8 ms·

By accepting that event cinema is the only thing the movie industry has left in its favour right now. As they say in the article itself, many people watch maybe

by CM30 7y ago

By accepting that event cinema is the only thing the movie industry has left in its favour right now. As they say in the article itself, many people watch maybe four films a year, and usually stick to those with the highest profile. So I think that's really what film as a medium is going to be in future. It's going to be the place you watch the next Avengers or Star Wars or James Bond or what not. The place for big picture films with million dollar budgets and rosters brimming with A listers, and nothing else beneath that. Or okay, maybe indie cinema may exist on the fringes or something. But fact is, the industry has probably got to accept that low/medium budget films are pretty much history, and they've been replaced entirely by streaming services and sites like YouTube. Still, it's not all bad news. No, if you want bad news, that's probably the future of television. That's on the way out right now, is probably going to completely supplanted by streaming services like Netflix in future, and as a format has pretty much no advantages over the internet whatsoever. Seriously, could you imagine trying to selling the experience of watching TV in a society that already has the internet? You couldn't. It objectively be a worse solution for most people. So yeah, I think film is probably gonna be reduced a bunch of blockbuster films by large studios mixed with some arthouse works, and TV is probably just going to be completely replaced by streaming services and video sharing platforms.

ghaff 7y ago
>It's going to be the place you watch the next Avengers or Star Wars or James Bond or what not. The place for big picture films with million dollar budgets and rosters brimming with A listers, and nothing else beneath that. That's mostly been me with going to theaters for a very long time. And I do watch a fair number of movies. Presumably, for lower budget movies, direct to streaming becomes more common although it's hard to say what that means in terms of what works economically. Anecdotally, many years ago, I was in the film group at school and we had 4 different movies over a weekend, filled large auditoriums etc. My understanding is that there are now occasional film showings but, as a whole, this doesn't exist any longer. A lot of going out to see movies in a theater is habit. Take the habit away and you can see a big fropoff.
- amyjess 7y ago
  > Presumably, for lower budget movies, direct to streaming becomes more common although it's hard to say what that means in terms of what works economically. Lower-budget productions, in general, are increasingly being produced as cable or streaming TV shows instead of movies nowadays. Vox even did an article on the phenomenon the other day, pointing out that it's resulted in a number of shows being poorly-paced because they were originally written to be movies before they were padded out to be TV shows: https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/6/19/18660602/tv-streaming-long-chernobyl-superstore https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/6/19/18660602/tv-streaming-...
tines 7y ago
Your comment about television isn't in the same category; tv and Netflix et al are content delivery mechanisms whereas this article is talking about the content itself, not delivery.
- ghaff 7y ago
  Netflix (and Amazon, Hulu, HBO, etc.) are both content delivery and studios. The two functions don't need to overlap but it appears as if that's what's needed for differentiation and stickiness.
- kibwen 7y ago
  Television is host to a few different categories of media that should be considered separately. Miniserieses, episodic character shows, serial stories, and sports will continue to find audiences no matter the platform, because the experiences aren't necessarily fungible (though at the limit that platform could be "piracy"). Fungible experiences like TV news networks and one-step-above-white-noise daytime television are dead on their feet, long since replaced among younger demographics by free content on the internet. The future of TV is going to be difficult-to-replace high-effort content like HBO, whereas channels stuffed with low-effort content are going to be crushed under heel by the convenience and momentum of YouTube. The makeup of cable packages is going to have to radically shift to account for the fact that the already-subsidized long-tail channels are going to continue to lose their audience, likely moving cable towards a more a la cart model that will be increasingly hard to convincingly differentiate from services like Hulu or Netflix, and will (one hopes) eventually transition to no longer demanding a distinct cable or satellite connection due to lack of justification (though of course plenty of people already get their internet over cable infrastructure, and that won't change).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
brm 7y ago
There is a not at all farfetched (anymore) scenario where Amazon or Netflix circle back around and roll out a series of movie theaters or "event cinemas" and try to sell people on it as some sort new real world experience where they're able to capture everything down to the concessions and market their own tentpole franchises.
- kibwen 7y ago
  They won't even need to make any investments in infrastructure, because they'll easily be able to cheaply snap up existing franchised cinema locations as they see the writing on the wall. Coming soon: "Delivery Option: Save $5 on your next ticket at Amazon Cinema by having this package delivered directly to your nearest theater!"
  - wry_discontent 7y ago
    This seems so dystopian. Victory Cinemas. Victory Gin. Victory Cigarettes. :s/Victory/Amazon/g
    - newsoul2019 7y ago
      Indeed. "Spaceballs, the flamethrower!"
  - linuxftw 7y ago
    I could see a prime-theater partnership network. 'The Official Prime Cinema Experience'.
    - newsoul2019 7y ago
      Now with Personal Seat Licenses! For a low one-time fee you can own your seat at the Prime Cinema! Buy or sell your seat tickets using the Prime Cinema Seat Marketplace! Purchases made with the Prime Cinema Credit Card get 5% off. Alternatively you can simply add the PSL to your Amazon Prime Mortgage balance as a one-time courtesy!
kodz4 7y ago
The past few years I am finding the Avengers, Star Wars and James Bond movies hard to sit through. I really don't need 3 hours of over stimulation of all my senses. There are better things to do in life.
- anm89 7y ago
  Seriously. I wish that I at least liked the one thing that was what the whole world apparently decided all at once was the only way to do things. I'm not even that snobby but I think these films are garbage from the perspective of what I've liked about movies over the last 60 years.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - derefr 7y ago
    They're also the type of film for which there is the largest difference between watching them in a theatre and watching them at home. The reason "movie-theatre movies" are the way they are, is that everything that's not a "movie-theatre movie", people would rather watch on Netflix.
- rolltiide 7y ago
  yeah I like movies too but whats IN the movies now is hard to rationalize. I find myself loathing the listed run times of 1 and a half to 2 and a half hours, while I'll gladly watch a miniseries on Netflix where each episode is just as long. I'm usually thinking: how are they going to cut corners on character development this time, jam pack the action scenes and twist in, without me feeling exhausted of the whole ordeal? I like the theatres because many of my living arrangements weren't conducive to turning the sound up so high that I can feel it in my body but now, I catch most theatrical releases while on planes - which may be unique to me - and just regret every time I actually do go to the theatre.
- wolco 7y ago
  I try to watch everything but I can't watch a blockbuster. The stories are too easy to guess and the rest is mainly special effects.
izzydata 7y ago
Sounds like I'll be able to cut out the theater going experience from my life entirely then as those types of features are becoming increasingly more corporate and consumerist feeling.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
bongobongo 7y ago
“Event cinema” is precisely what caused this decline, transforming cinemas from clean, pleasant, affordable places to watch films with great audio and visual quality to today’s smelly, expensive, sticky auditoriums where digital video is crappily projected onto a wall and the sound is broken half the time. They decided to offer garbage and people decided to eat it.
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago
  How do you figure?
- pacerwpg 7y ago
  I would be willing to bet that today's theaters are both cleaner and have better projection and sound than any prior decade of their existence.
  - bongobongo 7y ago
    Lol you would be wrong, just Google it. Theatres used to have ushers to keep the noise down and to keep the rooms from getting trashed, sound engineers to cater the room to specific films, attendants to make sure everything went right—now it’s just on autopilot, with mixed results.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      Pre-multiplex maybe? Or an atypical urban theater catering to film buffs. Or Imax. But my recollection of most theaters 20-30 years ago is most of the screens being postage stamp size, audio being subpar, and the level of staffing not much different from today.
      - amyjess 7y ago
        This was also my experience going to the movies in the '90s in North Texas. Don't forget that this was before stadium seating was invented, so good luck being able to see the screen if the person in front of you is taller than you. I hated going to the movies back then. Cinemark started a revolution when they invented stadium seating (but even then, the original incarnation was problematic because it wasn't wheelchair-accessible until Cinemark settled with the DOJ).
brightball 7y ago
The internet wins for "consume when you want" but TV is always going to win for "live" whenever a large audience is involved. Just from a sheer efficiency standpoint, the bandwidth involved for millions of TCP connections for a single broadcast is staggering. That's why this model can work fine for niche live events that few people want but not so much for mass market live broadcasts. It's this reason that you've got to caveat "TV Shows" vs "Live TV" when you make that statement. "Shows" can be easily cached on CDNs much closer to each consumer. "Live" can't. If anything, I'd see the major broadcast networks and ESPN continuing to get stronger, while everything else on TV gets weaker. The only TV shows that people have to watch "live" are shows with a community built around them, ready to react and discuss it as it's happening (Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, etc). This is where movie audiences are similar because that opening weekend crowd for an anticipated movie tends to share the experience. I honestly wish they'd bring back midnight showings instead of 7pm Thursday showings, because that midnight crowd energy is impossible to replicate.
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  > the bandwidth involved for millions of TCP connections for a single broadcast is staggering. The technical solution for that is multicast. The internet doesn't really support multicast, but there are workarounds; the best known is BAMTech, which grew out of live streaming MLB baseball and was purchased for $1B in 2016 by Disney. I have no idea how they do it, but I imagine it's not that different from Netflix. Put a box in ISP's everywhere that acts like a multi-user PVR. One stream per channel going in to the box, thousands going out.
- a1369209993 7y ago
  > "Shows" can be easily cached on CDNs much closer to each consumer. "Live" can't. Um, no? You could argue that it isn't technically caching, and the system doing it isn't technically a CDN, but there's no reason why a broadcast can't be streamed to, say, 1000 SDN nodes, which each spool the stream in memory and serve it to 1000+ different recievers. A SDN node (server) is different infrastructure than a television station, so there might be issues with capital outlay, but I highly doubt it's more expensive once sunk costs are tallied.
- 7y ago
mntmoss 7y ago
That won't pencil out for everyone, though. If you convert "four times a year" to "one blockbuster a season" you are going to get gaps in which the theaters scramble to find other ways to use the space and keep the lights on - the "throwback" nights, video game nights, etc. The current value proposition of a theatrical release is primarily in the big screen and the big auditorium, and secondarily the access to content(which can be seen on screens of many sizes). This was basically also true when VCRs took hold, and it drove the wave of late-20th century blockbusters; it's only different now in that the value of the theater is more niche, and there are fewer barriers to wide distribution. IMHO the thing that could support theaters going forward is a common 21st century theme: customization and unbundling. Keep it a primarily passive audience experience(we've seen the "interactive movie" trope before), but introduce an element of performance and "VJing", taking the emphasis off making one prerecorded film and moving it towards remixable material inside a common framework. Given that so many big releases now are CGI-centric, the production pipelines are already in striking distance of doing this, and live effects can supplement it. It just needs the intersection of technical capability against a business model open to this structuring of IP and talent - which might put it out of reach of the current studios but create opportunities for new ones.
tomjen3 7y ago
I will say one thing in defense of flow-tv: you can be reasonably certain that what you have seen is the same as what every else have seen, so you have something in common with everybody that you can talk about. In a fractured world where everybody has different truths and things they have seen, TV may be the one factor that ensures everybody at least have access to the same stories, even if they disagree with them. Of course that is the experience before cable tv, not the experience of having 9000 channels, and none of them worth watching.

by CM30 7y ago

ghaff 7y ago

>It's going to be the place you watch the next Avengers or Star Wars or James Bond or what not. The place for big picture films with million dollar budgets and rosters brimming with A listers, and nothing else beneath that. That's mostly been me with going to theaters for a very long time. And I do watch a fair number of movies. Presumably, for lower budget movies, direct to streaming becomes more common although it's hard to say what that means in terms of what works economically. Anecdotally, many years ago, I was in the film group at school and we had 4 different movies over a weekend, filled large auditoriums etc. My understanding is that there are now occasional film showings but, as a whole, this doesn't exist any longer. A lot of going out to see movies in a theater is habit. Take the habit away and you can see a big fropoff.

amyjess 7y ago
> Presumably, for lower budget movies, direct to streaming becomes more common although it's hard to say what that means in terms of what works economically. Lower-budget productions, in general, are increasingly being produced as cable or streaming TV shows instead of movies nowadays. Vox even did an article on the phenomenon the other day, pointing out that it's resulted in a number of shows being poorly-paced because they were originally written to be movies before they were padded out to be TV shows: https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/6/19/18660602/tv-streaming-long-chernobyl-superstore https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/6/19/18660602/tv-streaming-...

tines 7y ago

Your comment about television isn't in the same category; tv and Netflix et al are content delivery mechanisms whereas this article is talking about the content itself, not delivery.

ghaff 7y ago
Netflix (and Amazon, Hulu, HBO, etc.) are both content delivery and studios. The two functions don't need to overlap but it appears as if that's what's needed for differentiation and stickiness.
kibwen 7y ago
Television is host to a few different categories of media that should be considered separately. Miniserieses, episodic character shows, serial stories, and sports will continue to find audiences no matter the platform, because the experiences aren't necessarily fungible (though at the limit that platform could be "piracy"). Fungible experiences like TV news networks and one-step-above-white-noise daytime television are dead on their feet, long since replaced among younger demographics by free content on the internet. The future of TV is going to be difficult-to-replace high-effort content like HBO, whereas channels stuffed with low-effort content are going to be crushed under heel by the convenience and momentum of YouTube. The makeup of cable packages is going to have to radically shift to account for the fact that the already-subsidized long-tail channels are going to continue to lose their audience, likely moving cable towards a more a la cart model that will be increasingly hard to convincingly differentiate from services like Hulu or Netflix, and will (one hopes) eventually transition to no longer demanding a distinct cable or satellite connection due to lack of justification (though of course plenty of people already get their internet over cable infrastructure, and that won't change).
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

brm 7y ago

There is a not at all farfetched (anymore) scenario where Amazon or Netflix circle back around and roll out a series of movie theaters or "event cinemas" and try to sell people on it as some sort new real world experience where they're able to capture everything down to the concessions and market their own tentpole franchises.

kibwen 7y ago
They won't even need to make any investments in infrastructure, because they'll easily be able to cheaply snap up existing franchised cinema locations as they see the writing on the wall. Coming soon: "Delivery Option: Save $5 on your next ticket at Amazon Cinema by having this package delivered directly to your nearest theater!"
- wry_discontent 7y ago
  This seems so dystopian. Victory Cinemas. Victory Gin. Victory Cigarettes. :s/Victory/Amazon/g
  - newsoul2019 7y ago
    Indeed. "Spaceballs, the flamethrower!"
- linuxftw 7y ago
  I could see a prime-theater partnership network. 'The Official Prime Cinema Experience'.
  - newsoul2019 7y ago
    Now with Personal Seat Licenses! For a low one-time fee you can own your seat at the Prime Cinema! Buy or sell your seat tickets using the Prime Cinema Seat Marketplace! Purchases made with the Prime Cinema Credit Card get 5% off. Alternatively you can simply add the PSL to your Amazon Prime Mortgage balance as a one-time courtesy!

kodz4 7y ago

The past few years I am finding the Avengers, Star Wars and James Bond movies hard to sit through. I really don't need 3 hours of over stimulation of all my senses. There are better things to do in life.

anm89 7y ago
Seriously. I wish that I at least liked the one thing that was what the whole world apparently decided all at once was the only way to do things. I'm not even that snobby but I think these films are garbage from the perspective of what I've liked about movies over the last 60 years.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- derefr 7y ago
  They're also the type of film for which there is the largest difference between watching them in a theatre and watching them at home. The reason "movie-theatre movies" are the way they are, is that everything that's not a "movie-theatre movie", people would rather watch on Netflix.
rolltiide 7y ago
yeah I like movies too but whats IN the movies now is hard to rationalize. I find myself loathing the listed run times of 1 and a half to 2 and a half hours, while I'll gladly watch a miniseries on Netflix where each episode is just as long. I'm usually thinking: how are they going to cut corners on character development this time, jam pack the action scenes and twist in, without me feeling exhausted of the whole ordeal? I like the theatres because many of my living arrangements weren't conducive to turning the sound up so high that I can feel it in my body but now, I catch most theatrical releases while on planes - which may be unique to me - and just regret every time I actually do go to the theatre.
wolco 7y ago
I try to watch everything but I can't watch a blockbuster. The stories are too easy to guess and the rest is mainly special effects.

izzydata 7y ago

Sounds like I'll be able to cut out the theater going experience from my life entirely then as those types of features are becoming increasingly more corporate and consumerist feeling.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

bongobongo 7y ago

“Event cinema” is precisely what caused this decline, transforming cinemas from clean, pleasant, affordable places to watch films with great audio and visual quality to today’s smelly, expensive, sticky auditoriums where digital video is crappily projected onto a wall and the sound is broken half the time. They decided to offer garbage and people decided to eat it.

PhasmaFelis 7y ago
How do you figure?
pacerwpg 7y ago
I would be willing to bet that today's theaters are both cleaner and have better projection and sound than any prior decade of their existence.
- bongobongo 7y ago
  Lol you would be wrong, just Google it. Theatres used to have ushers to keep the noise down and to keep the rooms from getting trashed, sound engineers to cater the room to specific films, attendants to make sure everything went right—now it’s just on autopilot, with mixed results.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Pre-multiplex maybe? Or an atypical urban theater catering to film buffs. Or Imax. But my recollection of most theaters 20-30 years ago is most of the screens being postage stamp size, audio being subpar, and the level of staffing not much different from today.
    - amyjess 7y ago
      This was also my experience going to the movies in the '90s in North Texas. Don't forget that this was before stadium seating was invented, so good luck being able to see the screen if the person in front of you is taller than you. I hated going to the movies back then. Cinemark started a revolution when they invented stadium seating (but even then, the original incarnation was problematic because it wasn't wheelchair-accessible until Cinemark settled with the DOJ).

brightball 7y ago

The internet wins for "consume when you want" but TV is always going to win for "live" whenever a large audience is involved. Just from a sheer efficiency standpoint, the bandwidth involved for millions of TCP connections for a single broadcast is staggering. That's why this model can work fine for niche live events that few people want but not so much for mass market live broadcasts. It's this reason that you've got to caveat "TV Shows" vs "Live TV" when you make that statement. "Shows" can be easily cached on CDNs much closer to each consumer. "Live" can't. If anything, I'd see the major broadcast networks and ESPN continuing to get stronger, while everything else on TV gets weaker. The only TV shows that people have to watch "live" are shows with a community built around them, ready to react and discuss it as it's happening (Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, etc). This is where movie audiences are similar because that opening weekend crowd for an anticipated movie tends to share the experience. I honestly wish they'd bring back midnight showings instead of 7pm Thursday showings, because that midnight crowd energy is impossible to replicate.

bryanlarsen 7y ago
> the bandwidth involved for millions of TCP connections for a single broadcast is staggering. The technical solution for that is multicast. The internet doesn't really support multicast, but there are workarounds; the best known is BAMTech, which grew out of live streaming MLB baseball and was purchased for $1B in 2016 by Disney. I have no idea how they do it, but I imagine it's not that different from Netflix. Put a box in ISP's everywhere that acts like a multi-user PVR. One stream per channel going in to the box, thousands going out.
a1369209993 7y ago
> "Shows" can be easily cached on CDNs much closer to each consumer. "Live" can't. Um, no? You could argue that it isn't technically caching, and the system doing it isn't technically a CDN, but there's no reason why a broadcast can't be streamed to, say, 1000 SDN nodes, which each spool the stream in memory and serve it to 1000+ different recievers. A SDN node (server) is different infrastructure than a television station, so there might be issues with capital outlay, but I highly doubt it's more expensive once sunk costs are tallied.
7y ago

mntmoss 7y ago

That won't pencil out for everyone, though. If you convert "four times a year" to "one blockbuster a season" you are going to get gaps in which the theaters scramble to find other ways to use the space and keep the lights on - the "throwback" nights, video game nights, etc. The current value proposition of a theatrical release is primarily in the big screen and the big auditorium, and secondarily the access to content(which can be seen on screens of many sizes). This was basically also true when VCRs took hold, and it drove the wave of late-20th century blockbusters; it's only different now in that the value of the theater is more niche, and there are fewer barriers to wide distribution. IMHO the thing that could support theaters going forward is a common 21st century theme: customization and unbundling. Keep it a primarily passive audience experience(we've seen the "interactive movie" trope before), but introduce an element of performance and "VJing", taking the emphasis off making one prerecorded film and moving it towards remixable material inside a common framework. Given that so many big releases now are CGI-centric, the production pipelines are already in striking distance of doing this, and live effects can supplement it. It just needs the intersection of technical capability against a business model open to this structuring of IP and talent - which might put it out of reach of the current studios but create opportunities for new ones.

tomjen3 7y ago

I will say one thing in defense of flow-tv: you can be reasonably certain that what you have seen is the same as what every else have seen, so you have something in common with everybody that you can talk about. In a fractured world where everybody has different truths and things they have seen, TV may be the one factor that ensures everybody at least have access to the same stories, even if they disagree with them. Of course that is the experience before cable tv, not the experience of having 9000 channels, and none of them worth watching.