film

A community-led database of video fingerprints

Introducing a proof-of-concept for a community-run database of rights ownership claims for both Creative Commons and Web Monetizable videos, matched with their ISCC fingerprints.

An open way to structure, set and pay out royalties, deferrals and profit-shares

RevenueSha.re is building an open source, community-driven system for precise and reliable automated revenue sharing for creators, non-profits, coops and collaborators.

Two reports for the EU Interreg-funded Irish, North-Irish & Scottish creative cluster project Honeycomb. The first looked at producers & market activity across animation, film & TV, music and interactive media; the second at the commissioners of content, across tourism, advertising & health/education.

“Staged financing must become the film business’s immediate goal.”
– Ted Hope, September 2013

Over a series of blog posts I’ve been looking at some challenges that film and documentary are dealing with online. In a conclusion to the series looking at what can be done, I explore the limits and opportunities around crowdfunding.

Not before time, the new year started with some promising news about selling films online. For the first time, the annual decline in DVD and Blu-ray sales in the US has been outstripped by the growth in digital sales, rentals and subscriptions. Home entertainment rose 0.7% in 2013 (PDF source). $6.5bn – over a third of total consumer spending – came from digital rental, retail and subscriptions, with download-to-own rising a hefty 48% on 2012.

The monopoly that created the independents that created the studios

Imagine having to pay a license fee every time you filmed something or screened your work. At the start of the 20th century, the Motion Picture Patent Company (MPPC) in America controlled patents around cameras, film and projectors, and demanded fees for anyone screening or filming anything.

Perhaps no sector has been more involved in shifting the debate around video piracy than the TV industry. It seemingly began in late 2006, nine months after Steve Jobs had sold Pixar to Disney, joined their board and become more involved in their operations. Disney co-chair Anne Sweeney declared at a conference that piracy was not simply a threat, but a competitor – that pirates competed on quality, price and availability.

There are only so many hours in the day. Take a look – if it’s not etched already in your film business memory – at the graph of cinema admissions in the UK following the launch of television. TV's arrival, peaking in the 50s, did not herald an end to people engaging with mass-market moving image – but it dramatically changed the platform and format for where they did that.

In 1997, Kevin Kelly in Wired Magazine set out twelve rules for the new economy. Rule five was the 'Law of Increasing Returns: Make Virtuous Circles – the idea that you could create positive ripples that self-sustain themselves: as a networked platform becomes useful, it gets users, therefore is more useful, so gets more users, ad infinitum.

In June 2008 Netribution Ltd won feasibility study funding to explore how to enhance the live experience of filmgoing. The project, Living Cinema, was run with Francis Morgan-Giles, Eelyn Lee Productions and Yuva, culminating in test performances at Thomas Tallis School in South London and the Star and Shadow Cinema in Newcastle.