Morgan Freeman, not just a great actor
Jul 7, 2005 Internet, Music & Entertainment
Freeman Bringing Films to Net ( Wired News / Katie Dean )
From the article: “Oscar-winning actor Morgan Freeman is teaming up with Intel to launch an online movie-download site that aims to pull users away from illegal downloads of first-run films.
[..]
“We’re going to bypass what the music industry had to come up with, and that’s to get ahead of the whole piracy thing,” Freeman told reporters at Sun Valley after making his presentation, which was closed to the press.”
Apparently Morgan Freeman has been busy setting up ClickStar, a company which aims to make new release movies available for download while they are still showing at the cinema. He wants to make it easier to buy a download of the movie than to pirate one. I think the determining factor on whether this will work or not is how much the movie will cost relative to the quality of the video.
DVD sales slowing down
Jul 6, 2005 Media & Advertising
End of the DVD Party? ( Business Week / Ronald Grover )
From the article: “Now small but troubling signs are emerging that the DVD market’s growth could be trailing off faster than Hollywood expected. On June 30, Pixar Animation Studios cut its earnings-per-share estimate for the second quarter to 10 cents from 15 cents, due to slower-than-expected DVD sales of its blockbuster The Incredibles. The stock of Dreamworks Animation dropped sharply in mid-May, after the studio reported that returns of its own blockbuster Shrek 2 left sales 5 million short of its forecasts.”
Although the article is from the US, I noticed a lot of unsold Shrek 2 and Incredibles DVD when strolling through shops in Melbourne as well. With the number of cinema goers declining it will be interesting to see how the movie execs will react to this. No doubt they will want to blame piracy, and this would certainly be a factor, but probably not as big as the studios would have you believe.
Net TV on the way
Jul 5, 2005 Internet, Media & Advertising
Net TV poised to make the switch ( The Age / Graeme Philipson)
From the article: “When TV stations start to broadcast over the internet there will be no need for pay TV. Pay TV succeeds because it uses a proprietary broadcast network, based on satellite or cable, as its transmission medium. It controls who can receive the signal by controlling the technology.
When any TV station can broadcast over the internet and anybody with a high enough bandwidth Internet connection can receive it, pay TV will cease to exist. Like the BBC black box, it is an interim technology. I give it 10 years, which means Foxtel might become profitable at about the same time its technology becomes redundant.”
There are some limited forms of internet tv around currently but the quality is too low for regular consumers to bother with. The rollout of ADSL2+ and other high bandwidth tail connections will encourage people to experiment more with streaming video, which should in turn drive further developments in that area. As the article hints at, pay tv only works because the provider has exclusive access to the delivery medium. Once high quality content is available over the internet the pay tv operator’s current infrastructure advantage will turn into a liability.