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rancis Ford Coppola once said there would come a day when some little fat girl from Ohio could borrow her dad’s camcorder and become the next Mozart of moviemaking. That day has arrived.
Imagine a world where anyone who has the desire to make a film can do this with little or no money. Where all you need is an imagination and the willingness to get out there and do it. For the first time, technology advances are allowing independents to produce cinema-quality digital video for, in some cases, under $10,000. That means a young filmmaker on a shoestring budget might produce a film that’s as visually compelling as something created by a Hollywood producer who’s working with a couple of million dollars. The popularity of inexpensive digital video cameras, fast computers, easy video editing software, and high-speed Internet services are combining to create a revolution in filmmaking. It is letting people do high-quality work for a fraction of the cost of what studios could do before. (Learn More: PC Magazine; 5/23/2006, CINEMA IN THE DIGITAL AGE - Making an Indie Film)
The savings won’t stop with the filmmaking.
Distributors spend millions striking film prints of
a would-be blockbuster to ship to theaters. A digital
transmission via satellite would cost a small fraction
of that. If you take the physical film out of
the equation, things get a lot cheaper. Digital movies
are basically big computer files, and just like computer
files, you can write them to a DVD-ROM, send them through
broadband cable or transmit them via satellite. There
are virtually no shipping costs, and it doesn’t cost
the production company much more to show the movie in
100 theaters than in one theater. With this distribution
system, production companies could easily open movies
in theaters all over the world on the same day. Up until 2005, the studio’s principal access to the home market came through Pay-TV, free television, video rentals, and DVD sales. But now, with products such as Apple’s video iPod and TiVo-type digital recorders becoming widely available, Hollywood is inching towards an even more lucrative way of exploiting the home market. Online companies such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon.com and Netflix along with cable providers Comcast and Time Warner and telecom giants Verizon and AT&T have announced new movie downloading services. This downloading strategy is particularly appealing to independent filmmakers because, they are no longer reliant and Hollywood studios to distribute their films. They now have unlimited shelf space and zero distribution costs. Unlike DVDs, which require manufacturing, warehousing, distribution, and disposing of returns, it costs almost nothing to download a movie. Indeed, all of the costs of transmission would be born by the cable operator (or a site like the Apple Music Store), whose cut would be less, under present arrangements, than retailers get on DVDs. The marginal cost of filling orders would be zero. The consumer, once he bought the download, could watch it where and when he chose to just as he once watched a DVD.
As more and more consumers get digital recorders or video iPods, downloading will prove irresistible. This is just one more part of the digital transformation of movies from a big screen to a small screen experience and from a theatrical to a home or even mobile iPod products. (Learn More: The Hollywood Economist; Downloading for Dollars - The future of Hollywood has arrived.)
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