Why Movies Are Not Exactly Like Music

Ars digs into the proposition that movies will go the way of the music business, and finds some reasons not to be totally gloomy about Hollywood's immediate future. For one thing, the movie biz managed to introduce a next-generation format to follow the DVD, a trick that eluded the music crowd (anyone remember DVD-Audio? SACD?). Blu-ray isn't making up the gap as DVD sales fall, but it is slowing the revenue decline. Perhaps the most important difference from the music business is that movies aren't amenable to "disaggregation" — unlike CDs, which people stopped buying once they could get the individual songs they really wanted. Ars concludes: "The movie business is facing many of the same challenges that are bedeviling music, but it's not about to go quietly into that good night — and it may not have to."

Comments

DVD Sales Gap

[Enderandrew]

DVDs sales are going down, but some of that gap is Amazon Unbox, Netflix, iTunes, DVRs, Hulu, etc.

The movie industry gets paid from all of these sources (including DVRs in that movie companies are paid to air movies on cable).

BluRay sales aren't huge because some retailers keep insisting on charging $35 for BluRay movies. We all know the cost of the disc is minimal. Amazon can sell BluRays for $10-$20. I'm not going to pay $35 for a movie, and I'm not alone on that issue.

Re:DVD Sales Gap

[chadplusplus]

And let's not forget the instant gratification demanded by many consumers. On typical broadband, a song downloads in less than a minute. The significantly longer time required to download a movie (if purchased and stored in Blue Ray quality) is longer than the time required to drive to Blockbuster or Walmart to buy the physical copy of the same movie.

For instance, a few months ago, I ordered PPV Gran Torino in 1080p for my wife and I to view one evening. Six hours later it was ready to view, but she was already in bed.

Re:DVD Sales Gap

[Rogerborg]

Question: aren't you therefore stealing $15 (or $30 for Blu-Ray) from the distributor by not paying the full 0-day retail price?

No, you say? But why not? After all, you're apparently stealing $20 from them if you pay $0 for it, so why aren't you stealing $15 if you pay $5?

Let's throw that question open to any distributor executives or their lawyers who happen to be wandering by.

Re:DVD Sales Gap

[Evil Shabazz]

It takes an hour to download a 720p movie. You don't usually _need_ a 1080p movie. And more importantly, with the technological marvel that is streaming you can start watching after 15 minutes (unless you're downloading .mkv or something) and the playtime will not catch up to the download time. But then again, some people don't have FTTH like most of us in developed countries do. :)

It only takes an hour to download a 720p movie if you happen to have access to about 7mb+ broadband. And even then, you're subject also to the bandwidth of the service you're trying to download from. For instance, take trying to download a movie from Sony's PS3 store. You'll only ever make that mistake once. You could have a 10 petabyte internet connection and it would still take you 16 hours to download a TV episode from them because they won't send you the file at anywhere near a reasonable speed.

Re:DVD Sales Gap

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

To be fair, CDs are only 1400 kbit/s because they were designed to be played back on hardware with almost zero processing power. Depending on the source material, it isn't uncommon to see lossless compression get this down to around half the original size. Still a far cry from the bitrates of the lossy stuff; but less dramatic than the uncompressed/lossy compression comparison.

Re:DVD Sales Gap

[slim]

I believe that for some formats, the player needs to peek at the start and end of the file, before chewing through from the start.

Hence, many Bittorrent implementations prioritise the start and end of the file.

For as-good-as-streaming, of course you can fetch the beginning, fetch the end, then fetch the rest beginning at the front.

If everyone does that it kills torrent swarm performance as a whole, but hey, we're not advocating P2P here, right ;)

Re:DVD Sales Gap

[zmollusc]

Do you play an instrument? I bet you don't pay a fee to the instrument maker for every note you play. I bet part of that fee doesn't get paid backwards to the supplier of the materials the instrument is made from. A singer? How much do you pay the production line guy who made your microphone every time you sing into it?

Sculptors? You know the plastic mouldings that nearly everything is made from? Someone has to sculpt the moulds. Do they get a percentage? No, and they have to work to very tight tolerances not 'that looks finished now'.

One of the reasons your 'art' gets 'ripped off' so much is that the people doing so will never be in the position of doing a job once, then getting royalties forever and they don't see why they owe you anything for doing the duplication themselves.

Are you contractually obliged to bitch about downloaders?

Go make pattern parts for GM vehicles, you won't get put away for grand theft auto, but you won't get paid per mile used either.

Re:DVD Sales Gap

[Omestes]

. If you get a copy of the sound recording that I worked hard to produce without either paying me for it or me giving it to you than you have stolen it from me.

No, I copied it. You were not deprived of anything, therefore it isn't theft. The copying might be illegal, or immoral, but it still isn't theft. The closest we get to theft with copying is the potential deprivation of profit. If I copied your song, then smashed the masters, it would be closer to theft since I actually denied you use.

I personally think copying music without compensating the artist is wrong. I also have nothing against using P2P as a "try before you buy" medium, I have nothing against pirating thing from musicians who don't actually derive profit from sales (anyone who is dead, or don't own their own rights), I have nothing against pirating things over a certain age (lets say 30 years). I have nothing against pirating music released to be intentionally broken (DRM), or that is released in the spirit of limited scarcity. I have nothing against pirating music that I have already bought, albeit in a different form, whether or whether not I actually own the media.

Though, honestly, I really don't care anyone. Artists, and their backers, have been trying to screw their customers over for years, so I see nothing wrong with playing the same game and screwing them over. This is especially true of RIAA labels and artists, I would generally never even CONSIDER buying their music, no matter how much I like them (if I like them, I will see them in concert and buy a damn shirt... though even that experience is getting a biut customer hostile with bigger shows). I am not your guaranteed revenue stream, and if you screw with me (even a little), your not getting a damn cent from me.

Musicians are NOT special people who deserve special rights and protections. If you don't play music, someone else will. If you only play for money, then you aren't really worth much in my eyes. If you find having a day job to onerous, then tough shit. If you aren't successful enough to do music 100% of the time, and live off of it, then you should have a job just like the rest of us.

Re:DVD Sales Gap

[danny256]

If I copied a site like slashdot called slashdot2, copied all of the articles from slashdot, and got users and people to read it and added some advertisements, would you tell slashdot to get another "business model"? After all, noting of value was taken..only copied. This should be fine in the digital age..right?

It's ironic that you say that, because Slashdot runs on free software and the scenario you're describing would be perfectly legal and ethical. Feel free to get all the Slashdot source code, fork the site to "Slashdot 2" and use Slashdot's RSS feed to populate it with stories.

Despite anyone's ability to freely copy its content Slashdot still manages to make money. Maybe you could learn something.

"Why Movies Are Not Like Music"

[clang_jangle]

Uh -- because movies have pictures?

The most important sentence in the article:

[jrq]

On the other hand, it does have one tremendous weakness that doesn't afflict music: consumers often watch films only once.
Really, if anyone should be working on a system to enable on-demand viewing of their intellectual property it should be the movie industry.

Re:The most important sentence in the article:

[commodore64_love]

>>>to hear Kevin Spacey say, "I killed him." under his breath

And I watch Kevin Spacey's other movie over-and-over just so I can see him disrobe the hot cheerleader. Ahhhhh 16-year-old perfection.

(mutters)

I'm going straight to hell

Obvious difference

[spitzak]

An obvious difference is that people are interested in seeing a movie exactly once, and as soon as possible.

Music relies on people wanting to hear it multiple times and they are probably more interested in the music well after it exists. And complete knowledge of the contents of the music increases, rather than decreases, their desire to hear it.

Re:Obvious difference

[Ephemeriis]

An obvious difference is that people are interested in seeing a movie exactly once, and as soon as possible.

Music relies on people wanting to hear it multiple times and they are probably more interested in the music well after it exists. And complete knowledge of the contents of the music increases, rather than decreases, their desire to hear it.

Incorrect.

Completely wrong.

So wrong it makes me wonder where on Earth you came up with this idea.

In a lot of ways, a movie is like a novel. There are some you read through once, and then get rid of because they just aren't that amazing. There are some you have to re-read several times simply to understand them. And then there are the favorites that you keep coming back to year after year.

To claim that everyone is only interested in seeing a movie once, and that they're all basically disposable, is simply ignorant.

Sure, if you're talking about some generic action/horror movie aimed at teenfolk that's probably accurate. They're just looking for something to serve as background noise while they hang out with their friends. They'll go see it within days of the opening, they'll see it once, and they won't even pay much attention to it.

But then you've got the G/PG stuff aimed at little kids. You've obviously never witnessed a small child and their favorite movie. They'll drag you to the theater a dozen times while it is showing... They'll make you buy every single solitary piece of merchandise tied into the film... They'll need the DVD the day it becomes available... And they'll watch it over and over again, until the disc literally wears out.

Then you've got movies with some real substance to them. Things like Pulp Fiction. Movies where you literally notice something new each time you watch it. Movies that take multiple viewings to actually understand what is going on.

Then there are the quality movies that just don't get old. This will, of course, vary quite a bit depending on your personal preferences... But I don't know how many times I've watched Alien or Evil Dead II or Cannibal: The Musical.

Re:Obvious difference

[TheGratefulNet]

could it be...

that you're BOTH RIGHT?

ie, you've just demonstrated that each person has their own take on what form of entertainment works for them and makes them happy.

there IS no one-stop style that fits all.

some movies: watch once. others, watch many
some songs: listen once. others, listen many

people are different. wow. what a revelation.

Gaming,

[Icegryphon]

Do they get into the fact the people are wasting there time and entertainment budgets on gaming?
Can't go see a movie when you are busy playing CoD:MW2 or Tekken 6 or etc.
Also at 60$ a Crack you might be hurting for expendable cash.

Re:Gaming,

[Mr. DOS]

Let's work something out: a $60 game will get you what, hopefully 10+ hours of playtime? (Sidenote: oh how I long for days gone by when that would've been considered short...) That's less than $6/hour. Blu-ray discs are about $20; given a movie length of about 2 hours, that's around $10/hour - almost twice as expensive. On top of that, some multiplayer games

      --- Mr. DOS

Re:Gaming,

[Ephemeriis]

Let's work something out: a $60 game will get you what, hopefully 10+ hours of playtime? (Sidenote: oh how I long for days gone by when that would've been considered short...) That's less than $6/hour. Blu-ray discs are about $20; given a movie length of about 2 hours, that's around $10/hour - almost twice as expensive.

Exactly.

It is really hard to justify going to the movies these days. Our local theater charges roughly $12/ticket... So that's $24 for the wife and I. For roughly two hours of entertainment. And more often than not it really doesn't feel like we're getting our money's worth... Either the movie will be mediocre (if not completely disappointing) or the other patrons will be distracting or whatever.

Instead, we can wait a few months until it comes out on DVD and pick it up at Blockbuster for $5 or so... Or at a Redbox machine for $1... Or grab it on Pay-Per-View for $7... Or wait for Netflix to send it out... All of which dramatically lower the price and dramatically increase the chances of us enjoying ourselves (no annoying folks in the theater, etc.)

Or I can spend my money on a game instead... We used to have a couple WoW accounts going. $30 a month, for the two of us, for basically unlimited entertainment. Much cheaper than going to the movies or renting or anything else.

Disaggregation

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Perhaps the most important difference from the music business is that movies aren't amenable to "disaggregation" -- unlike CDs, which people stopped buying once they could get the individual songs they really wanted.

I stopped watching movies a few years ago, now all I watch are the trailers. They are free, you get 80% of the story, and it is always the best parts too. What's not to love?

Gloomy?

[Quiet_Desperation]

not to be totally gloomy about Hollywood's immediate future

Why would I even care? Seriously. I like movies, but if the big centralized studios vanished and we just had independent filmmakers left I don't think I'd shed any tears. I might actually welcome that just to see what happens.

Re:Gloomy?

[TheLuggage2008]

...if the big centralized studios vanished and we just had independent filmmakers left I don't think I'd shed any tears.

You say that now, but how are you going to feel when there are no big studios left to greenlight "Cheaper by the Dozen 3"?

Re:Gloomy?

[snspdaarf]

...if the big centralized studios vanished and we just had independent filmmakers left I don't think I'd shed any tears.

You say that now, but how are you going to feel when there are no big studios left to greenlight "Cheaper by the Dozen 3"?

Ecstatic?

PSN's video store

[Rik Sweeney]

I was horrified when I saw some of the prices on the PSN video store. £2.50 to rent Zoolander. In the UK, that film is on TV every other weekend and then DVD is probably onto £3.99. There's no way I'd rent that, much less fork out the £6.99 for the SD version.

That said, with proper 3D movies coming into play, I'm quite willing to still go to the cinema, sure I find the price quite high but if you haven't seen a 3D film yet I urge you to go and see one, it's very rare that I'm impressed with technology but this is something else.

Movies are definitely not like music, except it would be nice if you could download your favourite single episode of Family Guy, The Simpsons or The Big Bang Theory instead of having to fork for the box set (or can you already do this).

New physical music media?

[Mr. DOS]

The summary seems to suggest that audio needs a new physical format. Why? It's not like the so-called "musicians" of today want to make longer records (for which more storage would be necessary), and it's not like consumers want higher-quality audio, either - it's been repeatedly (although I wouldn't say conclusively) shown that most consumers can hear no problems with 128Kbps MP3's, and that they're perfectly happy with said bottom-of-the-barrel quality. CD's aren't great, but it's not as anybody's starving for something better (as opposed to video, where people seem to want constantly higher and higher resolution). Also - and I hate to say this, but - it seems as if the music industry is starting to "get" digital distribution which further negates the need for a new format (as opposed to the movie industry, who still totally less-than-three's physical distribution).

      --- Mr. DOS

Re:New physical music media?

[Lemmy Caution]

Funny how this is another difference between film and music. Popular music audiences don't really care about resolution or sound-quality - they generally want familiarity, reassurance, a sense that they're having fun and fitting in. (Adorno was right about this 70 years ago.) But when they see a film - and really, we're talking about the same people - they do what high visual resolution, excellent camera work (as they understand it), etc. Now, they may have really poor discrimination for quality in script-writing, in narratives, even in the finer aspects of cinematography - they may even be as entirely committed to cliches in film as they are in music - but they do respond positively to higher quality in the delivery medium.

said it before, am saying it again

[zmollusc]

1. Forget chasing 'pirates'. This will save a lot of expensive legal bills. Cut back drastically on advertising too, as you don't need to whip people up into a frenzy to get them to theatres in the first week.

2. Make film (Citizen Kane2, The Reckoning: starring Adam Sandler or something).

3. Make a VCD cut and make unlabelled cheapo vcd's. Using the economies of scale, sell these so cheap that the guys selling pirate vcd will buy from you rather than burn their own copies. Your margin is the difference between a bulk pressed cd and a small scale burned copy.

4. Simultaneously sell the film as a download for the same price as you get for the vcd. ...wait a few weeks

5. Make a nicer, longer dvd cut of the film and, again, sell these so cheap that the guys selling pirate dvd will buy from you rather than burn their own copies.

6. Sell the dvd cut of the film online at the same price as the DVD wholesale price. .... wait some more

7. Theatre release of film in lovely THX/35mm

8. Dvd/Bluray boxed sets with extra everything.
9. Laugh all the way to the bank (which then gambles half your money away and pays the other half to its CEO).

Re:said it before, am saying it again

[Ephemeriis]

It seems to me that this plan would be reliant on people actually wanting to watch the new releases after having seen the previous ones. You seem to assume that after watching the low-quality VCD, folks would want to watch the DVD... And after watching the DVD, they'd want to see the theatrical release and buy the boxed set.

The problem with this, of course, is that a lot of movies just aren't that good.

I could easily see this working for something like Kill Bill or Ghost Busters...

But I'm not certain that it would work for the majority of movies out there. I mean, I enjoyed The Hangover... But, having watched it on VCD or DVD, I really don't think I'd feel the need to see it in the theater. And I certainly wouldn't buy the boxed set. And that was a pretty fun movie.

Sure, if the popularity for the VCD is low you don't have to make a crapton of DVDs... And if the DVDs don't move you can just skip the theatrical release... But it seems to me that most of the money goes into producing the film itself - not duplicating it in various mediums. The money goes to paying actors, and lighting guys, and directors, and writers, and whoever else... Not to buying blank discs and celluloid.

So I'm really not certain you'd wind up making enough money to break even. I really think that with most of the crap coming out of Hollywood these days, most people would be content with a VCD or DVD. I don't think you'd really see all that many people showing up in the theater or buying the boxed set.

Re:said it before, am saying it again

[rcastro0]

> It seems to me that this plan would be reliant on people actually wanting to watch the new releases after having seen the previous ones.

No, I don't think you got the point. The point is that this plan would be reliant on people actually wanting to wait to watch the new release in their most preferred format.

I propose the following:
(1) People have only one chance to have a first impression of a movie.
(2) They can chose what that first impression is.
(3) They will chose the one that best satisfies them, within their cost/convenience/quality/social mix (for the occasion).

Therefore, they will pass the chance to watch a movie in a format that robs them the full experience it can give. You know what I am talking about. Any /. reader knows very well how to DL a free copy of a movie, right now, at this moment. He/she can pick between a quick download that will be trasfered to (an can be watched on) their cellphone screen. Or they can get the PSP version. Or the VCD version. Or the DVD version. Or the HD version. Yet... how many /.ers have stopped going to movie theaters because of that?

Myself, I don't have time to watch every movie. And the limited time I have, I will use to watch the best movies in the grandest way (at a movie theater, or at least in HD). I will not be wasting time with bad movies, nor wasting great movies with a tiny screen...

Another huge difference

[plastbox]

Also, one pretty significant difference between the two is the cost of production. Terminator 2 cost about $90 million and is 137 minutes long. That's $647.482 per minute. A typical album might contain an hour of music or so and can (despite what the MPAA wants you to believe) be produced for next-to-nothing*.

Of course, I am not taking into account all the last millennium issues with distribution and publicity. I'm talking about the costs of actually making a movie or album

*By "next-to-nothing" I mean that cost of time in a studio and a good mixer/sound technician is low enough that even unknown, new bands can pool their money and pay to have an album recorded quite easily.

Re:Another huge difference

[MadKeithV]

That's a nonsense argument. Movies can be made for next to nothing as well with a handheld camcorder. See "Blair Witch Project" and the like. Sure, those are lucky shots, but so are the bands that "make it" on a shoestring budget.

The amount of gear and expertise required to make a decent album with half a chance of making any money at all is more than you'd think.

Lots of bands are making cheap recordings, some of them are even good. But very, very few of them make any money off of it, let alone enough to live off it.

Jim Bob and Michelle Plus 18

[tepples]

how are you going to feel when there are no big studios left to greenlight "Cheaper by the Dozen 3"?

If Twentieth Century Fox dramatically scales back its operations, then the Gilbreths are going to have to shop their works to smaller studios, including those that use the medium of SWF serials rather than traditional feature films. But these studios will have to compete with reality TV: see Jon and Kate Plus 8 or 18 Kids and Counting or Table for 12 or the new series starring Nadya Suleman and her kids.

Re:WTF does NEED have to do with this?

[j00r0m4nc3r]

When you've got FTTH at home you get used to certain levels of image quality ...

Like getting used to the convenience of the automated ATM machine...