The Concept of Free Movies Gets No Free Ride

I will admit. I am really not yet buying into all the hype about free streaming for feature length narrative films. Shorts, I can understand, even no budget documentaries, but narratives right now seem a little less promising. Number one, if you really research the blogs and articles about streaming online movies for free, they read fairly well. It even is awe inspiring and has a knack for pumping the artist/businessman full of enthusiasm. But if you read down further at the comments from most of the actual viewers, the actual consumers, and (hopefully) the potential customer, one thing reads loud and clear: They Dont Want to Watch Full Length Movies on Their Computer. I'm sorry folks. But the people who you want to eventually purchase your special features DVD don't want to watch the film online to begin with. And isn't business about listening to what the consumer wants or doesn't? What else do we have to go by when it comes to supply and demand?

On Demand is pretty popular - on TELEVISION. I know not long ago Mary Bronstein's YEAST stream online for 3 whole days (at least) and racked up thousands of views. Yet I am still curious to see how many DVDs she was able to sell afterwards. So yes friends, as a producer I know I should be "ahead of the curve." But I'm man enough today to admit I am not there yet. I'm sorry.

That being said, for nearly ever other industry, this new model seems to make sense to me. Free content like Google, Yahoo, etc, are free business models. Everything is free. Yet they are a billion dollar company.

One difference between free Google, and free Yahoo though (besides 10 or more 0's in their yearly profit statements) and some 25-year-old technical wiz kid who made the latest no budget relationship comedy - Google and Yahoo receive billions from advertising. There needs to be a way for artists to make money from ad space before this makes perfect sense to me. Or at least, one success story from someone who was dead broke before they put their feature online, and year or two later (or less of course), has either made enough money to make another movie, or at the very least, enough to pay back all of his friends and family that gave him free resources, free labor, or free face time in this film.

For now, check out this scathing and entertaining review by Malcolm Gladwell from the New York Times of Chris Anderson's new book Free, after the jump.




"At a hearing on Capitol Hill in May, James Moroney, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told Congress about negotiations he’d just had with the online retailer Amazon. The idea was to license his newspaper’s content to the Kindle, Amazon’s new electronic reader. “They want seventy per cent of the subscription revenue,” Moroney testified. “I get thirty per cent, they get seventy per cent. On top of that, they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device.” The idea was that if a Kindle subscription to the Dallas Morning News cost ten dollars a month, seven dollars of that belonged to Amazon, the provider of the gadget on which the news was read, and just three dollars belonged to the newspaper, the provider of an expensive and ever-changing variety of editorial content. The people at Amazon valued the newspaper’s contribution so little, in fact, that they felt they ought then to be able to license it to anyone else they wanted. Another witness at the hearing, Arianna Huffington, of the Huffington Post, said that she thought the Kindle could provide a business model to save the beleaguered newspaper industry. Moroney disagreed. “I get thirty per cent and they get the right to license my content to any portable device—not just ones made by Amazon?” He was incredulous. “That, to me, is not a model.”

Had James Moroney read Chris Anderson’s new book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” (Hyperion; $26.99), Amazon’s offer might not have seemed quite so surprising. Anderson is the editor of Wired and the author of the 2006 best-seller “The Long Tail,” and “Free” is essentially an extended elaboration of Stewart Brand’s famous declaration that “information wants to be free.” The digital age, Anderson argues, is exerting an inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things “made of ideas.” Anderson does not consider this a passing trend. Rather, he seems to think of it as an iron law: “In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.” To musicians who believe that their music is being pirated, Anderson is blunt. They should stop complaining, and capitalize on the added exposure that piracy provides by making money through touring, merchandise sales, and “yes, the sale of some of [their] music to people who still want CDs or prefer to buy their music online.” To the Dallas Morning News, he would say the same thing. Newspapers need to accept that content is never again going to be worth what they want it to be worth, and reinvent their business. “Out of the bloodbath will come a new role for professional journalists,” he predicts, and he goes on:"

Read the full Review HERE.

- Princeton