The news spread on April 1st, and was widely reported as being no joke.
It still seemed so…ridiculous.
And yet, starting with the Liam Neeson thriller Unknown (updated, 4/21: or perhaps it’s the Adam Sandler comedy Just Go With It, which now appears to be the first film to show up in a “test” listing), the partnership between DirecTV and Comcast known as Home Premiere will uncork a new on-demand service allowing viewers to watch certain feature film releases two months after their theatrical opening. Many studios are on board. Movie theater owners are angry. The deal? The subscriber will have access to said movie for a period of some (2-3?) days.
Cost? Thirty dollars.
That’s $30 for each movie. Am I the only one in the room that thinks this is preposterous? (That’s a rhetorical question: I’m not.)
Yes, no one is thrilled with the rising price of big-screen tickets, but when you compare the movies to live theater, we’re still talking about a pretty good bargain. Movies still reign as the entertainment of the “common people.”
Some don’t cotton to what they perceive as an increase in bad manners in the movie house, but I maintain that’s (in part at least) inversely proportional to the quality of the movie. Quality of movie goes down, bad behavior goes up. Concessions are absurdly expensive—as I discovered when I purchased my first (and last) Six Dollar Popcorn. It can be tough to get out when you’ve got young kids.
None of those things argue for the Home Premiere service as it’s currently being promoted, and there are simple (and what I would think to be impossibly too huge to miss) observations to be made as to why I’m not going to be the only person who thinks this “deal” is an enormous dud:
Movies function in their various outlets in three distinct but not completely exclusive ways—as experience, product, and content. In a theatrical run, the primary appeal of a motion picture is one of experience (the big big screen or the intimacy of an art house, the crowd/communal experience, a night out, the trailers, etc.); when you get to home video, we’re talking about movies primarily as a product (Super-8 film reel, VHS, LaserDisc, Blu-ray); when films are exhibited/screened over your cable television or your computer, movies become mainly content.
Let’s start with the weakest argument first, the one centered around movies as experience:
When you decide to watch a movie for the first time at home rather than the way it was “meant to be seen” by its creators—in a theater, with a crowd—then you are trading away that superior experience. We can quibble about how you may regard it as being a diminished experience (see above, rude audience members and inflated concession stand prices), but just in terms of the quality of presentation, you cannot surpass the unique appeal of the theatrical venue no matter the size of your large-screen set nor the tricked-out nature of your sound system. There are naturally exceptions to this rule, what with projection bulbs set too dimly or crackling/malfunctioning speakers, etc., but I’m talking about in the main, be it a huge multiplex or tiny art house.
Cost-wise, you may have something if you are greater than a two-person household and we’re factoring in babysitting fees along with ticket prices. But, if you are the kind of person who must or is willing to wait two months to see the hot-ticket movie, my bet is you are the kind of person who will recognize the value of waiting a mere two months or so more to spend the same amount of money to own the film as a product and enjoy the advantages that come with that ownership.
Which brings us to the idea of product. A $30 DVD or Blu-ray (and there are so, so many that come much cheaper than that) is yours. Period. You watch it again and again and again (should you wish) anytime, anywhere there is a compliant device. There are often special features. You can loan it to family members. Can this on-demand movie be downloaded to your iPod or sent over the Internet to a friend? You have exactly zero lasting product when you spend that same amount of money for on-demand.
The on-demand experience occurs in a sphere where movies can be safely classified primarily as content. Which now brings us to the really, really easy equation. Pick whatever type of cable service you want, basic plus one premium, let’s say. What are you paying–$100-some dollars a month? For that you get probably hundreds of channels with TV, film, sports, news content running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all month.
Are you now ready to pay roughly one-third of that same price for a single two-hour film? To possess data that gets “returned” in a couple of days? What family member in charge of the checkbook is going to think that makes the remotest bit of good sense?
This news made me think of a passage early in futurist Ray Kurzweil‘s The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, a book filled with both incredible statistics about the speed of technological advance and appealing, if often highly questionable and utopian, predictions about the future.
The section of the book I’m referring to is called “The S-Curve of a Technology as Expressed in Its Life Cycle.” This is extremely relevant when it comes to thinking about the evolution of cinematic entertainment, especially as it relates to what is persistently advertised as the ever-imminent twin demise of theatrical exhibition and what we’ll call movies-as-product, meaning produced and packaged in some solid but portable format that you buy and then own.
Let’s pick up Kurzweil’s outline of “The Life Cycle of a Technology” towards the end of the fourth stage (emphasis mine):
“Although it may continue to evolve, the technology now has a life of its own and has become an established part of the community. It may become so interwoven in the fabric of life that it appears to many observers that it will last forever. This creates an interesting drama when the next stage arrives, which I call the stage of the false pretenders.”
Kurzweil’s take is that once a technology reaches its fullest maturity, there are a variety of unsuccessful fits and starts towards its next iteration—these are the “false pretenders,” often heralded as ready to dethrone entrenched tradition and put everybody invested in “the old ways” out of business forever. The false pretender may, at first, appear to have some shiny advantages over the mature technology, but it (and others) ultimately fail over and over again due to any number of overlooked flaws and weaknesses…until the technology actually does evolve.
We are at the dawn of the age of false pretenders in terms of the next stage of disseminating motion picture content to the masses. People make a mistake in being certain things are going to shift as suddenly away from product and towards pure content as they did with music. (The same discussions are going on about magazines and books. Oh, don’t get me started) You can see attempts to change the way business is done sprouting up everywhere, from Hulu to Facebook to this. It shouldn’t be any mystery why studios are flailing all over the place searching for a magic bullet that will obviate their obligation to manufacture physical products in order to continue their revenue streams.
Before there’s any genuine threat to movies-as-product, though, you need deep catalog (as in, a Library of Alexandria’s worth of older movies), effective if not total portability, and a price that makes sense. At the very, very least. You may also need to arrive at the time when the “collector’s” sensibility, at least around movies, vanishes (or should I say dies off?). And I say this not just because my current employment situation depends upon the correctness of that assessment, I say it as an enthusiastic consumer of the material in question.
I’m no Hollywood Nostradamus, but the $30 movie rental seems like a pretty easy call.
“My Home Premiere bill is HOW much?!?”