Drew Turney
Big moves, big players and big messages in the market these last few weeks.
First, studio space in Hollywood has always been a cultural institution among the major names like Warner Bros and Paramount – to the point they offer tours of their premises and one of them – Universal – has become as legendary a theme park attraction as anything by Disney.
Today the business case for Hollywood studios are shadows of their former selves, the grand sound stages and backlots of yesteryear mostly used for TV commercials and sitcoms while movies are filmed in tax havens like Canada and Louisiana.
But in an arresting metaphor for the rise of digital media in the cloistered, century-old business model, Netflix has taken a lease on a 200,000 foot property to be built along Sunset Blvd, which is enough space for very decent production facilities like a sound stage or two.
They already own nearly 250,000 square feet of space in Northern California, but the new premises will further cement their status as a player where it counts.
A technical (and customer) advance came from Amazon Prime recently, which announced it’s going to allow for offline playback. That means users can download a show or movie to watch later when they’re not connected to their network, and it stands to give Amazon access to a far wider user base of people who (for example) travel a lot and are never shackled to a single internet connection for long.
Something nobody’s mentioned – and who knows whether it was part of Amazon’s thinking – is how similar the new capability is to the way a lot of people use notoriously piracy-friendly technologies like Bittorrent, by downloading content to their device or computer to consume later.
But the big news is the first steps towards producing original content by a very big name, Apple. Not just a longtime facilitator of digital entertainment thanks to products like the iPod and iPad, many would argue Apple’s been the prime mover in delivering us all into the play-anything-anywhere world thanks to the success of its product ecosystem.
Apparently the company has had preliminary meetings with Hollywood bigwigs but, in its usual fashion, hasn’t admitted to anything.
Interesting side note; the department supposedly doing the original content homework reports to Apple’s Eddy Cue, who took to Twitter to rail against Alex Gibney’s documentary on his former boss ”Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine”. Maybe Apple’s first original movie will be a 1984 Macintosh ad-style attempt to recast the Jobs myth so we don’t all remember him as a tyrannical monster.
The Apple news also completely overshadowed the move by Hulu’s former content chief to another hardware maker, GoPro, to head up its own original content efforts.
But all these giant names jumping into the VOD paddling pool has us wondering; when will the biggest name of all, Google, announce some world-beating original content initiative?
Sure, there are plenty of smaller original programming and movie initiatives over at YouTube, but here’s the thing about that; from a brand perspective, YouTube is still seen as a user platform. There are some big YouTube stars getting fat paydays and contracts with traditional networks and studios because of their pre-packaged appeal, no question, but it’s still little more than a digital TV channel for other content providers.
There have even been very big names, such as former Fast and the Furious helmer Justin Lin with his VR alien invasion short Help, built to be viewed on your mobile, but such high profile projects haven’t shifted the common perception about what YouTube is for.
Second, the names ‘Netflix’, ‘Amazon’ and ‘Hulu’ are single-word bywords for who they are and what they do. There isn’t a single place or product name people think of to get original content from Google (or even YouTube). Until the company announces one big original series or movie feature push through a new service (‘Moogle’? ‘TVgle’?), they can’t be considered to be in the race.
New on small screens coming up, ”Some Kind of Hate”, a horror thriller about a bullied teenager who gets some help from an unlikely source – the ghost of a girl who was driven to suicide by her own tormenters.
The second season of awesome comedy series Silicon Valley is on Digital HD, as is the lush reimagining of Thomas Hardy’s classic novel ”Far From the Madding Crowd”, with Carey Mulligan as the feisty heroine Bathsheba.
Also out, ”Dirty Weekend”, starring Alice Eve (”Star Trek Into Darkness”) and Matthew Broderick. Director Neil LaBute tarnished his rep somewhat with the laughable Nicolas Cage remake of ”The Wicker Man” a few years back, but if you know his early work like ”In The Company of Men” (which introduced the world to Aaron Eckhart), you might give him another round.
