to pledge” said Cobb. “Pledges can be made from $100 offering fantastic opportunities at every level”.

Robert Burton-Bradley – mumbrella – July 1st, 2014

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e6bf2OkQKA&list=UUrkkQ0gp5biGP7K0mixrdyQ

Film streaming and downloads to overtake box office in 2017

The growing popularity of downloads and streaming services like Netflix means that Blu-ray and DVD sales are declining

A study by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) has declared that the market for DVDs and Blu-ray is quickly declining, with the slack taken up by increasingly popular on-demand streaming services like Netflix – which will also overtake cinema box office revenues in the coming years.

The study says that revenue from electronic home video (ie streaming and downloading films) will outstrip physical media in 2016, and that the market for physical media will drop from $12.2bn now to $8.7bn in 2018. They also predict that in 2017 electronic home video will overtake the traditional cinema as the biggest contributor to total film revenue in the US, reaching a total of $17bn the following year – double the $8.5bn the sector currently generates.

That’s not to say the multiplex is under threat – PwC predict a 16% increase in ticket sales over the next five years. “People still want to go to the movies, especially the big tentpole films,” said Cindy McKenzie, managing director of PwC’s entertainment, media and communications arm. She also pointed to the cheap and easy distribution allowed by digital media as being a major cost saving: “The amount of money that you’re making per transaction may not be the same, but it is cheaper to distribute things digitally.”

Netflix, Amazon Instant Video and the popular US streaming service Hulu are funnelling their growth into ambitious production projects: all have quickly made the jump from mere middlemen to creators of original content, with hits like House of Cards and Arrested Development. Netflix’s revenue rose an astonishing 24% in the first quarter of 2014.

In the music market, streaming is eating into downloads to the point where Spotify’s streaming revenue is beginning to outpace iTunes’ download revenue in certain parts of Europe – perhaps a catalyst for Apple’s recent purchase of streaming service Beats Music. But downloads of films are still growing (albeit at a much lower pace than streaming) and topped $1bn in revenue for the first time last year, driven in part by high-quality downloads becoming available before physical and streamed versions.

PwC also announced that ebooks would overtake printed books as the UK’s most popular reading format by 2018, with revenue to triple to nearly £1bn over the next four years.

Ben Beaumont-Thomas – theguardian.com, Wednesday 4 June 2014

Jonah from Tonga will come out on ABC iView before traditional TV

All six episodes of Chris Lilley’s comedy will go on the catch-up service days before  TV broadcast in an online first

Chris Lilley’s new comedy series, Jonah from Tonga, will be made available on the ABC’s catch-up TV service iView before being broadcast on ABC1, a first for Australian broadcasters. BBC Three, a co-broadcaster of Jonah, will also offer the entire series on the BBC iPlayer first. All six episodes of the comedy about Jonah Takalua who was expelled from the fictional Summer Heights High, will be on iView for what the ABC has described as “binge viewing” on the weekend of 2 May. It will be broadcast traditionally on TV from 7 May on Wednesday nights.

Putting a program online first flies in the face of the conventional path taken by the networks because an online viewing doesn’t count towards the TV ratings, which determine whether a program has been successful or not. But the appetite of younger viewers to consume shows all in one sitting is growing and binge viewing may create buzz around the first broadcast, in particular on social media.

Lilley’s last series, Ja’mie: Private School Girl, was not a major ratings success for ABC1 but did very well on iView and has garnered the actor a nomination for most popular actor in the TV Week Logie Awards next month. Producer Laura Waters of Princess Pictures said: “Jonah from Tonga is a thrilling series, coming out in the most thrilling era of television. Chris and I will always put the fan’s experience first. We’re so excited that people can choose their own way of getting involved with Jonah.”

The ABC’s iView is the most successful catch-up service in Australia, with 15m monthly program plays. The ABC’s head of online and multiplatform, Arul Baskaran, said: “We’re firm believers in innovation and improving how technology can deliver outstanding Australian content to audiences no matter where they’re watching, and we’re thrilled to now offer binge viewing of a highly anticipated show from one of Australia’s most respected comedic talents.”

Amanda Meade – theguardian.com, Thursday 17 April 2014

10 viewing trends for 2014 that will change the way we watch TV

From Twitter’s ‘social soundtrack’ to self-made YouTube stars and Amazon turning future viewers into commissioners: the latest in interactive television trends

Israeli show Rising Star separates singers from the studio audience by a wall, which rises as viewers vote using the show’s official app.

The MIPTV conference in Cannes is where the television industry gathers to buy and sell shows, while debating the changing attitudes of broadcasters and producers, the shifting habits of viewers and the disruption coming from new technologies. This year’s show was a mixture of stars – traditional celebrities, but also fresh-faced YouTubers with audiences in the millions – and strong opinions about how we’re watching TV now, and how this may change in the years ahead.

1 Twitter wants to be the ‘social soundtrack’ for TV social networks

Twitter and Facebook are competing to become the online watercooler where people discuss their favourite shows. Twitter’s pitch – as made by chief media scientist Deb Roy – is that it is a “synchronised social soundtrack for whatever is happening in the moment, as a shared experience”.

During this year’s Oscars, 5 million people sent 19m tweets that were seen by 37 million people – including Ellen DeGeneres’s famous selfie. Meanwhile, a single episode of The X Factor in the UK last year tempted 1.2 million Brits to tweet. Roy also suggested that Twitter buzz could fuel new kinds of shows. “The opportunity is in the hands of storytellers in how to tap into this new creative storytelling … to look to the data, and to really go and pioneer potentially whole new genres.”

2 YouTube and rivals are creating new stars and starry shows

Could the next Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones come from YouTube? It’s not a ridiculous thought: there are growing numbers of sharp, witty and well-scripted dramas being made for online viewing – and not just on YouTube, with Hulu, Amazon, Xbox and (most famously) Netflix all commissioning. Britain also has a growing cadre of young YouTube stars reaching mass audiences. Twins Finn and Jack Harries are good examples: their JacksGap YouTube channel has 3.4 million subscribers, with their latest show documenting a rickshaw ride across India.

Gamer Joseph Garrett has 2.3 million subscribers – many of them kids – for his Stampylonghead channel, with its daily videos of a virtual cat exploring the Minecraft game. He’s now spinning off a new education channel.

3 Jerry Springer was inevitable, just like social media

Jerry Springer delivered a robust defence of his chatshow genre’s effects on society. “This concept that television has influenced human behaviour and the destruction of society is garbage. We had a Holocaust before anyone had a television set,” he said.

Springer sought to put his show into historical context. “What is happening in the social media was inevitable. The coming of my show 23 years ago was inevitable. What we are witnessing is the democratisation of culture,” he said.

“For thousands of years it was people sitting in an audience watching something happen on a stage, on a screen, on a ball-field. It was the audience and then the performers. Now, literally, the audience are the ones that are entertaining.” And not just when throwing chairs.

4 Amazon is turning viewers into commissioners

Amazon’s Studios division funds pilots and full series of TV shows for adults and children, then makes them available through its Prime subscription service – with brooding crime drama Bosch the latest show to be unveiled.

It’s Amazon’s commissioning process that’s most interesting: it funds a pilot, puts it online and then waits to see how its customers rate and review the episode before deciding whether to commission a full series. “It is oddly Marxist in its idea, but it’s a very smart business model,” saidBosch star Titus Welliver. “What you’re doing is empowering the people.”

Amazon’s Roy Price said show producers get over their “initial trepidation” rapidly. “At the end of the day we’re in a commercial art form, we’re not exchanging private haikus,” he said. “You want to get your work out there in front of millions of viewers and see what they think.”

5 Kids are causing the biggest changes in TV

The average six- to 14-year-old in the UK still spends 10.4 hours a week watching linear TV, according to research firm Dubit. But the growth of tablets is startling: the percentage of children with access to a tablet at home has surged from 20% in 2012 to 51% in 2013 and 84% now.

Angry Birds maker Rovio is one of the companies capitalising on this: it has quietly built its own kids’ TV network within its mobile games, generating billions of views for shows by other companies – including Fraggle Rock – as well as its own cartoons. Meanwhile, British startup Hopster has an app blending shows with educational games. “For the first time this new, alternative ‘first screen’ is going to establish a relationship of equals with the TV,” said Hopster founder Nicholas Walters.

6 Kim Cattrall is flying the flag for older women

Sex and the City star Kim Cattrall’s latest TV role focuses on a woman coming to terms with the ageing process. She had sharp words for broadcasting bosses who she feels are discriminating against female writers and actors.

“I believe that women my age have very much to say, and unfortunately this business doesn’t recognise that, most of the time,” said Cattrall, adding that “the pressure to stay young, be young, bubbly, nubile, is suffocating”. She also suggested that TV had a long way to go in its roles for older women. “They don’t really know what to do with me. I don’t want to play someone’s wife and become a joke about plastic surgery.”

7 Interactive TV shows are more than just a novelty

Transmedia – telling a story across different devices and platforms – has been around a long time as a concept. But there are more and more interesting examples.

Fort McMoney is a Canadian web project focusing on environmental issues, using a mixture of video and gameplay. “The game is a tool to debate,” said director David Dufresne. “A lot of people came for the game, and they stayed for the subject.”

Another Canadian project, State of Syn, is a sci-fi show that lives on various devices. “It’s a series, it’s an app, it’s a Google Glass game and it’s a social experience,” said producer Jay Bennett. Meanwhile, Australian crime drama Secrets & Lies gives fans clues through social networks and social TV app Zeebox, to help them solve the crimes.

8 Vice isn’t as hip as you might think

Critics often label magazine-turned-media-network Vice as a haven for insufferable hipsters. Actually, it’s emerging as an important voice for the teens and twentysomethings who feel ill-served by traditional channels.

Vice’s latest online channel is the food-focused Munchies, but the company is also tackling hard news. “People say young people aren’t interested in the news around them. It’s bullshit,” said chief creative officer Eddy Moretti. “Our audience was telling us, ‘no, we want news, we want long-form, we want documentaries’,” added CEO Shane Smith.

Here, too, environmental activism is to the fore, with a new show calledToxic about climate change. “We can’t just have stick-your-head-in-the-sand shit any more. We have to say something. We have to say ‘if we don’t do something about the environment, we’re fucked’,” said Smith. “And if we don’t say that in media, then shame on us.”

9 The second screen is changing talent and game shows

TV talent shows have had viewers voting with their phones for a long time. The next generation of formats takes that further. Israeli show Rising Star, which is now being adapted around the world, separates singers from the studio audience by a video wall, which rises only when enough viewers have voted using the show’s app.

Elsewhere, American Idol has been allowing viewers to vote from Google’s search engine in its latest series. “We are doing two times the average number of votes we did the previous year, and almost half of them are coming from Google,” said Olivier Delfosse of producer FremantleMedia.

10 Monkey Tennis is alive, well, and being pitched in 2014

The spirit of Alan Partridge’s famously strange pitches for new TV shows lives on in 2014. Among shows being pitched at MIPTV were Host in the Box, where a presenter is shipped to a mystery location in a box, and has to survive; Rocco to the Rescue, where former porn star Rocco Siffredi helps people in need of “sexual healing”; and Adam Looking for Eve, a dating show where prematched contestants meet on a tropical island. Nude.

Babe Magnet is like Blind Date if the female contestants could reject unsuitable men with a giant magnet; The Shower is a music talent show where contestants sing in an on-stage shower whose temperature is controlled by the audience’s app votes; and Dolphins With the Starspairs celebrities with dolphins for a weekly performance.

None of these formats has been made up.

Stuart Dredge – The Observer, Sunday 13 April 2014

The secret to a successful YouTube video – by some of the site’s stars

Creators of Rhett & Link, JacksGap and The Young Turks channels explain why they’re so popular

The Grand Auditorium in Cannes’ Palais des Festivals is most famous for hosting film screenings during the city’s annual film festival. This week, it’s showing YouTube videos.

The MIPTV television industry conference is holding its first “Digital Fronts” – two days of screenings and talks by YouTube and the multi-channel networks (MCNs) that have built businesses on Google’s video service.

The sessions included interviews with some of the most popular young YouTubers, including the creators of the Rhett & Link, JacksGap and The Young Turks channels.

Rhett & Link

Rhett Mclaughlin and Link Neal describe themselves as “Internetainers”, producing a mix of sketches, music videos and comical adverts, as well as a daily talk show called Good Mythical Morning.

Their main channel has nearly 1.9m subscribers and 263m total views, while the separate talk-show channel has 1.5m subscribers and 166m views. The duo now have a fluctuating team of 7-8 people and their own studio space in Los Angeles.

Neal talked about how they fund their productions by partnerships with brands. “Over years of doing that a lot, we’ve been able to have a conversation with our audience as it’s grown to help them understand that brands fund our content, and help us to create content for them that otherwise we couldn’t create,” he said.

“For us, there has always been a commitment to create better content with a brand involved, and that’s really paid off in the long run. There’s no backlash from our audience, because they’re on-board. We’re not trying to pull the wool over our audience’s eyes: we’re upfront about it, and everybody wins.”

JacksGap

British twin brothers Finn and Jack Harries started their YouTube channel to document a gap year, but over time it has grown to 3.4m subscribers who have watched their videos 144m times.

“What we realised on YouTube is that it’s very different to TV. People are directly engaged with you as a person and your story,” said Jack. “People were subscribing and coming back every single week to find out more.”

Two years in, the brothers decided to branch out from their early five-minute clips and make longer 15-minute episodes as part of a web series, themed around driving rickshaws across the width of India. They raised £20,000 to fund the series from Skype, Sony and MyDestination.

“There’s money in YouTube through ads on the site, but only for a certain level. If you want to create higher quality content, obviously you need to generate more money,” said Jack.

“We did four episodes, and each is over 15 minutes,” added Finn. “We had no idea how it was going to go down, but each episode now has just over 1m views and Google allows us to see how long people watch for. The average engagement of those people is 13 minutes, out of a 15-minute episode.”

The Young Turks

Billed as “the largest online news show in the world”, The Young Turks streams live on YouTube and archives its shows for later viewing. Its channel has 1.5m subscribers and nearly 1.4bn total views. It’s aimed squarely at young people.

“There is this massive misconception that young people have absolutely no interest in the news. Young people definitely do want to be informed, but they want to be informed by people they can relate to,” said host and producer Ana Kasparian.

“We noticed this void in the market, especially in the US. There are great news anchors, they’re probably very smart, but they’re not talking to the audience like real people. They’re just reading from a teleprompter.”

Kasparian said that The Young Turks’ audience is a “huge part of our content”, playing a prominent role in commenting and tweeting on live streams and archived shows alike.

“Immediately you know what they like and don’t like,” she said. “They’re holding you accountable. If you want an audience that genuinely sticks around, you have to listen to what their opinion is.”

YouTube’s potential

These creators were all speaking as part of a Digital Fronts session curated by YouTube itself, which also saw French channel Golden Moustache’s Adrien Labastire talking about running a Web Comedy Awards as a simultaneous YouTube and TV event.

Meanwhile, football channel Copa90’s Eli Mengem outlining the dizzying rise of online video fame. “11 months ago I was a uni student working in a bar, watching Arsenal on TV. Two months ago, I interviewed Arsene Wenger,” he said.

Session host Michael Stevens, from science network VSauce, said that these stories were the tip of an online iceberg for the media industry.

“These five channels made the choice to build a global fanbase on YouTube. They are not just isolated examples: this is happening everywhere, and the scale of the audience available on YouTube is gigantic,” he said, before harking back to comments the previous day from YouTube’s entertainment head Alex Carloss about the desirability of creating a fanbase rather than just an audience.

“You can build a really big audience on YouTube: they show up, they listen. But a fanbase is going to subscribe and watch everything you make in the future, and tell their friends about you,” said Stevens.

“What we’re seeing on YouTube all over the place is the building of fanbases that will follow you to new formats and to new platforms.”

Challenge to TV networks

In a later session, MCN Maker Studios – which is in the process of being acquired by Disney – presented similarly-bullish views on the potential, with the company’s international president René Rechtman warning the television industry not to be scared of the implications of YouTube’s growth.

“It’s democratising creativity and media… It’s a big opportunity for all of us. We should embrace this,” he said. “YouTube has now become the second biggest search engine. So we go there, we search. And six billion hours of video is watched every single month. And a lot of that is happening with the mobile device. The numbers are insane.”

Rechtman also claimed that MCNs like his company are presenting a challenge for traditional TV networks – this may well have been one of the reasons Disney agreed to pay up to $950m for the company.

“Networks like Maker are now becoming more important than the traditional cable players. According to Nielsen if you want to reach the millennials, you have to come to us, or other players like us… and we do it for 5-10% of the cost of traditional TV,” he said, before turning the attention back onto the YouTubers that form the backbone of any MCN.

“Fans, hobbyists, creators are the new publishers, and they are the new distribution,” said Rechtman, who added that of the more-than 380m subscribers to Maker’s network of YouTube channels, 80% are aged between 13 and 34, 60% are outside the US, and 40% are watching on mobile devices.

He also warned the TV industry not to miss the impact of the shifting habits of young people. “We had the newspapers who neglected what happened, the music industry.neglected what happened. We cannot do the same. We need to embrace the change.”

Stuart Dredge – theguardian.com, Wednesday 9 April 2014 22.08 AEST

Motion picture industry continues to stagger under piracy with mere record-breaking income

Once again, the “piracy-stricken” motion picture association has had a banner year, with box office revenue breaking all records (as they’ve done in most recent years).
The biggest gains this year come from China — a market condemned by the studios as a hive of piracy.
Some of the best news in the report is that American movies are seeing success in China, which has become the first international market to reach more than $3 billion in movie sales. The Chinese enthusiasm for US-produced movies comes despite the fact that China continues to restrict the number of foreign-made films that can be released in theaters to 34 imports a year.
But the country at the top of the MPAA’s sales charts is also at the top of its piracy target list. Last year, the MPAA placed China on the list of the “most notorious” markets for distributing pirated movies and TV shows. As reported by the LA Times, MPAA spokesperson Michael O’Leary has explained:
The criminals who profit from the most notorious markets through the world threaten the very heart of our industry and in doing so threaten the livelihoods of the people who give it life. These markets are an immediate threat to legitimate commerce, impairing legitimate markets’ viability and curbing US competitiveness.
Despite prolific piracy, China’s increase in sales has been positively “meteoric,” MPAA chief Chris Dodd said at a press conference yesterday, noting a 27 percent increase.

Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing – Thu, Mar 27, 2014

Machinima Premieres Web Series ‘Enormous’

The YouTube network is testing the pilot with audiences before making a series commitment.

Machinima is asking viewers to help decide whether its newest pilot should become a full-fledged web series.

The YouTube multichannel network Thursday debuted the pilot for Enormous, a live-action series based on the Image Comics graphic novel of the same name. The West Hollywood company will study audience response to the pilot before ordering it to series.

Written by Tim Daniel and illustrated by Mehdi Cheggour, the comic tells the story of a post-apocalyptic world where humans are prey for giant insects. Producer Adrian Askarieh (Hit Man) optioned the project with Machinima more than a year ago.

The live-action pilot is written by Andrew Ovredal and directed by Ben David Grabinski. It stars Ceren Lee as a mother who has lost her child and now rescues abandoned children. Erica Gimpel (Veronica Mars) and Steve Braun (Wrong Turn 2) also star.

Enormous is one of a handful of Machinima original series whose fate will be decided by fans. Machinima vp development Andy Shapiro tells THR that the audience feedback process is meant to keep costs down and engage viewers.

“We need to be able to test things,” he says. “We need to be able to get our audience integrated early on. Hearing what people are looking for will help guide us a little bit more.”

Machinima will use viewership metrics, conversations around the projects and internal discussions to determine which series it ultimately will pick up.

For director Grabinski, that means the next few months will be a waiting game.

“I have a million ideas and I’d love to just jump into it,” he says. “But the thing that’s fascinating is that there are a lot of opportunities dictated by [the audience reaction]. It’s different than anything I’ve done before.”

Production on Enormous began in October 2013 and cost in the low six figures, says Askarieh, adding that Machinima “backed us all the way. I will always be grateful to them and for their vision in letting us do Enormous the way we wanted.”

The Enormous pilot streams on Machinima Prime, a YouTube channel devoted to the company’s original scripted series. The company’s first big push into original content was Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn, a full-length series based on the popular Microsoft game that premiered in 2012.

Shapiro says short web series such as Enormous are meant to help round out Machinima’s original content offerings.

“The end goal for all of this from a programming point of view is to fall into a cadence that allows us regular scripted programming.”

20/3/2014 by Natalie Jarvey – THR

Screenburn raises $500k to help sell films and music on Facebook

British startup has already worked with Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones on video-on-demand films

British technology startup Screenburn has raised $500k (£302k) in angel investment to continue building its business helping musicians and filmmakers make money from Facebook.

The company specialises in video-on-demand (VOD) events, with fans paying to watch films or concerts on the social network. It has launched more than 200 films on Facebook, including projects for Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones.

Screenburn’s app, which launched in December 2012, sits within clients’ Facebook pages, taking payments from fans then making films available to stream for set periods of time.

Alongside the funding, the company has recruited Steve Macallister from television distributor Zodiak Rights and Howard Kiedaisch from digital cinema firm Arts Alliance Media to join its board of directors.

“There’s no question that much of the future of long form video content lies with digital streaming,” said Macallister in a statement. “Screenburn is exciting because it offers content owners an opportunity to reach out to people already engaged with a brand or a particular release online.”

Screenburn says it has a number of partnerships in place for 2014 around music, sports and television, as well as films.

“Content owners may already have thousands or even millions of fans on Facebook. The app works very well to monetise this existing audience,” said founder Tom Raffe.

“The app also takes full advantage of Facebook’s sharing functionality to find new fans and increase distribution to a nationwide or worldwide audience. This funding is a great qualification of our business model and plans for this year.”

Screenburn is one of a number of companies exploring social commerce. US startup Chirpify started out working with artists like Amanda Palmer, Green Day and Snoop Dogg to sell music and merchandise on Twitter, before expanding to Facebook and Instagram.

Another company, Gumroad, has worked with Bon Jovi and Wiz Khalifa in music, while author Nathan Barry sold more than $355k worth of books through the service in 16 months.

A more direct rival for Screenburn is Milyoni, which has worked on “social video” campaigns for clients including Universal Music Group and Hollywood firms Paramount and Lionsgate. In July 2013, it streamed a concert for Smashing Pumpkins for free, albeit to just 1,800 fans.

One challenge for all these companies when working on Facebook is the ongoing debate about “organic page reach” on the social network – the number of people who’ve Liked a band or brand who’ll actually see its posts in their news feeds.

Marketers have been complaining for some time that their organic page reach stats have been falling on Facebook, with grumbles that it’s a deliberate strategy on the social network’s part to force them to pay for advertising to reach more of their own fans.

In December 2013, Facebook responded to the criticism, admitting the trend but saying it was inevitable. “On a given day, when someone visits News Feed, there are an average of 1,5001 possible stories we can show,” claimed its blog post.

“As a result, competition for each News Feed story is increasing. Because the content in News Feed is always changing, and we’re seeing more people sharing more content, Pages will likely see changes in distribution. For many Pages, this includes a decline in organic reach.”

That presents a challenge for the clients of Screenburn and its rivals: they can make films or gigs available to stream, but ensuring all their fans know that these events are available to watch may increasingly require more spending on Facebook advertising.

Stuart Dredge – theguardian.com, Thursday 20 March 2014

God squad doc nets $55k via crowdfunding

Melbourne filmmakers Don Parham and Warwick Vincent have raised $55,000 via a crowdfunding campaign for a feature-length documentary called Smithy: Something
In Every Hue. Before getting too excited about a new film on the pioneer aviator, this one is about John Smith, the Australian founder of Christian motorcycle club God’s Squad. His fans include Bono, who backed the Pozible campaign by describing Smith as a preacher who is ”a very eloquent speaker with a brilliant mind”.

Closing Piracy Powerhouse Actually Hurt Movie Revenues

Only blockbusters benefitted from shutdown of Megaupload; grosses of mid-range
pics declined, according to David S. Cohen of Variety.

Closing the notorious piracy site Megaupload didn’t help theatrical film grosses , according to a new study. Megaupload, which claimed at one time to account for as much as 4% of all Internet traffic, was shut down suddenly by the FBI on Jan. 19, 2012, its domains seized and its management team arrested. That amounted to what the researchers call a “quasi-experiment” on anti-piracy policy.

“We find that box office revenues of a majority of movies did not increase,” said the paper. “While for a mid-range of movies the effect of the shutdown is even negative, only large blockbusters could benefit from the absence of Megaupload.” They add their findings suggest “that there were less average performing movies after the shutdown, while at the same time there were more poorly performing movies.”

The study, from researchers at Ludwig Maximilians University Munich and Copenhagen Business School, looked at weekly data from 10,272 movies in 50 countries, as reported on boxofficemojo.com. Its results contrast with findings of researchers at Carnegie Mellon, who found that the shutdown of Megaupload boosted legal digital sales of movies.

The European researchers attributed the “counterintuitive” drop in theatrical grosses following the shutdown of the site to ”social network effects, where online piracy acts as a mechanism to spread information about a good (film) from consumers with low willingness to pay to consumers with high willingness to pay.” This network information-spreading effect of illegal downloads, they argue, “seems to be especially important for movies with smaller audiences.”

“Piracy has positive externalities,” they wrote, “where information about the quality of a good experience spills over from pirates to purchasers. Once it becomes significantly less easy to consumer pirated content online, we would expect that at least some consumers convert to legal digital purchases or start going to the movies.”

But when that happens, they argue, the positive effects of piracy vanish, and some consumers end up less informed about specific titles.

Blockbusters’ huge advertising campaigns make that unimportant, but pictures without that advantage were hurt on average after Megaupload shut down. The authors argue that these findings imply that anti-piracy policy may have unintended consequences because different kinds of movies are affected differently as piracy declines.

Some entertainment pros and technologists have predicted this might be the case, as anecdotes have long circulated that young viewers, especially young men, like to check out a picture via the web before deciding if they like it enough to buy a ticket.

That has been one argument for ending theatrical windows on some pictures and moving to day-and-date release on streaming VOD.

David S. Cohen, Variety Senior Editor, Features – August 27, 2013