DVDs, Home Theatres and the death of quality in Hollywood
We are our own worst enemies at times
from 
JoeUser Forums
JoeUser Forums
Was just reading and conversing a bit at another site I frequent. A discussion there revolved around the film Serenity (recently released, great SciFi / Action / Adventure film, well worth the price of admission for *anyone*) and the news found here: http://www.thefutoncritic.com/cgi/newswire.cgi?id=7009 which notes the following (and more):
FIREFLY (FOX) - USA has purchased the broadcast rights to "Serenity," the feature film continuation of FOX's short-lived series "Firefly," from NBC Universal Domestic Television. The deal, valued in the $3 million range, will give the cable channel the non-exclusive rights to broadcast the film beginning in May of 2008, when HBO's initial window expires. Not surprisingly, USA has the option to air "Serenity" on cable sibling Sci Fi, the current home to "Firefly's" off-network run.
That news solicited the following reply from one of the people participating in the conversation:
I MAY see it on the bigscreen, but, with a great home theater setup, and the price of tickets at or exceeding $10, I may just wait for the DVD instead. I think many are thinking the same as I.
I left some of the following as my reply:
In case you haven't heard, there are these things called "matinees" where prices are much less.
And btw, if you want to hope to ever see additional installments of adventures in the Firefly/Serenity 'verse, then the box office is important, and just getting the DVD isn't that much help.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again - the movie deserves to be seen on the big-screen. It is that good, and worth every penny of the full fare, never mind discounted fare you might catch by seeing an early movie on a weekend versus going to the full priced evening and late nite shows.
And I'd also say again it's worth getting the biggest bucket of popcorn for. It's got great action, good characters, great dialog, humor in just the right spots, and keeps you in your seat well entertained. It beat the crap outta any of the 3 Star Wars "pre-quels" and beats the crap outta the last several Star Trek flicks.
Even most main stream reviewers have given the film good marks, which is great for Joss Whedon. Sadly those reviewers haven't been paying for tickets though, and the people that have read the reviews haven't shown up in droves because many seem to be like the poster I'm quoting above -- waiting for DVDs so they can see stuff on their own personal home theatre, rather than paying high prices to theatres.
I continued a bit with some additional thoughts that I'm gonna expound on further here, hopefully it will be worthy of discussion among others.
Theatres in general are losing business like crazy because of this tectonic shift in the way customers view Hollywood products. Perhaps it's the over-priced popcorn, the long lines for concession stands, the 30+ minutes of advertisements and other crap shown before movies in some theatres, and the high-prices for tickets, but either way people are not going to theatres the way they used to, and the future of content of Hollywood may suffer greatly because of it.
Instead of being able to use somewhat reliable ticket sales numbers to justify future movie budgets, there will be much more guess work in the future, and maybe more "straight to video releases". That could be fine, but it could also lead to complete and total crap being released and good quality films being left un-made because they would be too expensive to make and market.
Hollywood has good reason to be concerned over the future of their products and their market. They are, even now, trying to get a piece of the Ipod Video pie, having seen the news this past week that promises the ability of customers to buy content on a Video Ipod, including (reportedly) hot content like the current TV hit Lost, or Desperate Housewives.
Entertainment Weekly in a fairly current edition talks about how Video killed the radio star and at the same time made almost as many stars -- including making an empire for the MTV networks. Record companies used to give away their products in the name of self promotion, hoping to help drive sales of records and later CDs. They saw that their products were used to make MTV and VH1 and their TV personalities much money in the process. It may have helped sell those records and CDs, but video sales (at least initially) were minimal thanks to high prices for video equipment (VCR's used to be toys of the rich, as DVDs were just a few years ago) and also high prices for video tapes (thanks in part to Hollywood trying to reap large amounts of money for sales of videos and video tapes of their products).
Hollywood hung onto high prices for years, almost until the death of the VCR. They cried over people using VCRs to record their broadcast content, and content that was sent over cable into people's homes. When they finally realized that there was a market for selling their content when it was fairly priced for home consumption, it was too late to rake in a lot of lost profits. Their reduced pricing which originally came partly from experimenting with prices hoping to perhaps draw in just a few more sales showed that a market existed, but only if prices were in the right range.
Over time Hollywood has found customers for their older content, releasing even old (classic) TV shows on DVD. A format that would seem to be perfect for Hollywood, given that it's fairly high quality, but is recorded on a write protected and copy protected media. The only problem was that the copy protections were broken thanks to industrious hackers that really only ever wanted the ability to play the discs on other operating systems that didn't have players because Hollywood didn't see a market there, and perhaps didn't want to piss off their technology partners like Microsoft and Apple. Now the protections are mere nuisances for those that want to make copies of the discs, and that in turn may have helped to force down pricing even more as Hollywood has struggled to keep prices at a level that make the value of the time involved in copying a disc seem more valuable than the actual cost of a new release.
Along the way consumer electronics firms have helped to provide more and better entertainment equipment to us, the home consumers. Though prices have been high in the past, the race to bring more customers to the products has also seen prices dropped to entice customers, and then later competitors also started dumping their products into the market as well, causing a race to drop prices even more to shore up market share.
Now we have very high-tech equipment for home theatres. Large hi-definition televisions, wide screen TVs, progressive scan DVD players, Dolby sound systems, and much more. And we do continue to crave content to watch on the equipment. More content than just live sporting events like the NFL, MLB, the NBA and others. Movies, TV shows and much more.
The problem has become, though, that Hollywood can't quite predict the content we want so well any more. Where it used to be easy for a pay network like HBO to know what were blockbuster films and would please their customers, the numbers of viewers for films in theatres has dropped and continued to drop as more people have stayed home watching content on their hi-tech toys. That would seem fine as Hollywood would seem to be losing viewers in theatres to viewers at home, but at the same time the number of choices in channels over cable and satellite has led to lower and lower viewership for all individual content providers (it may be near the same total amount of viewers, but the depth of viewers for each channel is much lower, consider it a very large and very shallow pool).
Again, these lower numbers hurt Hollywood because there's so much competition for us (the viewers and consumers) that prices have to be kept down everywhere in the hopes of maximizing returns on what little money is spent to produce the content.
I fear that in the next several years the neighborhood megaplex may go much the same way as the old neighborhood drive-in movies. It happened a bit before when the old (smaller screen) megaplexes were consolidated and eventually replaced with the new mega-megaplexes with huge screens, large and luxurious lobbies, stadium seating and more enticements. Unfortunately those enticements haven't kept us, the consumers, coming. We've grown tired of paying money to the theatres who pay the money to spoiled stars in Hollywood, and it leaves less empirical evidence for the content providers over what content we really want in the future.
Will the content we get in the future be lesser quality stuff like the reality TV shows that fill our air-waves now, or will it be more along the lines of some of the shows that have helped Hollywood enjoy a bit of a renaissance (with shows like Lost, Desperate Housewives, Prison Break, etc.)? It's up to us to decide, and part of how we decide is via ticket sales at theatres when quality films like Serenity are out in first run.
I'll just say again, go see the movie in the theatres. It's that good. (And save some $$ to get the DVD later also. It will undoubtedly be worth the $$ also).
FIREFLY (FOX) - USA has purchased the broadcast rights to "Serenity," the feature film continuation of FOX's short-lived series "Firefly," from NBC Universal Domestic Television. The deal, valued in the $3 million range, will give the cable channel the non-exclusive rights to broadcast the film beginning in May of 2008, when HBO's initial window expires. Not surprisingly, USA has the option to air "Serenity" on cable sibling Sci Fi, the current home to "Firefly's" off-network run.
That news solicited the following reply from one of the people participating in the conversation:
I MAY see it on the bigscreen, but, with a great home theater setup, and the price of tickets at or exceeding $10, I may just wait for the DVD instead. I think many are thinking the same as I.
I left some of the following as my reply:
In case you haven't heard, there are these things called "matinees" where prices are much less.
And btw, if you want to hope to ever see additional installments of adventures in the Firefly/Serenity 'verse, then the box office is important, and just getting the DVD isn't that much help.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again - the movie deserves to be seen on the big-screen. It is that good, and worth every penny of the full fare, never mind discounted fare you might catch by seeing an early movie on a weekend versus going to the full priced evening and late nite shows.
And I'd also say again it's worth getting the biggest bucket of popcorn for. It's got great action, good characters, great dialog, humor in just the right spots, and keeps you in your seat well entertained. It beat the crap outta any of the 3 Star Wars "pre-quels" and beats the crap outta the last several Star Trek flicks.
Even most main stream reviewers have given the film good marks, which is great for Joss Whedon. Sadly those reviewers haven't been paying for tickets though, and the people that have read the reviews haven't shown up in droves because many seem to be like the poster I'm quoting above -- waiting for DVDs so they can see stuff on their own personal home theatre, rather than paying high prices to theatres.
I continued a bit with some additional thoughts that I'm gonna expound on further here, hopefully it will be worthy of discussion among others.
Theatres in general are losing business like crazy because of this tectonic shift in the way customers view Hollywood products. Perhaps it's the over-priced popcorn, the long lines for concession stands, the 30+ minutes of advertisements and other crap shown before movies in some theatres, and the high-prices for tickets, but either way people are not going to theatres the way they used to, and the future of content of Hollywood may suffer greatly because of it.
Instead of being able to use somewhat reliable ticket sales numbers to justify future movie budgets, there will be much more guess work in the future, and maybe more "straight to video releases". That could be fine, but it could also lead to complete and total crap being released and good quality films being left un-made because they would be too expensive to make and market.
Hollywood has good reason to be concerned over the future of their products and their market. They are, even now, trying to get a piece of the Ipod Video pie, having seen the news this past week that promises the ability of customers to buy content on a Video Ipod, including (reportedly) hot content like the current TV hit Lost, or Desperate Housewives.
Entertainment Weekly in a fairly current edition talks about how Video killed the radio star and at the same time made almost as many stars -- including making an empire for the MTV networks. Record companies used to give away their products in the name of self promotion, hoping to help drive sales of records and later CDs. They saw that their products were used to make MTV and VH1 and their TV personalities much money in the process. It may have helped sell those records and CDs, but video sales (at least initially) were minimal thanks to high prices for video equipment (VCR's used to be toys of the rich, as DVDs were just a few years ago) and also high prices for video tapes (thanks in part to Hollywood trying to reap large amounts of money for sales of videos and video tapes of their products).
Hollywood hung onto high prices for years, almost until the death of the VCR. They cried over people using VCRs to record their broadcast content, and content that was sent over cable into people's homes. When they finally realized that there was a market for selling their content when it was fairly priced for home consumption, it was too late to rake in a lot of lost profits. Their reduced pricing which originally came partly from experimenting with prices hoping to perhaps draw in just a few more sales showed that a market existed, but only if prices were in the right range.
Over time Hollywood has found customers for their older content, releasing even old (classic) TV shows on DVD. A format that would seem to be perfect for Hollywood, given that it's fairly high quality, but is recorded on a write protected and copy protected media. The only problem was that the copy protections were broken thanks to industrious hackers that really only ever wanted the ability to play the discs on other operating systems that didn't have players because Hollywood didn't see a market there, and perhaps didn't want to piss off their technology partners like Microsoft and Apple. Now the protections are mere nuisances for those that want to make copies of the discs, and that in turn may have helped to force down pricing even more as Hollywood has struggled to keep prices at a level that make the value of the time involved in copying a disc seem more valuable than the actual cost of a new release.
Along the way consumer electronics firms have helped to provide more and better entertainment equipment to us, the home consumers. Though prices have been high in the past, the race to bring more customers to the products has also seen prices dropped to entice customers, and then later competitors also started dumping their products into the market as well, causing a race to drop prices even more to shore up market share.
Now we have very high-tech equipment for home theatres. Large hi-definition televisions, wide screen TVs, progressive scan DVD players, Dolby sound systems, and much more. And we do continue to crave content to watch on the equipment. More content than just live sporting events like the NFL, MLB, the NBA and others. Movies, TV shows and much more.
The problem has become, though, that Hollywood can't quite predict the content we want so well any more. Where it used to be easy for a pay network like HBO to know what were blockbuster films and would please their customers, the numbers of viewers for films in theatres has dropped and continued to drop as more people have stayed home watching content on their hi-tech toys. That would seem fine as Hollywood would seem to be losing viewers in theatres to viewers at home, but at the same time the number of choices in channels over cable and satellite has led to lower and lower viewership for all individual content providers (it may be near the same total amount of viewers, but the depth of viewers for each channel is much lower, consider it a very large and very shallow pool).
Again, these lower numbers hurt Hollywood because there's so much competition for us (the viewers and consumers) that prices have to be kept down everywhere in the hopes of maximizing returns on what little money is spent to produce the content.
I fear that in the next several years the neighborhood megaplex may go much the same way as the old neighborhood drive-in movies. It happened a bit before when the old (smaller screen) megaplexes were consolidated and eventually replaced with the new mega-megaplexes with huge screens, large and luxurious lobbies, stadium seating and more enticements. Unfortunately those enticements haven't kept us, the consumers, coming. We've grown tired of paying money to the theatres who pay the money to spoiled stars in Hollywood, and it leaves less empirical evidence for the content providers over what content we really want in the future.
Will the content we get in the future be lesser quality stuff like the reality TV shows that fill our air-waves now, or will it be more along the lines of some of the shows that have helped Hollywood enjoy a bit of a renaissance (with shows like Lost, Desperate Housewives, Prison Break, etc.)? It's up to us to decide, and part of how we decide is via ticket sales at theatres when quality films like Serenity are out in first run.
I'll just say again, go see the movie in the theatres. It's that good. (And save some $$ to get the DVD later also. It will undoubtedly be worth the $$ also).
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