Video Insider is a good read, and I recommend following them. Like many sites, they take a pass at Online Video Predictions for 2013. They vary from the cute:
1. The term “This is the year of online video†will be written and stated about 35% more often in 2013 than it was in 2012.
to the sly and accurate, slipping in at the end:
6. Branded content (Branded Video) production will be on the rise, but not enough to grab headlines or the kind of attention this trend will deserve.
A $100 million film fund is not to be ignored, and this one comes from the fans as outlined by Mike Masnick in $100 Million Pledged To Indie Film On Kickstarter… And 8,000 Films Made. Some of the highlights:
That’s a pretty decent film fund, and fairly successful at that.
As I’ve noted, Robert Cringley is writing a series of articles on how “Hollywood” (the studios, network broadcasters and cable companies) Â might be disrupted by “Silicon Valley” (i.e. Apple, Amazon, Google, Netflix, et al). He notes the exact same problem that Intel (and everyone else) in disrupting Hollywood: that incumbent content controllers don’t want to disrupt their own very profitable existing ecosystem for an uncertain future.
I think the implicit attitude in this Variety article, 2012: The year pay TV fought off the future, reveals just how ill prepared the current established pay TV business is for the inevitable disruption. Variety proclaims:
But despite the fragility of their delicate bond, programmers and distributors didn’t face any real challenge in 2012 from any of the expected upstarts hoping to gain rights to live TV and package it in more innovative ways.
If anything, the content companies demonstrated an increasing savvy in capitalizing on digital challengers. And what little damage the old guard sustained on new platforms seemed more self-inflicted than the result of any outside threat.
Right, there are no threats, the established industry is doing just fine, and we’re going to adapt and lead the future, because nothing dramatic happened in 2012! It’s a fairly long article, and I’m sorry if you get frustrated by Variety’s paywall, but it is worth reading to get an insight how the trade’s own rag thinks the business is going.
Frankly if I were Variety, I’d be more worried about my own future disruption.
Ironically, reading the article through, it makes good points showing where the disruption will come from.
2012 has been one of the most interesting years I’ve had in a long time. The year started with the release of 7toX for Final Cut Pro followed by Sync-N-Link X to mark our fourth piece of Final Cut Pro X software. Then came the intense planning for the Solar Odyssey journey and production, followed by the disappointing reality that it descended into. Fortunately a lot of good has come out of the experience. It’s also been a year where the maturing of Final Cut Pro X has won over more people, and the consensus is favoring big sensors. Terry Curren and I took a look back on the trends of 2012 and Larry Jordan also did a good take on the trends on his blog. This is much more my subjective take on my year.
I recall seeing the first of the training films from John Cleese’s then company, Video Arts and realizing that they were a cut above what I’d come to understand as “training” videos. High production values, great writing and amazing talent. John Cleese and the founding partners sold out decades ago, but current CEO Martin Addison spoke with beet.tv  about how the role of video has changed since Video Arts launched thirty years ago.
Addison says, “The role of video has changed. When we began it was very much a specialist market and the cost of entry of having a film camera was very high. That’s changed completely now. All of us have the potential to be filmmakers with a camera that we have in our pocket on our smartphone.”
Or, in other words, democratization has occurred and video is just another literacy.
Another episode of The Terence and Philip Show – Episode 48: Who should be using which NLE?
I recall this as a very interesting discussion and a good follow on from my own thoughts with Terence’s unique perspective.
One of the great problems with the traditional Studio System is the problem they have turning a profit on highly profitable movies. Of course, it’s just an accounting trick to line the pockets of the studios, at the expense of the talent who created the film.
Well, the partly-crowdsourced, Iron Sky, is now returning money to its crowdsourced funders out of the revenue of $10 million that the movie has already made.
The article of the same name at Techdirt starts with:
Just a few days after Joe Karaganis posted his response to the RIAA’s favorite researcher, Russ Crupnick of NPD Group, who suggested that Karaganis must be drunk and have little knowledge of statistics to publish a study showing that pirates tend to buy more — and then revealing his own numbers that showed the exact same thing — UK regulatory body Ofcom hascome out with a study saying the same exact thing again (found via TorrentFreak).
Yes, finally, another Terence and Philip Show! This time Terence grills Philip on what really happened during the Solar Odyssey, the production lessons learnt and what else has come out of the experience.