I'm betting the overwhelming majority of people can't tell the difference except "louder".
I know, this is the challenge to anyone that would dare strive for excellence, the rest of the world is constantly trying to drag you back to mediocrity. Thus Netflix basically does the equivalent of delivering McDonalds to your house, and it's so convenient and cheap, people start telling themselves that only purists or dorks can tell the difference between McDonalds and Morton's prime rib.
Are you drunk? Do you know anybody who dresses up to go to the movies and meets people there? What is this, 1964?
By "dress up," of course I mean, get dressed at all and meeting people, instead of sitting in your living room watching Guardians of the Galaxy in a dirty Homestar Runner t-shirt while swiping through Tinder...
But, we don't give a crap about your revenue.
Yeah but the people who make the movies care about the revenue. The GP said that theaters were a dying business model, that's really not true.
The GP said "phone." Besides, your screen at home isn't as good and I guarantee you that unless you have $10,000 in acoustic treatment you don't have a theatrical sound experience -- I'm a sound designer so I'm a little partial to that, I admit.
You don't see any value in getting out of the house, getting dinner, meeting people, dressing up a little? I'm not being prescriptive, here, I'm not saying you people should pay more for a theater, I'm saying, flatly, that they do, that theaters are still a really competitive distribution platform, and the alternatives work but they don't generate the same revenue.
Mass market theaters will probably continue their decline but I'm not sure producers and distributors should significantly adjust their business models today. Particularly when the business models for streaming are much less favorable to producers and filmmakers, and much more favorable to middle men like Netflix. Netflix Accounting is a lot harder on writers and actors that Hollywood Accounting.
If this is true, how would it compare with the movie studios' usual "Hollywood Accounting" claims that films don't make back the money invested in them?
The difference between GAAP profit-and-loss and Hollywood Accounting has to do with contractual terminology. I you ever see a residuals statement you'll see that they never are structured in terms of revenue, profit and costs, they always use terms like "proceeds" and "expenses". A movie can profit on a GAAP basis but still never pay residuals (never "make money"), and on the other hand a movie can be a net loss but still be paying residuals. Wether a movie "makes money" and wether or not the director, actor and writers are getting their "back end" aren't really correlated, they're different things.
At the end of the day studios have some internal way of tracking wether or not a movie was "successful" but the economic performance of individual films is never tracked in a GAAP standard way, and that probably wouldn't be possible because of how producers and distribution companies share resources between films, how films are packaged... One of the reasons I'm skeptical of this factoid is because it probably comes from the top line of someone's residuals statement, and the fact is that residuals statements don't tell you if movies make money, they just tell you if your contract is paying yet.
The "Hollywood Accounting" meme is sorta true but it's also more than a little bit of propaganda from a few disgruntled screenwriters and their lawyers.
I think faster (and more complete) turnaround of announced content would definitely help, I also wonder if it would make sense to rethink some of the streaming assumptions -- like, why straightjacket yourself into the one hour episode format? Why not two hour episodes, but fewer of them?
I think the biggest factor is the insistence on releasing entire seasons at once, it's hard to produce a season of TV in under a year. I've worked on a few HBO miniseries and those only went around six episodes, but they were in production for over 6 months.
In case the incumbants haven't noticed by now, the millenial generation of moviegoers is perfectly willing to watch a new-release movie on a damn 3" cell phone screen with earbuds.
This sounds like market failure to me, particularly when the price differential between buying a new release on your phone and watching it in a theater is only a few bucks, as it is now. Like why would you want to pay $13 for a movie on your cellphone when going to the Arclight matinee is $16?
I guess it's more convenient but it's a little tragic when people don't have enough free time to leave the house to go to a movie theater, which is just about the lowest-impact social activity the western world has yet devised.
And content providers don't need a theater to make revenue.
I've been working in the movie business for 15 years or so, I'm in my thirties so I'm not a millennial but I get the arguments you're laying out. But we still live in a world where if your film can only find Internet distribution, it's a horrible failure that'll never make its budget back. I've worked on films with $300k budgets that were really good, and the on demand/Netflix/iTunes money just comes nowhere close to paying the budget. The promise of Internet distribution as a supplementary good to theatrical distribution is, at present, a fraud. People just aren't willing to pay the same amount for movies in their home as they are at a theater, expensive soda and all.
The only way it could work is by either crushing the budgets of all films down to a few hundred thousand dollars, or loading the movies with basically wall-to-wall advertising. (But let's not beat around the bush, the breaking of American film industry, and putting it under vassalage to Internet Venture Capitalists is a feature, not a bug, to some people.)
Streaming can't make a $200 million international opening, particularly on platforms like Prime and Netflix because...
Bottom line is incumbents better wake the hell up and smell what the single-serve k-cup generation is serving themselves.
If people were actually buying movies single-serve this wouldn't be half as bad a problem as it is. Right now most of the consumer money spent on streaming is spent at all-you-can-eat business models, like Netflix, where nothing is done to price-differentiate actual movies from the shittiest Asylum crap. Or to even price differentiate the act of watching a movie from not.
Netflix famously had their corpus of user preferences and tracking data, so they have really good metrics on exactly what they think people would like to see. Amazon does something different, they do pilots and then they solicit public votes and comment.
I think either have their strengths and weaknesses, Netflix's stuff is generally guaranteed to hit but their biggest product is effectively a reboot of an existing media property.
Just speaking for 2014... Birdman, Unbroken, American Sniper, Selma, Wild, Grand Budapest Hotel, Whiplash. All sequels and reboots? This was an amazing year for movies and it's really not that exceptional. There's a lot of crap too but 90% of everything is crap.
The big budget movies are usually franchises because franchises are the only way you can get half a billion dollars in box office. A lot of great movies are made every year. Judging Hollywood by Captain America sequels would be like saying Boeing only makes bombers.
I mean, these Amazon movies won't be "big" budget by any standard, either, probably no more than $50 million.
The incumbent film studios don't release many films for home streaming because they think people will have to go to the theater or buy the DVD.
The filmmakers would generally prefer theatrical, since it has the best reach, tends to present the work in the highest quality, and contractual royalties and residuals are most favorable to theatrical release.
The studios (the "producers" and production companies) are indifferent, they like making money off the movie wherever. They prefer theatrical because theatrical usually produces the most revenue but this isn't always true for all films.
The distribution companies would love to launch everything day-in-date, and they love streaming since they usually get a fatter cut of the revenue.
The theaters (the "theatrical exhibitors") are hell bent against day-in-date streaming because they believe they'll lose attendance to it. When a studio attempts to release a movie day-in-date on streaming or DVD, like Universal tried to do with Tower Heist, the theaters band together and refuse to release the movie. Theater chains generally won't agree to screen a film without a contractual blackout period.
I dunno. CoreImage kicks ImageMagick's pants. AVFoundation do half of what ffmpeg or libavconvert do but it's MUCH faster...
I know Apple is really paranoid about disk I/O and their APIs flush to disk more often, so people doing work with databases and datasets tend to see some problems. I got an SSD a year ago though and haven't looked back.
The package managers install software under/opt/, that's just where they put them.
OS X is as idiomatic about libraries, and tooling, and filesystem locations as any other commercial Unix (and I worked on SunOS and Irix in the day).
I've noticed this trend from the whole systemd controversy where everyone starts from the proposition that Linux is an ideal Unix, and that Linux works the way Unix Should Be and always did. This is not remotely the case, Linux is the oddball, and you shouldn't confuse your expectations as a Linux user with "UNIX standard" behavior.
Nit: If you want to be able to express yourself with Pro Tools in a way that requires the DSP cards, you'll be spending $2k on a Thunderbolt PCIe chassis.
Well, firstly, Navajo Code Talkers were only used for tactical communications, where the information had a half-life of minutes: directing fire, company-level movements, stuff like that.
The Japanese did actually kidnap a Navajo speaker at one point, and they tortured the shit out of him and forced him to listen to the radio to translate. He wasn't trained as a Code Talker, though, so all of the strange idioms and jargon didn't make any sense. So the Japanese tortured him some more and simply gave up trying to figure it out.
Navajo code was also used to a limited extent in WW1 in Europe, the Germans were a bit less obtuse and made a priority of sending German linguists to America in the 30s, to document all the American aboriginal languages.
Don't BT keyboards do a key exchange? They just use the passcode for initial identification, but the actual event stream is encrypted with a session public key.
If you turn on FileVault 2, the power-on and boot behavior of the system is also changed. External USB and Thunderbolt devices aren't mapped into the system until a valid user logs in. When the Mac boots to the login screen, only the keyboard, mouse, and the "main" display ports work; plugging stuff into the USB ports on the grey login screen doesn't work, they don't light up, the system doesn't access them, try it some time!
So, if a stranger has physical access to your machine, they won't be able to get a hacked Thunderbolt adapter to be recognized by the system just by turning it on, they'll have to have a login password as well. If you install a hacked Thunderbolt adapter and let it be connected during a firmware update, while you're logged in, you're screwed.
The US doesn't operate colonies like 19th century Britain (although it does have some outright colonial possessions like Puerto Rico and the Marshalls). The US operates an empire much more like 16th century Britain, where local control is maintained by friendly satraps who are nominally independent but do not exercise true sovereignty, and resources (mostly oil, but also cheap labor) are expropriated by factorist enterprises, nowadays called "corporations."
The thing that Pythagoras can be most accurately given credit for was the idea that ALL triangles, not just triangles with sides of integer relation, abided by the formula. Realizing this effectively posited that irrational numbers could exist. Everybody before that just worked in "triples" of integers.
The weird detail was that Pythagoras swore all his followers to secrecy about this fact, because he had a series of religious beliefs attached to integers and their ratios. He had at least one person killed for disclosong the existence of irrational numbers in public.
There was really only one Jewish Zombie, and he's really just an excuse to have a protracted discourse on Neo-Platonism.
Hinduism is a beautiful system of beliefs but strains of it can be REALLY overloaded with a lot of superstition and naturalistic garbage... Christianity has different problems- its idealism and anti-humanism for a start- but it's attachment to weird pseudoscience isn't generally one of them.
"The USA was a major force in dismantling colonialization. The exceptions to this seem to have been through the involvement of Wall Street anglophiles (or just plain agents of the British) "
Hmm. James Monroe, Teddy Roosevelt, William McKinley, William Randolph Hearst, General Pershing and Commodore Perry, all Anglophiles...
Ask the Spanish-speakers of the Western Hemisphere about the US commitment to anti-colonialism.
FileVault adds a bunch of secondary behaviors not related to the system drive. The advertised feature is system drive encryption, but it's effectively a "paranoia" mode for Macs.
When you're running FileVault, if no one is logged in, the machine will refuse to communicate with ANY attached external device, over thunderbolt or USB or anything else, but for one "main" display and the keyboard and mouse. Also the machine shuts itself down if it's left unattended with no one logged in for more than a few minutes. With FV enabled the machine takes on. bunch of hardware behaviors that essentially treat the entire external environment as hostile territory, until someone authenitcates.
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I know, this is the challenge to anyone that would dare strive for excellence, the rest of the world is constantly trying to drag you back to mediocrity. Thus Netflix basically does the equivalent of delivering McDonalds to your house, and it's so convenient and cheap, people start telling themselves that only purists or dorks can tell the difference between McDonalds and Morton's prime rib.
By "dress up," of course I mean, get dressed at all and meeting people, instead of sitting in your living room watching Guardians of the Galaxy in a dirty Homestar Runner t-shirt while swiping through Tinder...
Yeah but the people who make the movies care about the revenue. The GP said that theaters were a dying business model, that's really not true.
The GP said "phone." Besides, your screen at home isn't as good and I guarantee you that unless you have $10,000 in acoustic treatment you don't have a theatrical sound experience -- I'm a sound designer so I'm a little partial to that, I admit.
You don't see any value in getting out of the house, getting dinner, meeting people, dressing up a little? I'm not being prescriptive, here, I'm not saying you people should pay more for a theater, I'm saying, flatly, that they do, that theaters are still a really competitive distribution platform, and the alternatives work but they don't generate the same revenue.
Mass market theaters will probably continue their decline but I'm not sure producers and distributors should significantly adjust their business models today. Particularly when the business models for streaming are much less favorable to producers and filmmakers, and much more favorable to middle men like Netflix. Netflix Accounting is a lot harder on writers and actors that Hollywood Accounting.
The difference between GAAP profit-and-loss and Hollywood Accounting has to do with contractual terminology. I you ever see a residuals statement you'll see that they never are structured in terms of revenue, profit and costs, they always use terms like "proceeds" and "expenses". A movie can profit on a GAAP basis but still never pay residuals (never "make money"), and on the other hand a movie can be a net loss but still be paying residuals. Wether a movie "makes money" and wether or not the director, actor and writers are getting their "back end" aren't really correlated, they're different things.
At the end of the day studios have some internal way of tracking wether or not a movie was "successful" but the economic performance of individual films is never tracked in a GAAP standard way, and that probably wouldn't be possible because of how producers and distribution companies share resources between films, how films are packaged... One of the reasons I'm skeptical of this factoid is because it probably comes from the top line of someone's residuals statement, and the fact is that residuals statements don't tell you if movies make money, they just tell you if your contract is paying yet.
The "Hollywood Accounting" meme is sorta true but it's also more than a little bit of propaganda from a few disgruntled screenwriters and their lawyers.
I think the biggest factor is the insistence on releasing entire seasons at once, it's hard to produce a season of TV in under a year. I've worked on a few HBO miniseries and those only went around six episodes, but they were in production for over 6 months.
This sounds like market failure to me, particularly when the price differential between buying a new release on your phone and watching it in a theater is only a few bucks, as it is now. Like why would you want to pay $13 for a movie on your cellphone when going to the Arclight matinee is $16?
I guess it's more convenient but it's a little tragic when people don't have enough free time to leave the house to go to a movie theater, which is just about the lowest-impact social activity the western world has yet devised.
I've been working in the movie business for 15 years or so, I'm in my thirties so I'm not a millennial but I get the arguments you're laying out. But we still live in a world where if your film can only find Internet distribution, it's a horrible failure that'll never make its budget back. I've worked on films with $300k budgets that were really good, and the on demand/Netflix/iTunes money just comes nowhere close to paying the budget. The promise of Internet distribution as a supplementary good to theatrical distribution is, at present, a fraud. People just aren't willing to pay the same amount for movies in their home as they are at a theater, expensive soda and all.
The only way it could work is by either crushing the budgets of all films down to a few hundred thousand dollars, or loading the movies with basically wall-to-wall advertising. (But let's not beat around the bush, the breaking of American film industry, and putting it under vassalage to Internet Venture Capitalists is a feature, not a bug, to some people.)
Streaming can't make a $200 million international opening, particularly on platforms like Prime and Netflix because...
If people were actually buying movies single-serve this wouldn't be half as bad a problem as it is. Right now most of the consumer money spent on streaming is spent at all-you-can-eat business models, like Netflix, where nothing is done to price-differentiate actual movies from the shittiest Asylum crap. Or to even price differentiate the act of watching a movie from not.
Where did you see that?
Netflix famously had their corpus of user preferences and tracking data, so they have really good metrics on exactly what they think people would like to see. Amazon does something different, they do pilots and then they solicit public votes and comment.
I think either have their strengths and weaknesses, Netflix's stuff is generally guaranteed to hit but their biggest product is effectively a reboot of an existing media property.
Both processes seems sorta artist-hostile.
Just speaking for 2014... Birdman, Unbroken, American Sniper, Selma, Wild, Grand Budapest Hotel, Whiplash. All sequels and reboots? This was an amazing year for movies and it's really not that exceptional. There's a lot of crap too but 90% of everything is crap.
The big budget movies are usually franchises because franchises are the only way you can get half a billion dollars in box office. A lot of great movies are made every year. Judging Hollywood by Captain America sequels would be like saying Boeing only makes bombers.
I mean, these Amazon movies won't be "big" budget by any standard, either, probably no more than $50 million.
The filmmakers would generally prefer theatrical, since it has the best reach, tends to present the work in the highest quality, and contractual royalties and residuals are most favorable to theatrical release.
The studios (the "producers" and production companies) are indifferent, they like making money off the movie wherever. They prefer theatrical because theatrical usually produces the most revenue but this isn't always true for all films.
The distribution companies would love to launch everything day-in-date, and they love streaming since they usually get a fatter cut of the revenue.
The theaters (the "theatrical exhibitors") are hell bent against day-in-date streaming because they believe they'll lose attendance to it. When a studio attempts to release a movie day-in-date on streaming or DVD, like Universal tried to do with Tower Heist, the theaters band together and refuse to release the movie. Theater chains generally won't agree to screen a film without a contractual blackout period.
The vagus nerve is an important physiologically but it's not endowed with magical properties. Just saying.
I dunno. CoreImage kicks ImageMagick's pants. AVFoundation do half of what ffmpeg or libavconvert do but it's MUCH faster...
I know Apple is really paranoid about disk I/O and their APIs flush to disk more often, so people doing work with databases and datasets tend to see some problems. I got an SSD a year ago though and haven't looked back.
The package managers install software under /opt/, that's just where they put them.
OS X is as idiomatic about libraries, and tooling, and filesystem locations as any other commercial Unix (and I worked on SunOS and Irix in the day).
I've noticed this trend from the whole systemd controversy where everyone starts from the proposition that Linux is an ideal Unix, and that Linux works the way Unix Should Be and always did. This is not remotely the case, Linux is the oddball, and you shouldn't confuse your expectations as a Linux user with "UNIX standard" behavior.
Nit: If you want to be able to express yourself with Pro Tools in a way that requires the DSP cards, you'll be spending $2k on a Thunderbolt PCIe chassis.
Blender's timeline is probably the best video editor on Linux. And isn't that sad...
Well, firstly, Navajo Code Talkers were only used for tactical communications, where the information had a half-life of minutes: directing fire, company-level movements, stuff like that.
The Japanese did actually kidnap a Navajo speaker at one point, and they tortured the shit out of him and forced him to listen to the radio to translate. He wasn't trained as a Code Talker, though, so all of the strange idioms and jargon didn't make any sense. So the Japanese tortured him some more and simply gave up trying to figure it out.
Navajo code was also used to a limited extent in WW1 in Europe, the Germans were a bit less obtuse and made a priority of sending German linguists to America in the 30s, to document all the American aboriginal languages.
This rule is not suspended for the sake of China...
"Tesla To Produce 'a Few Million' Electric Cars a Year By 2025"
If man is still alive, if woman can survive...
Don't BT keyboards do a key exchange? They just use the passcode for initial identification, but the actual event stream is encrypted with a session public key.
If you turn on FileVault 2, the power-on and boot behavior of the system is also changed. External USB and Thunderbolt devices aren't mapped into the system until a valid user logs in. When the Mac boots to the login screen, only the keyboard, mouse, and the "main" display ports work; plugging stuff into the USB ports on the grey login screen doesn't work, they don't light up, the system doesn't access them, try it some time!
So, if a stranger has physical access to your machine, they won't be able to get a hacked Thunderbolt adapter to be recognized by the system just by turning it on, they'll have to have a login password as well. If you install a hacked Thunderbolt adapter and let it be connected during a firmware update, while you're logged in, you're screwed.
The US doesn't operate colonies like 19th century Britain (although it does have some outright colonial possessions like Puerto Rico and the Marshalls). The US operates an empire much more like 16th century Britain, where local control is maintained by friendly satraps who are nominally independent but do not exercise true sovereignty, and resources (mostly oil, but also cheap labor) are expropriated by factorist enterprises, nowadays called "corporations."
As an Angelino, I can assure you that many, many people still speak Spanish.
The thing that Pythagoras can be most accurately given credit for was the idea that ALL triangles, not just triangles with sides of integer relation, abided by the formula. Realizing this effectively posited that irrational numbers could exist. Everybody before that just worked in "triples" of integers.
The weird detail was that Pythagoras swore all his followers to secrecy about this fact, because he had a series of religious beliefs attached to integers and their ratios. He had at least one person killed for disclosong the existence of irrational numbers in public.
There was really only one Jewish Zombie, and he's really just an excuse to have a protracted discourse on Neo-Platonism.
Hinduism is a beautiful system of beliefs but strains of it can be REALLY overloaded with a lot of superstition and naturalistic garbage... Christianity has different problems- its idealism and anti-humanism for a start- but it's attachment to weird pseudoscience isn't generally one of them.
"The USA was a major force in dismantling colonialization. The exceptions to this seem to have been through the involvement of Wall Street anglophiles (or just plain agents of the British) "
Hmm. James Monroe, Teddy Roosevelt, William McKinley, William Randolph Hearst, General Pershing and Commodore Perry, all Anglophiles...
Ask the Spanish-speakers of the Western Hemisphere about the US commitment to anti-colonialism.
FileVault adds a bunch of secondary behaviors not related to the system drive. The advertised feature is system drive encryption, but it's effectively a "paranoia" mode for Macs.
When you're running FileVault, if no one is logged in, the machine will refuse to communicate with ANY attached external device, over thunderbolt or USB or anything else, but for one "main" display and the keyboard and mouse. Also the machine shuts itself down if it's left unattended with no one logged in for more than a few minutes. With FV enabled the machine takes on. bunch of hardware behaviors that essentially treat the entire external environment as hostile territory, until someone authenitcates.