Dive into the archives.
- This Website is Not Yet Rated - Can the MPAA regulate internet trailers?
Over at Films.com, Christine Champ has an interesting article about the MPAA’s successful efforts to force Kevin Smith to take down a “red band” trailer of his film Zack and Miri Make a Porno from his own website. Alex Billington at FirstShowing.net goes into more detail, explaining that as a signatory of the MPAA (though not a member), the Weinstein Co. must follow certain rules related to trailers. Of course, they can make up whatever rules for members they want, in theory, but the idea that the MPAA can regulate a basically ungovernable region seems… [more]
- Caachi Vidget snags trailer sharing
Snag Films has been out for a bit now, and I’m not sure how they are doing, though I have noticed Snag-related stories and promotion around the internets. When they launched, I wrote to them to suggest using the technology for trailers as well as full-length films. For me, the chance of making money in a scheme where revenues are tied to people watching the whole film (Snag monetizes the films with a series of interstitial ads, and the filmmaker gets something like $.10 if the viewer watches the whole film) and this is a streaming situation, even… [more]
- Here Comes… Trouble?
Clay Shirky’s new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations is not specifically about media distribution (it’s more generally about how social networks and their emergence on the internet have affected culture and business development) but it does deliver this metaphor:When reproduction, distribution, and categorization were all difficult, as they were for the last five hundred years, we needed professionals to undertake these jobs, and we properly venerated these people for the service they performed. Now these tasks are simpler, and the earlier roles in some cases have become optional, and are sometimes obstacles… [more]
- Crash Course
As we’ve moved increasingly into mobile technologies, English teachers have been aghast at the trend of shorter, even micro communiques with questionable spelling and grammar that have all but made the elegant postal letter obsolete.Cinema studies grads may be the next to gasp. If When the Internet and Film Collide is the guide to the new film ouvre, ‘mobile cinema’ looks a lot like what we formerly called a “promo clip”. On mobile, attention spans are short and pixels are few. Even on laptops with giant 14″ screens, on services such as MySpace or YouTube, viewers… [more]
