Archive for the 'Hollywood' Category

Poor box office on opening weekend for new Ben Stiller movie, ‘The Heartbreak Kid,’ is being blamed on the huge success of Halo 3, the third in the series of Halo video games by Microsoft Corp’s video game division.

Halo 3 sold $170 million in its first 24 hours of sales when it was launched on September 26, beating out previous record-holder movie Spiderman 3 for the title as biggest entertainment launch ever (of course Spidey 3 was a piece of crap, so it was just a matter of time). This shows how so NOT niche video games now are - they are going head to head with more traditional (read ‘dull’) forms of entertainment competing for the attention and pocket money of the fickle youths. And winning.

‘The Heartbreak Kid’ made $14million in its opening weekend, versus an expected $20-25million. And overall, box office receipts in October is down down down - it’s lowest level since 1999. Studio execs have been wondering aloud whether the success of Halo 3 can be blamed for the lackluster performance.

But we think there might be another explanation. Crap movies. Yes, Stiller’s movie (a project from the Farrelly brothers who worked with him on ‘Something Sticky About Mary’) just isn’t that good. The critics have panned it. If it was a good movie, the video game could wait a few hours. And there’s not much else out there to lure someone into the theater to kill a couple of hours on a Friday or Saturday night.
It’s all about content. And Bungie Studios, the newly independent studio that created the Halo series, got it right, while Dreamworks, the studio that produced the Stiller stinker, just didn’t .

So, movie men, ad people and anybody else in the content business, stop blaming external factors for your failures and start raising your quality standards. Then the people will come flooding back.

Another victory for consumer power yesterday. Digg.com, the world’s most popular technology news website and responsible for 1% of US Internet traffic, announced it would no longer edit stories containing a secret code that people can use to hack hi-def DVD discs. Scared of lawsuits from the big ol’ Entertainment Industry, up until yesterday Digg had been removing the offending code from its users posts. But this is content created by The People, for The People and said People didn’t like it when someone told them what they could and couldn’t write, and so revolted. “We are revolting!” they said. They deluged the website with thousands of posts, so much so that it collapsed under the weight.

Digg founder, Kevin Rose, saw the error of his ways and yesterday reversed his decision to edit the posts containg “the code,” and announced the people were more important than the smelly lawyers. He said in his post on the website: “You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.” And what’s more he stuck the code itself in his post. Now that, Kevin, is ballsy. But, really he had no choice. He realized a website that relies on user-generated content is nothing without its users and calculated he could still fend off any legal challenges. And, in doing so, he’s shown (though it took a while) he understands what is important and who has the real power now. Nice one, Kev, we dig that.

Exactly one week after Viacom said it was suing Google and YouTube for copyright infringement, two of Hollywood’s other big TV boys showed that there can be a different approach to tackling the Tube. Today NBC and NewsCorp announced they are joining forces to launch a website of professionally produced video content. What’s more they’re doing it with the distribution power of Yahoo!, AOL and MSN. And NewsCorp’s mighty MySpace is there to help with distribution. The partnership crows that they will be able to reach 96% of all US Internet users with this new, yet to be named, website.

A few observations about this deal:
1. Google must be thinking oh shit, there goes all the good stuff from the website we just sunk $1.65billion into.
2. For NBC and NewsCorp to form a partnership I guess they must have been pretty desperate not to have to rely on YouTube to keep the youngsters intersested in their content.
3. They are selling ad space and no doubt are offering it as part of a value-added package to TV advertisers and have a business model that works. They’ll probably be in profit quite quickly while YouTube won’t be for a long long time.
5. All the content will be professionally produced. This doesn’t show they have much faith in the consumer-produced stuff, which soon will be all that will remain on YouTube.
6. Viacom better jump in with NBC and NewsCorp or come up with an alternative plan soon or they’ll be looking like they missed the boat…again.
7. Marketers can experiment with both YouTube and the new website before they invest too heavily in either. That’s good, right.
8. If the content on the new site isn’t great and does not pique the interest of younger consumers in the same way that YouTube content does, they and then the advertisers will quickly say, nah forgeddit and move on. Professionally produced could end up being as bad as the shit on TV. Remember it’s not where the stuff is placed it’s how good it is.
9. Let’s hope they come up with a good name for it soon. Any suggestions? We’ll pass on the ones we like to NBC/NewsCorp. Our favorite so far is ScewYouTube, but see if you can beat it.

Or….Sumner Whine.

Today old man Sumner Redstone’s Viacom announced it was suing Google for $1billion for copyright infringement because of the 160,000 video clips posted “illegally” on YouTube, including shows from Viacom’s VH1, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central. According to Viacom’s legal claim, in the last six weeks since they asked YouTube to remove the more than 100,000 illegal clips of Viacom shows, over 50,000 more have popped up. Oops.

If this ever goes to court - Redstone is a grumpy old man with a big ego money to burn, so it just might - Google will be using the “safe harbor” defense from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 that basically says if users stick up content illegally and the company takes them down when asked, all is sweet. One commentator has likened the current law to “head shops” getting away with selling weird-shaped smoking pipes because, they say, they didn’t realize that the pipes might be used for smoking illicit substances (”Oh, that’s why the kids with funny beards bought them!”)

Of course it’s really about the fight of Old versus New. Old media conglomerates like Vicaom have been losing the battle for the teen and young adult audience, while those pesky upstarts like MySpace (Redstone is still bitter he missed out on buying that one to his much more tech-savvy rival Rupert Murdoch) and YouTube. Print publishers and authors have also been upset at Google’s quest to put all the information up on the web for free when it’s their content that is being put up there. And who can blame them. TV networks and writers (hell, I’m one!) spend time and money creating content and then Google lets people put it up there for all to see without paying for it.

The question that companies including Viacom have been wrestling with is whether it’s better to let YouTube show bits of its content for free and hope they benefit from the potential increase in viewers to the show it came from on the box; or, whether they the should retain complete control and make people come to the their own sites if they want to see stuff like South Park. There’s no easy answer. In fact since Viacom told youTube to pull all its content from YouTube a few weeks ago indications are that traffic to its own websites, showing clips of Jon Stewart’s show on Comedy Central for instance, have increased.

Not that Google’s made any money from having the illegal clips up on YouTube. But every one of the big media companies know that that will soon change. Google paid such a hefty price for YT last November ($1.65billion) because they saw where the eyeballs were going - to short online video clips - and know they should be able to monetize that interest through sponsored searches, the method that has made them the giant they now are.

There’s no telling how the battle will pan out. For sure Google will tighten up its technology so it’s easier for them and the media companies to track illegally posted content and pull it down. Meanwhile the big G will be scrambling to do some big deals with content owners before they, seeing Viacom’s move today, build their own sites to compete with YouTube.

But the end result will not be determined by big media deals and court cases, but by the consumers. They will seek out the content they want, and turn on companies - Google, Viacom or whoever - who don’t give it to them in the form they want it. The winners will be those that work out how to do this in the least bullshit way.

Meanwhile, I bet Chad Hurley and Steve Chen - the founders of YouTube - are glad they sold when they did, before the law suits started flooding in. Here’s to ya, boys!