Andrew Whittaker Mirrors Indiwire’s Coverage of Tribeca Indi Film Dist Panel
Indiwire’s coverage of my Tribeca panel was mirrored by Andrew Wittaker in a 3 part series. Here’s Part 3 but you can go back to part 1 & 2. I’m in tip 6 & 9. Enjoy.
Snag Films Overview in Fortune Magazine
Every blog becomes a cinema
Leonsis-backed start-up wants users, not studios, to distribute documentaries.
NEW YORK (Fortune) — Former AOL executive Ted Leonsis was frustrated: He’d produced a critically acclaimed documentary called Nanking, a film that looked at some Westerners who had protected Chinese civilians during a brutal, six-week attack by the Japanese army in 1937. But he was pretty sure the film, which premiered in 2007 at the Sundance Film Festival, would reach a relatively small audience.
Only a few hundred movie theaters in the U.S. will even show documentaries, and even those cinemas don’t always give non-fiction films prime spots on their schedules. Distribution is a source of aggravation for many documentarians.
Unlike most filmmakers, though, Leonsis, who stepped down from day-to-day management at AOL at the end of 2006, had the wherewithal to do something about the situation. Last year he launched SnagFilms, a company that aims to distribute documentary films via the Internet. But rather than just stream its library of 650 titles through the SnagFilms site, the company is enabling portals, news sites and individual fans to share the movies through their own Web sites, blogs, Facebook home pages and other sites.
“Everyone talks about user-generated content,” says Leonsis, who also is majority owner of NHL’s Washington Capitals. “Let’s talk about a new category called user-distributed content,”
Leonsis’ Nanking, which will be available online for the first time Memorial Day weekend, is the centerpiece of an 10-film slate Snag is presenting during the holiday; each of the movies commemorates the heroism of soldiers and civilians during periods of war and conflict.
For films released in theaters Snag provides an opportunity for the documentaries to find new audiences. A blogger who is writing about alcohol abuse on college campuses, for example, might seek to embed in her blog a Snag video player that shows the movie Haze, a look at a drinking-related hazing incidents.
Filmmakers who make their movies available to Snag benefit in a few ways: For each film it includes a “Buy DVD” button that takes a viewer immediately to the documentarian’s DVD distributor. Leonsis contends that many Snag users will only watch a portion of the film via the Internet, and that true fans will end up purchasing the film to watch on their home televisions.
Snag also sells advertising in the documentaries, and splits the ad revenue with the filmmakers. “We are writing checks to filmmakers every quarter,” Leonsis says. “They’re not always big, sometimes as small as $20 but sometimes more than $1,000.”
Finally Snag offers users a chance to make an online donation to a cause of the documentary maker’s choosing.
But for most directors who work with Snag, the main benefit is the opportunity to reach more people. “Filmmakers have never had this kind of opportunity before,” says Steven C. Barber, whose film, Return To Tarawa, is part of Snag’s Memorial Day slate. “I can get my film to every single country this way.”
Barber’s film has already run on Discovery’s Military Channel, and many of the films in Snag’s library have traveled a fairly conventional path for documentaries (film festival, theatrical or television premiere, DVD) before landing at Snag. But Snag CEO Rick Allen says the company is looking for more documentaries to launch on Snag, a concept that would upend the traditional theatrical distribution model.
(Entrepreneur Mark Cuban has also sought to disrupt theatrical release windows, showing films on his HDNet Movies channel two days before the film appears in theaters.)
Allen says it is too early to know if Snag’s Internet-distribution efforts will cause major movie studios to think differently about their current models, but he does believe the film industry will go through lots of experimentation in the coming years.
“I think everybody believes that digital distribution is the wave of the future and they’re all trying to figure our how it affects content delivery and content creation,” Allen says. “I think people in large media organizations have seen the success of something like Hulu and its broadened people’s ideas about how to get content out there and consumed.” To top of page
Discussion on Web 3.0 from an Advertisers Perspective
For all of you just beginning to understand Web 2.0, now Web 3.0 is on the horizon. Some arguments from an advertising perspective.
In Web 3.0 We Trust — or Not
Why We Need a Return to the Human Side of Things
Posted by Judy Shapiro on 05.18.09 @ 12:00 PM
The Web 3.0 conference is about to kick off on May 19 in New York. No doubt it will be well attended by anyone wanting to see what’s “bleeding edge.” After all, Web 2.0 is so “done.”
Well aside from the general lack of understanding about what Web 3.0 is exactly, there is a befuddling mix of technologies all competing for a stake in this still unformed, Jell-o-like confection. I think it is safe to say that at a 50,000-foot view, the general consensus is that Web 3.0 is about making the web a more personal web.
Beyond that yellow brick road of a concept, paths diverge wildly. You’ve got Tim Berners-Lee talking about the Next Web being about linked data. And then you have the semantic technology advocates working on contextually intelligent search engines. The Google juggernaut is creating intelligent search agents that act as your digital butler — dutifully and efficiently learning your habits to serve faithfully and without complaint. (I have fun imagining digital versions of the butlers from the BBC series “Upstairs, Downstairs” sans the British accent.) Who wouldn’t want an internet that can anticipate my needs, understand my meaning and even allow me to find information better than ever?
But there’s a proverbial fly in this digital ointment and it is betrayed by the very name “Web 3.0.” It is paradoxical that the name, which is suited to a software release, is being used to metaphorically define a web that is meant to let us express our humanity. The irony of it all is rich.
If it were just a paradox, it would be an interesting intellectual thought experiment. But there’s more at stake here. Web 3.0 clearly tells us what is driving the next generation web — technology. I respectfully submit that if this future web is focused on technology alone, it can not succeed. What is required in equal measure to the technology is the introduction of the human element of trust. The internet is a digital society governed by the same principles as in the real world. Trust is the glue that holds societies together, and this is true of the web world, too. No doubt creating an intelligent web is cool, but without the foundation of trust Web 3.0 will be built on pillars of sand.
“Wait a minute,” I hear many of you thinking. “Who says I can’t trust the web? I do my banking online. I send e-mail. The web is plenty trustworthy — thank you very much. But offer me an internet that can show me how to buy that pimped-up iPhone and I’m there.”
That kind of thinking is exactly the problem. As Melih Abdulhayoglu, CEO of Comodo, a leading internet security company has said, “Technology adoption tends to ignore the human element until there is some disastrous trigger event that forces us to introduce protections around these new technologies.” How many times do people using Twitter have to be hit with a virus? Or how many social profiles have to get compromised before the industry takes note?
Well Web 3.0 runs the same risk, because as our dependence on the internet grows, a lack of trust will unravel any or all of the marvelous innovations being conceived now. What good is more linked data when we have no idea which data to trust? Wouldn’t you rather get a product recommendation from a trusted friend than a “paid” digital butler, ah, I mean agent?
You get the idea and this just touches the tip of the iceberg. As we explore how to create a technologically advanced web, we must marry that to the human factor of trust. It is not an either/or proposition but the ying/yang of the internet. One can not have technological innovation without being able to trust. Nor can one develop the “smarter” web without introducing the Trusted Web. We must consider seriously how to transfer this trust infrastructure to the web world with new technologies around authentication, privacy, ID management and security (and OpenID ain’t the answer folks).
Since I would never, ever place my trust on just technology alone, I am lobbying to rename the whole Web 3.0 sha-bang to the Trusted Web. This places the emphasis where it belongs, on the human element, and this is how the web can evolve to a personal web.
Do I have a shot?
(By the way — other ideas for the name of next-gen web would be cool too.)
~ ~ ~
Judy Shapiro is senior VP at Paltalk and has held senior marketing positions at Comodo, Computer Associates, Lucent Technologies, AT&T and Bell Labs. Her blog, Trench Wars, provides insights on how to create business value on the internet.
Social Media Backlash?
Here’s an article from ZD Net about customers getting overloaded with social media marketing. Food for thought. The author is Oliver Marks.
There appears to be a fully fledged backlash against ’social media’ marketing emerging, with commentary in both areas you’d expect and in places you might not.
This is tough on the people who have solid foundations for what marketing messaging is all about, and who are doing good things with modern technologies around the age old concepts of marketing ‘conversations’ or word of mouth.
10 years ago the ClueTrain Manifesto put forward ninety five theses essentially expanding on the following proposal:
“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.”
The ClueTrain Manifesto was written in the era of email and mailing lists, news groups, chat/instant messaging and of course Web Pages (it was conceived during the height of the dot com boom). Read more
Clue Train Manifesto for Filmmakers
The Oliver Marks post from yesterday pointed me to the Clue Train Manifesto that I had never heard of. I’ve taken the liberty to repost it here (you can click on the link and sign the manifesto):
if you only have time for one clue this year, this is the one to get…
Online Markets…
Networked markets are beginning to self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally served them. Thanks to the web, markets are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most business organizations.
…People of Earth
The sky is open to the stars. Clouds roll over us night and day. Oceans rise and fall. Whatever you may have heard, this is our world, our place to be. Whatever you’ve been told, our flags fly free. Our heart goes on forever. People of Earth, remember.
95 Theses
Signers & Comments
1. Markets are conversations.
2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.
6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
7. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
Read more
