UK industry to create films people actually want to watch

[Keith Walters]

Theres been a little bit of talk about iTunes here, which of course sells moving image content as well as music, but they aren't the only major player out there in this field.

Yes, the point was, the same exact same bleatings about how the commercial availability of high quality movie downloads would destroy the film industry, as in: "you couldn't make any money out of it" because "who's going to pay for something they can download for free?!", were made about music downloads. iTunes proved them spectacularly wrong.

 

Anyway, a more practical problem at the moment is that most people in the world simply don't have the bandwidth to support even DVD resolution movie downloads in any quantity, let alone HD.

 

As an aside, it's amazing how little download capability you need if you set Windows automatic updates to "inform me but don't automatically intall". Most of them seem to do things like correcting errors in the Swahili character set for Powerpoint, (or more often a program I've never even heard of, let alone installed :rolleyes:) My monthly download limit is 1.5GB, three people share the connection, but I've never gone anywhere near that.

 

The big advantage of having an iTunes like company managing the downloads, is that you won't have to wade through acres of time-wasting wannabe crap, and you won't have your screen filled unwanted ads for Poker sites and God knows what else. People will pay for that.

 

On the other hand, the same model will support a "Bargain Basement" section where unknown film makers will finally get a crack at international distribution.

[Freya Black]

Yes, but people generally put stuff on YouTube for other people's enjoyment, not commercial gain. For example, funny commercials that would otherwise only get shown in the country of origin. I wouldn't call that piracy.

 

You could say the same about megaupload tho or any number of other sites, the long gone napster included.

There are also people putting samples of movies on you tube with links back to their own commercial bootleg sites. You tube is basically built on piracy. That was their model, rather like microsoft for that matter.

 

love

 

Freya

[Freya Black]

Yes, the point was, the same exact same bleatings about how the commercial availability of high quality movie downloads would destroy the film industry, as in: "you couldn't make any money out of it" because "who's going to pay for something they can download for free?!", were made about music downloads. iTunes proved them spectacularly wrong.

 

Yes I wasn't referring to any particular point, just pointing out some other examples of how the media world is changing and how the big companies are being left behined because they are unable to adapt. iTunes is obviously not the only significant player out there.

 

 

:rolleyes:) My monthly download limit is 1.5GB, three people share the connection, but I've never gone anywhere near that.

 

ouch! How do you cope! I get 10gb a month and I'm very careful but only just make it under a lot of months!

Had to use a 3g stick once with a 2gb limit, after a junkie neighbour got it into his head to slice through my utility cables with a kitchen knife! Was really struggling and had to turn off images! Are you sure you don't mean 15gb a month?

 

love

 

Freya

[Guest]

On the one hand I guess I should be flattered, my movies have been ripped off by all the best illegal download sites.

 

I especially enjoyed it when people would watch Dark Reprieve for free on-line and then bitch and moan about the movie. The fact that they hated the movie gave me a degree of satisfaction.

 

That's 80 mins of your life you won't get back, sucka!!!! :D

 

R,

[Keith Walters]

 

ouch! How do you cope! I get 10gb a month and I'm very careful but only just make it under a lot of months!

Had to use a 3g stick once with a 2gb limit, after a junkie neighbour got it into his head to slice through my utility cables with a kitchen knife! Was really struggling and had to turn off images! Are you sure you don't mean 15gb a month?

 

love

 

Freya

No, I mean 1.5GB. And that's for me, my wife and my 19-year-old niece, who spends quite a lot of time online.

I really don't know; either you seriously need to get a life ( :P ), you're doing a lot of graphic-intensive "real" work, or you're allowing an awful lot of automatic updates without realizing it. Trust me, they're nearly all useless crap.

You haven't got skype operating full-time by any chance?

It's amazing how my usage shrank after I pissed off all the automatic updates, plus the Internet is much snappier.

Also I use Opera almost exclusively. In fact I only ever use IE for a single work-related "cloud" site, because it won't work with anything else.

Most of my online activity is done at work, but I never use anything like 1.5GB a month there either.

[Keith Walters]

On the one hand I guess I should be flattered, my movies have been ripped off by all the best illegal download sites.

 

I especially enjoyed it when people would watch Dark Reprieve for free on-line and then bitch and moan about the movie. The fact that they hated the movie gave me a degree of satisfaction.

 

That's 80 mins of your life you won't get back, sucka!!!! :D

 

R,

Yes but people also do that with movies with 9-digit budgets, so what does that prove? :rolleyes:

[Freya Black]

No, I mean 1.5GB. And that's for me, my wife and my 19-year-old niece, who spends quite a lot of time online.

I really don't know; either you seriously need to get a life ( :P ),

 

Yeah been trying hard to get one of those for the last couple of years now. :(

Hopefully I'm on the brink of turning things around...

 

you're doing a lot of graphic-intensive "real" work, or you're allowing an awful lot of automatic updates without realizing it. Trust me, they're nearly all useless crap.

 

Not running windows.

 

Also I use Opera almost exclusively. In fact I only ever use IE for a single work-related "cloud" site, because it won't work with anything else.

Most of my online activity is done at work, but I never use anything like 1.5GB a month there either.

 

Well I would never use IE unless I had to but I suspect it might be the opera thing that's saving you. Especially if you are using opera turbo but even without, I think it's a lot more efficient.

 

love

 

Freya

[Guest]

Yes but people also do that with movies with 9-digit budgets, so what does that prove? :rolleyes:

 

Yep, Battleship and John Carter, coming to a free download near you. Let the bitching begin!

 

R,

[Mei Lewis]

You tube is basically built on piracy. That was their model, rather like microsoft for that matter.

 

How do you mean Microsoft was built on piracy?

Out of the two main OS vendors Apple would be the one that relied on piracy to succeed, their current survival stemming from the iPod which people bought to fill with pirated music.

[Freya Black]

How do you mean Microsoft was built on piracy?

Out of the two main OS vendors Apple would be the one that relied on piracy to succeed, their current survival stemming from the iPod which people bought to fill with pirated music.

 

That's kinda true, although they were very successful before that. They also ripped off the mac user interface from the work done at Xerox Parc. Nor exactly piracy in the trad sense but... Actually apple were doing preety well before the ipod. They started to make a big recovery the moment Mr Jobs returned on the scene.

 

However in the case of microsoft it's a bit more extreme. They delivered an OS to IBM called QDos which was short for quick and dirty operating system. It was basically a hacked and pirated version of CP/M from digital research to run on the new platform. They rewrote it a lot over the years but one of the guys at DR claimed that there was still a bit of code, even in the last days of dos, which only he knew why it was there! (So a bit of CP/M survived in there till the end). Of course they since wrote the NT kernal and now have a totally new code base. So it's clean code now but microsoft had their start from some smooth talking and a major work of piracy!

 

Anyway, this wasn't an apple vs microsoft thing, I was just referring to large companies involved in piracy and the different attitude towards them.

 

love

 

Freya

Edited May 21, 2012 by Freya Black

[Keith Walters]

 

Out of the two main OS vendors Apple would be the one that relied on piracy to succeed, their current survival stemming from the iPod which people bought to fill with pirated music.

Bollocks!

 

The main reason they're so successful is the sheer number of people who DON'T fill their iPods with pirated music. Not because they're so honest, more because they simply can't be arsed wading through virus- and spyware-ridden dodgy websites looking for tracks they can simply buy in a couple of minutes for small change.

 

There is this unfortunate conceit of the "pirate chic", where complete losers, 40-year-old virgins, generally unwashed, unwanted and unpartnerable persons (almost always male; like-minded females generally use different but equally futile strategies), want it made clear in no uncertain terms, that they, they, are the true masters of the Digital Universe, wallowing in an exhilarating, unbelievably rich lifestyle, based solely on the fruits of their downloading prowess. The tedious lives of the rest of us are as the homeless beggars sleeping in the streets of Mumbai (or even parts of London). Even Jim Jannard is just a penniless mendicant compared to THEM!

 

The tedious reality is, the vast majority of the world's productive population, don't spend their entire non-working lives glued to a monitor screen. That's generally the province of compulsive middle-aged male rod-whallopers as described above, and desperate teenagers/adolescents, who generally grow out of it by the time they reach their late teens.

 

The media would have us believe otherwise of course, because crap like that is a lot easier to write about, than finding real news.

[Keith Walters]

 

However in the case of microsoft it's a bit more extreme. They delivered an OS to IBM called QDos which was short for quick and dirty operating system. It was basically a hacked and pirated version of CP/M from digital research to run on the new platform.

How that tale has grown with the telling! The IBM PC project was not taken at all seriously by their Mainframe-Fixated management, and they wouldn't give them any programming resources. Somebody mentioned that a small firm called Microsoft (whose first major product was the operating software for the Tandy TRS 80, so it wasn't like they were complete beginners), might have something that could be adapted to the 8088-based PC platform. The did, and the rest is history.

As for being hacked, that's a bit of a stretch. Those programs were microscopic by today's standards, written in pure machine code. (You didn't have no C++ nonsense in those days)

There really was only one way most of that software could have been written.

In the old 60s 6800 mainframes, programmers could remember the entire instruction set in their heads, and punch in custom startup routines by hand. Things have changed a mite since then :rolleyes:

 

By the way, a small Pachyderm in the boudoir: The majority of the business software used on Macs is actually written by Microsoft!

[Freya Black]

 

As for being hacked, that's a bit of a stretch. Those programs were microscopic by today's standards, written in pure machine code. (You didn't have no C++ nonsense in those days)

There really was only one way most of that software could have been written.

In the old 60s 6800 mainframes, programmers could remember the entire instruction set in their heads, and punch in custom startup routines by hand. Things have changed a mite since then :rolleyes:

 

 

Well they would have been largely written in assembly strictly speaking but same difference almost.

However I don't see how anything you wrote changes the fact that qdos was a hacked copy of CP/M.

Also when programs are hacked it is often at the machine code level even now, as people tend to not have access to the source code.

 

love

 

Freya

[Freya Black]

Bollocks!

 

The main reason they're so successful is the sheer number of people who DON'T fill their iPods with pirated music. Not because they're so honest, more because they simply can't be arsed wading through virus- and spyware-ridden dodgy websites looking for tracks they can simply buy in a couple of minutes for small change.

 

 

EXCELLENT point! Very true. Apple re-shaped a landscape rife with piracy and re-modelled it back into a more commercial format. Can't be denied really.

 

love

 

Freya

[Rex Orwell]

I don't agree. Not that it matters.

 

they simply can't be arsed wading through virus- and spyware-ridden dodgy websites looking for tracks they can simply buy in a couple of minutes for small change.

 

In half the quality of what someone would be able to get elsewhere free if they knew what they were doing and it’s not hard.

 

iTunes takes advantage of peoples naivety. Apple does well because it makes good gear.

[Keith Walters]

I don't agree. Not that it matters.

 

 

 

In half the quality of what someone would be able to get elsewhere free if they knew what they were doing and it’s not hard.

 

iTunes takes advantage of peoples naivety. Apple does well because it makes good gear.

I rest my case :rolleyes:

[Keith Walters]

EXCELLENT point! Very true. Apple re-shaped a landscape rife with piracy and re-modelled it back into a more commercial format. Can't be denied really.

 

love

 

Freya

Exactly what needs to happen with video downloads. That's all I've ever really been saying.

[Keith Walters]

However I don't see how anything you wrote changes the fact that qdos was a hacked copy of CP/M.

 

 

Well, CPM was originally designed for the 8080, QDOS for the 16-bit version 8086/88. Just about anything written for the 8080 would run on an '86/88, and considering that the hardware (disc drives etc) would have all come from the same small group of manufacturers, it's hardly surprising that the software would look similar. The fact that the Microsoft version used some of the same techniques (8.3 filenames etc) was more likely done in the interests of compatibility than simple hacking. In any event, emulating is not the same as hacking.

 

Ironic that you brought this into a discussion about the slug-brainedness of Industry executives, since it was Digital Research's sheer Bloody-mindedness over licensing terms that made IBM turn to Microsoft in the first place. Bit like the man who said "no" to the Beatles....

 

Also when programs are hacked it is often at the machine code level even now, as people tend to not have access to the source code.

Only if it was written in machine code in the first place. Otherwise they use de-compliers. Not as nice as the original source code, but workable. Unless it's for very basic things like finding where the program looks for product keys, you'd have to be a total freak to be able wade through today's bloatware :rolleyes:

[Pat Murray]

Yep.

 

I think what Kim Dot Com was about to do, was create a website so massive that it was going to knock everything out of the water. If we asked what is it that people want most in the developed world we'd probably say music. Essentials like food and water aside people want media. Nobody doesn't want music or film. In fact I'm sure most would consider that they need more music and more media, in better quality too. What are the biggest profit makers in the world? well it's juggernaughts such as Facebook (currently in decline) and Google etc (and for the reader, time of posting is a few hours after Facebook was put onto the NASDAQ). Facebook is worth more than Coca Cola and Ford combined if you can imagine that (today). How many people on this board own a Facebook account? 3%? 5%? 15% as many as 20%? I don't.

 

 

 

 

I mean the pervasive and plastic Facebook in intself is just their version of trying to cash in on this (follow the funding at inception). That's why it's balls.

 

When a site like Megakey is able to distribute media uploaded directly from the artist or the production company and occasionally charge the end-user a few pennies / cents but generally allows them to download media in the best quality for free, then essentially everybody who uses any kind of modern technology in the developed world will have a Megakey application on each of their personal and home entertainment devices. The word 'piracy' disappears suddenly from use.

 

So then it transcends media, and becomes information, with the user acquiring both through one primary source. And the best thing is it's totally unrestricted. Like I said earlier and films being judged purely on their merit and popularity. You'd literally have access to anything, anytime. You'd give access to anyone, anything, anytime. And it's a self sustaining, publicly fuelled, publically controlled organism.

 

The crew get paid no matter what, through the advertising space utilised within the application on a user's machine.

 

They couldn't allow it. Like I said in the SOPA and PIPA thread, these people haven't got your interests at heart as an artist or a skilled professional. It's their own pockets they'd prefer to line better. Having this site operational was gonna make that more difficult.

 

The victimisation of Kim Dot Com has got nothing to do with the file sharing up to date on Megaupload, and in turn piracy has got nothing to do with destroying this industry. It's there to save it.

 

This is like the basics of the internet. The majority of us are still in some sort of hard-copy, Back To The Future, Chuck Berry Dance state of mind.

 

 

It's a bit crap really.

 

Rex, for most part I`m following you, but you are way off base on the quality talk, IMO. Especially when you associate hard-copy as crap. Au contraire, the best quality for a consumer of music is through a hard medium such as tape, vinyl or CD. Ditto for film, some digital file on my netbook isn`t going to surpass the quality of a properly projected film in a movie theater.

 

My original well cared for vinyl pressing of Moondance (meaning it`s 40+ years old) provides me with better quality performances of Into The Mystic, Crazy Love etc. then what I`d get from an Itunes download.

 

It`s not about quality, it`s about convenience for the consumer and cost savings for the producer of the media. Don`t get me wrong, I`m not stuck in some Chuck Berry dance, I do embrace the possibilities that technology provides us, just don`t make the mistake of confusing convenience with quality. Especially when part of that confusion has to do with companies hussling their product and telling consumers what they want to hear.

 

Personaly, the more options the better. The zero sum game for artistic media is stupid as it lets technology dominate art rather than technology working in equal partnership with art.

 

Purchasing a DVD with a digital file is the kind of thing I like to see. Directors only distributing their films through a stream from their website is cool too. I`m just not going to buy some snake oil argument that I`m better off quality wise watching the director`s movie through an online stream over a presentation on a Blu Ray on my HD tv or in a movie theater.

[Freya Black]

Well, CPM was originally designed for the 8080, QDOS for the 16-bit version 8086/88. Just about anything written for the 8080 would run on an '86/88, and considering that the hardware (disc drives etc) would have all come from the same small group of manufacturers, it's hardly surprising that the software would look similar.

 

You don't seem to be catching what I'm saying. I'm not saying it looked similar, like the apple-xerox Parc thing. I'm saying they took code from CP/M and reused it to create QDos

 

Ironic that you brought this into a discussion about the slug-brainedness of Industry executives, since it was Digital Research's sheer Bloody-mindedness over licensing terms that made IBM turn to Microsoft in the first place. Bit like the man who said "no" to the Beatles....

 

True enough. Digital Research acted quite strangely it seems and they weren't even that large a company.

Maybe when a company starts thinking it has some kind of monopoly, it gets into a certain mindset or something.

 

Only if it was written in machine code in the first place. Otherwise they use de-compliers. Not as nice as the original source code, but workable. Unless it's for very basic things like finding where the program looks for product keys, you'd have to be a total freak to be able wade through today's bloatware :rolleyes:

 

Maybe if it's a java applet or something but if it's a c++ application it's not going to decompile into anything that useful. More likely would use a disassembler, but this is a moot point.

 

love

 

Freya

[Michael Lehnert]

This thread has gone a long way. I wonder how much life it has left in it? More than the UK film industry post-Cameron?

/-M

[Rex Orwell]

I`m just not going to buy some snake oil argument that I`m better off quality wise watching the director`s movie through an online stream over a presentation on a Blu Ray on my HD tv or in a movie theater.

 

Yeah. But these formats are all gonna leave us you know. I mean maybe it will end up closing in on a format resembling a marble like is it Star Wars? Where they stick the marble on a plynth and the hologram comes out? - something like that.

 

It's not really a quality issue for me. Quality is always going to move around as we head towards hologram, it's the way it's all distributed now it's a played-out system.

 

I had quite a bit of text written out for this thread and thought "Nah I'm giving too many of my own plans away and want to operate a little differently and possibly be one of the first to do so" Saying what I wanted to say would be handing my ideas out on a plate before I've had a chance to test them myself.

 

 

 

And maybe I'm naive. I'm just a young guy starting out and hold the people who've posted in here with the utmost respect I'd love to have the same level of experience... but maybe being comfortable in how things have been up to now, which we know aren't working, wouldn't be the healthiest way to be. Whatever our individual views on issues like format or file sharing are, there'll be one point we'd all agree on; the ways in which things are done now aren't helping the industry, UK or elsewhere, to flourish. It's an old VHS business model and it's time to change how things are done.

 

So the term "Films people actually want to watch" and looking to improve the UK film industry according to that assumption is just cluthcing at straws in this instance.

[Markshaw]

What percentage of UK films is Government financed.

[Brian Drysdale]

What percentage of UK films is Government financed.

 

It's often UK lottery funding, which works like any other funder, i.e. they hope for a return on the investment. The percentage of the film's budget does depend on the overall budget, but on an extremely low budget feature I don't think it can go higher than 50%, although in practise the percentage is usually a lot smaller.

[Rex Orwell]

This is it. From my understanding it actually used to be public funding from the tax-payer. Then it changed under Bliar so that it now looks like the government are being responsible with your money, when in actual fact it's all lottery funding.