lol @MPAA :)

[DereX888]

I've sent complaints letter to Loews about ridiculous 18min of commercials before the movie started (like I haven't paid the full admission fee or what?). They apologized but said something about tough market etc BS how low profit margin their businesses operate (LOL!) but anyway they gave me a year-long free admission as a part of apology lol

theater DO operate in a very low profit margin .. give them a break in that respect ... recall that they make no money on most movies off the ticket price

Well, its not my problem if they don't make money, isn't it?
Perhaps theater owners should have start anti-monopoly and/or anti-cartel lobbying and campaign against MPAA and movie industry in general if thats how it is? Ask federal assistance in this matter? Im sure movie studios could spare few millions on each sucky star's wages per movie and help the theaters without which they won'y have most of the profit either...

But on the other hand most of theaters belong to corporations that are in the hands or belong directly to the same corporations financing movie production and hold shares in major studios... So whom are they kidding lol

[BJ_M]

But on the other hand most of theaters belong to corporations that are in the hands or belong directly to the same corporations financing movie production and hold shares in major studios

this is not true at all ....

and many movies nowdays make more money off dvd sales or other means than in the theater ...

[yoda313]

Hello,

I remember reading that if you don't buy pop or snacks during a movies first weekend run they lose money on the blockbusters. Apparently they movie producers get the mother load on the opening weekends and only give the leftovers after the initial push. So movies that hang around a couple of months with decent returns turn in to cash cows. It's movies like CATWOMAN that die a quick death that put the hurt on the theaters. They can't make up the money on the opening weekend and then it's jeered off the screens.

Kevin

[DereX888]

Hello,

I remember reading that if you don't buy pop or snacks during a movies first weekend run they lose money on the blockbusters. Apparently they movie producers get the mother load on the opening weekends and only give the leftovers after the initial push. So movies that hang around a couple of months with decent returns turn in to cash cows. It's movies like CATWOMAN that die a quick death that put the hurt on the theaters. They can't make up the money on the opening weekend and then it's jeered off the screens.

Kevin

IMO the problem is not with the movies like Catwoman that they don't make money. In the past (like when i was born or more) there were plenty of movies that played for a week or two only as well, so this hasn't changed.
Whats changed is the cartel-alike way of operating by distributors. I dont know much beside little pieces I read here and there, but from what I understand its not like you (as a theater owner) have a choic of titles; you can't get i.e. instant blockbuster like "Spidey 2" without buying stinker like "Catwoman" because they come bundled. And why it is like that? Because i.e. cartel like Sony Entertainment owns Paramount and bunch of other companies. Either you take what they give you, or you get nothing.
Its beyond monopoly.
But above applies to small independent theaters probably. Bcause on the other hand we have now mostly corporate-owned multiplexes, that basically belong to the same companies who fork the many for the movie production, advertising and distribution. It all has become a single monolitic factory, through all stages - from script approval to final editing, promoting, releasing in their own theaters and selling on their own PPV cable/sattv channels and dvds from their own labels as well. Simply - monopoly.
Thats why there is no longer room for even one single screen at your local multiplex to play any independent feature movie ever.

The only way to get independent or foreign movies nowadays is what they call "piracy" unfortunately.

[yoda313]

Hello,

It all has become a single monolitic factory, through all stages - from script approval to final editing, promoting, releasing in their own theaters and selling on their own PPV cable/sattv channels and dvds from their own labels as well. Simply - monopoly.

That's why I support LUCAS so much. He is HIS OWN COMPANY. He only uses FOX to release his movies. Everything he does he has total control of. He doesn't do market studies or take crap from board execs who don't WATCH MOVIES. He's a CORPORATE INDEPENDENT. He can make what he wants and that's why people dislike him for the prequels - they are the movies he wanted to make. Pure and simple

Kevin

[BJ_M]

DereX888 - that is not the way it works .....

i see your point -- but the industry does not work that way ....


catwomen accually made money btw --- even though it sucks .... took a lot longer though ..

[DereX888]

DereX888 - that is not the way it works .....

i see your point -- but the industry does not work that way ....


catwomen accually made money btw --- even though it sucks .... took a lot longer though ..

Catwoman and Spidey 2 were just examples, maybe not too accurate.
If given enough worldwide theatrical and tv distribution, even at fracture of the usual fee, any movie will make money at some point obviously.

From what I see from the 'inside' (I work for government agency thats related to movie industry, and few others) I think thats exactly how it works, if not worse... because sometimes some things that happened, or facts I heard about, can be explained only if there was one giant monopolistic corporation running the movie industry, otherwise many things make no sense.
Anyway - who cares

Most of movies stink, and if someone download it without paying - no harm is done, since it wouldn't have been bought anyway

He can make what he wants and that's why people dislike him for the prequels - they are the movies he wanted to make. Pure and simple

He's an artist. Wealthy artist (therefore independent). No one can tell a real artist what he should do, otherwise they are not artists anymore but just manufacturers.
I like his prequels. Someone else may hate them. As usual with any art - there are as many different opinions as there are consumers of this art (thinking ones ofcoz, not the parrots repeating the opinion read in Sunday Post etc )

[yoda313]

Hello,

He's an artist. Wealthy artist (therefore independent). No one can tell a real artist what he should do, otherwise they are not artists anymore but just manufacturers.
I like his prequels. Someone else may hate them. As usual with any art - there are as many different opinions as there are consumers of this art (thinking ones ofcoz, not the parrots repeating the opinion read in Sunday Post etc

HERE HERE! Thank you A very well informed consumer.

Kevin

[DereX888]

Hello,

He's an artist. Wealthy artist (therefore independent). No one can tell a real artist what he should do, otherwise they are not artists anymore but just manufacturers.
I like his prequels. Someone else may hate them. As usual with any art - there are as many different opinions as there are consumers of this art (thinking ones ofcoz, not the parrots repeating the opinion read in Sunday Post etc

HERE HERE! Thank you A very well informed consumer.

Kevin

someone should ban yoda from this forum
because whatever he touches it always ends up with star wars

[yoda313]

Hello,

someone should ban yoda from this forum
because whatever he touches it always ends up with star wars

HEY! Come on now....

Kevin

[DereX888]

Someone has posted this reply to MPAA:

[BJ_M]

prob. get sued for using a copyrighted image

[DereX888]

prob. get sued for using a copyrighted image

that wouldnt surprise me t all
I bet MPAA's logo is not only copyrighted, reserved and registered, but ******** like Valenti most likely would have patent it as well (i.e. the curvacy of the globe shape etc )

[lordsmurf]

It's trademarked, not copyrighted.

[BJ_M]

i was talking about the photo- not the logo ...

the logo mod could fall under satire and be exempt ..

[BJ_M]

OT in the OT -- but related a bit ....

"The Ugly Divorce of FM Radio and the Music Industry"
Jerry Del Colliano
Audio/Video News

In terms of marriages, the relationship between FM radio and the music industry was a long and successful one for more than 30 years. Today, emotions and business models are shattered, with both sides wondering what went wrong when things had been so good. Traditional terrestrial radio’s relationship with the record industry has been a mutually beneficial one that allowed the music industry to grow at unseen levels from the mid-‘60s until the mid-‘90s, resulting in a business that at its peak was selling in the neighborhood of 30 billion dollars of merchandise per year. Radio at the time was flying high like a dot com CEO the morning of his IPO. Thanks to Congress, radio was in the process of going from being a highly regulated industry to being highly deregulated, which allowed the acquisition of more than 1,000 radio stations by the same company when the historic limit was that one company could own was a total of seven FM, seven AM and seven TV stations. Radio’s feeding frenzy created zillionaires and gigantic players like Clear Channel and Infinity/Viacom. But it was specifically this unprecedented success and the arrogance it created that ate away what was left of the long-lasting marriage between radio and the music business.

In the days before MTV and the Internet, an artist absolutely needed radio to get his or her songs to the record-buying public. While FM radio is still a powerful medium today, it no longer reaches the record-buying public in the same ways. Nor does it carry the emotional branding that it did in the ‘60s and ‘70s. As hard as it is to believe for today’s youth, people actually used to associate themselves and their personal style with the radio station they listened to. That marketing power is long gone, but what remains is the immense pressure of running profitable radio stations under the corporate umbrella of gigantic public companies. My father, who is the former publisher of the radio trade publication Inside Radio and is now a clinical professor and Director of Executive Programs at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, notes the lack of any new successful radio formats in more than 10 years. When you think about it, he is right. Arrow and Jammin' Oldies are just that – a reinvention of an oldies format. ‘90s music is hardly a hit format.

Norm Pattiz, the founder of the syndication company Westwood One, years ago pointed out that radio has never earned more than seven percent of the overall advertising market, falling significantly behind other media, including print magazines, newspapers and especially television. In a recent interview with Audio Video Revolution, Pattiz noted, “Since radio consolidation in the late 1990s, radio’s ad revenue has increased at a respectable rate, with the overall earnings increasing from around 15 billion per year in 1996 to closer to 20 billion today.” Part of the growth comes from the effects of the vast economies of scale from the consolidation of radio companies. If one group broadcasts the same classic rock station to 55 different cities, then one person or a small team of people can program all of those stations, instead of having one well-paid program director in each city. The savings to the radio group are vast, but there is also a price, as the listeners now have more and more ways to get their musical entertainment. FM radio has in many cases added more and more ads per commercial break, allowing them more inventory to sell. Sit through a commercial set during the Howard Stern Show and you could develop hemorrhoids. Pattiz noted that, in terms of the business model of radio today, “[Due to] the consolidation of radio companies’ sales forces, lower-rated stations have been re-branded to reach niche audiences, thus getting premium ad rates that their more highly rated sister stations get.” All of these factors have helped radio to stabilize as a business that can expect to see at best, conservative growth in the coming years. Even optimists agree radio will likely never see the boom that it had in the late 1990s, even in the unlikely event of more deregulation being passed by Congress. Competition for the youngest and most desirable listeners is getting more and more stiff every day from players ranging from commercial-free satellite radio to increasingly good Internet radio stations available on your PC to people swapping out their trusty old FM Walkman for an Apple iPod or other MP3 device.

The record industry hasn’t had it as good as radio in recent years. While radio was booming in the late ‘90s, the music business was dealing with new technology the only way it has historically known how to do – by fighting anything new. It didn’t take long after high-speed broadband Internet services became commercially available for Napster to poke its ugly head into the marketplace. The business model of selling an entire album of songs was immediately under duress and the record industry started suing like mad. They sued peer-to-peer (p-2-p) sites. They sued end users. They sued everybody. And none of it worked. Today, there isn’t a song you can’t steal from a p-2-p system. Lackluster CD sales, although up just slightly in 2004 after several years of decline, are forcing record companies to do all they can do to avoid more years of decline. When given the chance to add significant value to the discs they sold, the music industry – specifically the major labels – waged a feeble format war, leaving both SACD and DVD-Audio bleeding in the gutter to die. DualDisc, a format compatible with CD and DVD-Video, never seemed to even make it off the launch pad in late 2004. All of these factors left the music industry playing the role of the battered wife, complete with the black eye and deeply wounded emotions.

The value proposition of selling an album with one or two hit songs on a $16.95 disc is no longer competitive with the music consumers, especially the all-important Gen Y audience. DVD-Video movies cost a little more than $20 and offer an entire feature film containing an audio and video experience that lasts over two hours. Instead of embracing music in surround sound and higher resolutions at lower prices, the music business is now trying to reinvent itself by selling songs one at a time on legal download sites. Some progress is being made on that front, but it will always be competing with free downloads – a tough battle. Until the music business addresses increasing the quality and the value of their discs, they will be losing market share year after year as they cling on to the antiquated compact disc and continue to believe in the questionable download model. Hollywood movie studios, in contrast, are getting ready to sell all of their catalog movies all over again on either Blu-Ray, HD-DVD and.or Windows Media 10. High-definition video is a good enough reason for mainstream consumers to buy their movie collections all over again. Little mention of how to sell music on Blu-Ray or HD-DVD has been made public, despite the format’s likely launch later in 2005.

Healing Deep Wounds in the Relationship Between Radio and the Music Industry
Radio needs the music business to provide it with the content that keeps people tuning in. Oldies formats are great but people, especially younger listeners, can tire of the same 300 songs over and over. Perhaps new formats like world pop music or a better electronic music format would lure younger listeners back to radio? But how does radio launch these new formats without the help of the record industry – a business model that holds radio stations hostage with crooked independent promotion deals and other mean-spirited business practices? Much like Peaches and Herb suggested, they need to get “Reunited” and they need to do it fast.

The record business is unquestionably its own worst enemy, but it needs to look to their former best friend, FM radio, as a way out of their troubles. They need to find a way to sell music on discs that are an excellent value and can compete favorably with HDTV-oriented discs that are only months away from hitting store shelves with two-hour-long movies configured for consumers’ enjoyment. Radio offers free advertising - worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year - to the music business, which is essential in breaking and developing new artists, even with new broadcast technologies like Internet and satellite radio. If major labels focused more on creating and nurturing talent, as they did when they were most successful, and less on fighting over signing high-priced established bands and has-been solo artists, they would be able to offer radio the better content they crave. More records are guaranteed to be sold. More people would tune in for morning and afternoon drive radio. Radio and the music business would both win, no matter what the new technology challengers do.

Apple iPods are not going away, nor is peer-to-peer file sharing or any of the other technologies that have changed the musical landscape. But after a little counseling, a little self-improvement and some open-mindedness, the marriage of radio and the music industry have the possibility of working things out, with the biggest winner being people like us – music lovers.

[DereX888]

Well, radiostations did their part in the devolpment of the modern society.
Today theyre as unimportant as newspapers for young people.
Internet took over their role, and internet will eradicate radiostations and newspapers within this generation.
Its a cry of the lambs.
FM Radios are gone away the way SW and AM radios did, and nothing can stop that. Once majority of households have really fast internet connections (not the so called "high speed" cables or ADSLs with 100-200kbps "speeds" lol) internet will reduce broadcast tv to the same unimportant levels.

Do you remember when was the last time you bought a paper because you wanted to read the news?
Or when is the last time you've turned on radio because you were waiting for a specific programm on a specific station?
I sure most of us here cant remember it - years ago, or never (if youre younger than 25)


Im more curious in what will replace internet in the next 25-30 years?

[Cobra]

Do you think the Internet will ever be replaced as such, or will it just evolve? If the latter, do you think it will be evolving steadily or will new technologies cause "spurts" in evolution?

I hope it gets an immune system soon. Nail spam and viruses...

[DereX888]

Do you think the Internet will ever be replaced as such, or will it just evolve? If the latter, do you think it will be evolving steadily or will new technologies cause "spurts" in evolution?

I hope it gets an immune system soon. Nail spam and viruses...

Tough questions
I won't even speculate there, Im too stupid

10 years ago I was rather sure that analog video will be expanding to be stored on some super-high resolution triple-capacity LDs, eventually it will be stored on some modified DATs, hehe
No one could have imagined back then that the mass-produced storage devices will become so cheap and the video compression hardware and software will become so easy (and cheap) and so popular and available on any home computers (again - 20 years ago no one predicted that every home will have PC either, at least not during the writer's lifetime, it was reserved for geeks only).

Certainly everything will be cheaper, better quality, smaller and faster - thats the only prediction I could bet on

What do you think?

[lordsmurf]

I think technology will make avatars like yours look even more real.

[bazooka]

Do you think the Internet will ever be replaced as such, or will it just evolve?

Internet Mark 2 and Lamda rail

[DereX888]

I think technology will make avatars like yours look even more real.

smurfie, but such technology exists already!
Real breakthrough would be to see avatar like yours become real 3D character (as in real life)

Do you think the Internet will ever be replaced as such, or will it just evolve?

Internet Mark 2 and Lamda rail

directly brain-embeeded, or still using old fashion optical transfer to the brain (aka eyes) and onscreen GUIs?