Have you ever wanted to see an independent film but were unable to because it’s only playing in New York and Los Angeles, places you don’t live? Or wished that you could experience a classic like “The Godfather” not in your living room, but on the big screen? Well you’re in luck — that is, if you’re in Brazil, home of MovieMobz.

According to founder and CEO Fabio Lima, the idea behind MovieMobz is to eliminate the traditional notion of theatrical windows for movies while opening up independent and art house movies to communities that might not otherwise get them — all while driving additional revenue. And it’s an idea that may be coming soon to a theater near you.

At first, the idea of cinema on demand seems completely impractical. Theaters are physical spaces with screen and seat limitations that only play so many movies in a given day. How could programming them be left to the masses?

It starts with Lima’s other company, Rain Network. A digital distribution system for theaters in Brazil, Rain essentially acts like a virtual private network (VPN), connecting art house theaters in 18 different cities. Currently some 62 theater complexes with 160 screens are on the system.

Those Rain theaters are connected to a central server running proprietary software that houses the movies and distributes them along with trailers and ads. Feature-length digital movies are upwards of around 300 GB, so Rain uses a private BitTorrent system on its network to speed up film delivery to the theaters and put them in front of movie watchers.

But first, MovieMobz organizes those movie watchers. It currently has 400 independent Brazilian and international films in its library. So let’s say a user wants to see “Film X” at a Rain-networked theater. That user “mobilizes” the film by sending a message to the MovieMobz community online, saying, “I want to see ‘Film X’ at this theater!” People from the community who also want to see “Film X” vote for it as well, and once enough people have voted, the screening is booked.

The number of votes it takes to secure a showing depends on the theater and the number of tickets usually sold there. For example, if a theater has 120 seats, and on any given Monday sells some 30 tickets, it will only take 40 MovieMobzters to secure a screening. And according to Lima, typically two people show up for every one MovieMobzter saying they’ll attend.

MovieMobz has been up and running for just eight weeks. In that time, 5,600 people have signed up for the service, what Lima called “very, very early adopters.” Two thousand mobilizations have been initiated and there have been 50 mobilized screenings — complete with highly targeted ads based on demographic and geographic data that MovieMobz has gathered about the viewers.

Will MovieMobz make it to the U.S.? “We want to go to the U.S. as soon as possible,” Lima said.

U.S. theaters are in the midst of a digital conversion that would open up such a possibility. There are 38,000 theater screens in the U.S., 5,000 of which have been converted to digital, according to the National Association of Theater Owners. Roughly 30,000 more screens will make the transition over the next 5-10 years.

According to Bud Mayo, CEO of Access Integrated Technologies, a company that helps convert theaters, digital cinemas open up new possibilities. “There’s opportunity to create incremental revenue, the opportunity to experiment,” said Mayo, who said that movie theater seats remain empty 85 to 90 percent of the time.

Going digital also means that people could revisit favorite older films on the big screen. “With film, because you have to spend a lot of money to maintain and ship the prints, showing catalog movies is not feasible,” said Mark Christiansen, executive vice president of operations for Paramount Pictures. “With digital you can move movies inexpensively, and they can be played at low cost, and you could make a profit.”

To our knowledge, MovieMobz is the first service of its kind. Amazon-owned Withoutabox offers a service called Critical Mass Ticketing that will let filmmakers and distributors book theaters, but the company declined to provide details for this article.

For the time being, DVDs and plasma screens will be the only way to watch the films you want. But maybe someday we’ll all be MovieMobzters.

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com.

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Posted by Chris Albrecht on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  5 Comments
Tags: MovieMobz, Online video

The image of a bedtime-avoiding youngster huddled under blankets with a flashlight and comic book might soon be joined by that of a kid thrilling to a superhero’s latest adventures on a laptop tucked under the covers.

Just like music, movies and TV shows, comic books are going digital. But unlike other media migrations, the jump from ink to bits significantly changes the nature of a comic book. “Ours is different from video because their final product looks exactly the same,” said Dan Buckley, president of publishing at Marvel Entertainment. “The DVD is the same as if you downloaded it.”

Comics, however, must go from a tactile, paper experience to a hands-free digital one, and unlike text-only books, comic narratives are told through sequential art; how the panels are laid out is just as important as what’s in them. Both Marvel and DC Comics are experimenting with different approaches to presenting comics on the web as they try to figure out what consumers want — and what they’ll pay for.

While sales of traditional entertainment forms like music CDs and DVDs have decreased or flattened, there hasn’t been a similar sea change forcing the comics industry to go digital — the paper-based comics business is still doing well. Combined sales of graphic novels and comic books in the U.S. and Canada hit $705 million in 2007 — a 10 percent bump up from 2006 — and sales of graphic novels have quintupled since 2001.

So if demand is still high for print, what’s driving the digital moves? Opportunity. “We want people to see these stories through as many distribution points as possible,” Buckley said. So Marvel is trying out a number of different digital formats for its properties. Last year, the company launched Digital Comics Unlimited, a subscription-based service that charges $50 a year for access to more than 4,000 (soon to hit 5,000) comic books online. Since launch, Buckley said Marvel has learned quite a bit. “The print and digital businesses complement each other,” he said. “One is not cannibalizing the other.”

The company is also trying its hand at so-called motion comics, which use existing comic panels but give them an animated feel through pans and zooms or by giving characters simple movement; voice actors provide the dialog. Marvel created a 25-episode motion comic out of “N,” a short story by Stephen King, as a promotion for “Just After Sunset,” his upcoming collection of short stories; free episodes are being released every weekday until August 29. The company has also tested motion comics out on some of its bigger-name properties like Ultimate Spider-Man.

Rival comic book powerhouse DC Comics and parent company Warner Bros. are jumping into the deep end when it comes to motion comics, releasing two high-profile properties, Watchmen and Batman Adventures: Mad Love, as motion comics. Watchmen, which will promote the upcoming feature film version, debuted exclusively on iTunes, with episodes costing $1.99 a pop, while Batman Adventures is available on Microsoft’s Xbox Live Marketplace (in high-definition) for roughly $1.75 per episode and on Verizon VCast as part of a subscriber’s plan.

Both digital and motion comics could help companies monetize their rich back catalogs for a relatively low cost or promote upcoming film properties and printed collected works of a particular title. But in a time when consumers can watch ad-supported TV and movies for free online, will people pony up for digital comics?

Neither Marvel or DC would provide any sales or subscription numbers. Marvel offers some digital comics online for free, but says it’s proceeding cautiously. “We’re still quibbling about what the primary form of revenue will be,” Buckley said when asked about ad-supported offerings. Marvel is also concerned about the impact of the move on the niche retailers like hobby shops that still sell comic books. “We don’t want to do anything to hurt anybody in the short term,” said Buckley.

But James Sime, owner of the Isotope comic book store in San Francisco, isn’t too worried about the impact of digital comics on his business. Sime says he believes there’s a great opportunity for comics retailers and publishers to learn from mistakes of the ailing music industry.

According to ICV2, a trade publisher that monitors the business of comics and pop culture, trade paperbacks (collections of single issues in one book) generated $375 million in 2007 and single issues did $330 million that same year. Though Sime doesn’t think single issues sales will go away, he envisions a scenario in which they are moved from print to online as promotion for the trade paperback.

“I’m all about it,” said Sime. “People are excited about comics. The more people get them into their hand, the more they read them — the Internet is a great facilitator for that.”

The article originally appeared on BusinessWeek.com.

Slideshow: Comic book heroes go digital

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Posted by Chris Albrecht on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  8 Comments
Tags: DC Comics, Isotope, Marvel Entertainment

To some, a web site like Craigslist asking you to verify that you are indeed a human by retyping distorted, nonsensical words is irritating. But the next time you do it, you could be helping to fill in some historical blanks.

NPR ran a story yesterday on Luis von Ahn, assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the guys who helped develop the CAPTCHA technology. The short version: Efforts to digitize (really) old books and newspapers were being hampered by faded ink that confounded OCR software. The solution von Ahn came up with was to use the words that the software couldn’t recognize and insert them into these so-called reCAPTCHAs and use the power of human brains to decipher them. CAPTCHAs serve up two words, one is the security word, the other goes toward the book digitization effort. It sounded interesting, so I called von Ahn to find out more.

Here’s how it works. The New York Times is working to digitize all of its issues starting way back in 1851. It starts by scanning every single page as an image. That’s where reCAPTCHA comes in. It runs two optical character recognition (OCR) programs to turn all of those images of pages into text. Different OCR programs tend to make different mistakes. When the two programs disagree on a word, that word is plucked out and distributed among CAPTCHA security programs spread out across 45,000 web sites like Craigslist and TicketMaster.

Human beings then look at the words as part of the CAPTCHA security measure and do the deciphering by retyping what they think the mangled word is. Depending on the word, as little as two or three people agreeing on what it is is enough to figure it out. The word is then sent back to the New York Times to be reinserted into the text version of the image.

Initially, this project was part of Carnegie Mellon, but von Ahn said that they are spinning out reCAPTCHA as its own company. While The New York Times is paying to use the service, reCAPTCHA is also doing work free of charge for the Internet Archive’s project to digitize every book published before 1980.

But von Ahn is looking beyond just re-typing words as security measures. He says that his team has tried using images and having people type what they see. The problem, von Ahn says, is that people don’t spell very well, so even though the image is of a “cat” people could spell “kat” and not answer the question correctly. ReCAPTCHA is also expanding into audio, and using the audio version of CAPTCHAs to have people listen to and decipher words from garbled old recordings or closed captioning transcriptions.

The idea of taking a necessary evil like spam prevention and turning it into something useful is a good one. Who knew selling my old digital camera on Craigslist was actually an act of historical preservation?

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Europe Struggles With Three Strikes, Fox Exec Wants It Anyway NewTeeVee – by Janko Roettgers "; Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Dealing With the Avalanches In Life and Business WebWorkerDaily – by Amber Riviere ";

Posted by Chris Albrecht on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  11 Comments
Tags: CAPTCHA, New York Times, reCAPTCHA, TicketMaster

Let’s just admit it: “Your Love” by one-hit wonder The Outfield still holds up, more than 20 years on. Its catchy melody is rivaled only by the inability to sing in the same high-pitch as the lead singer. But will its sing-along-ability be enough to get you to buy QuickBooks?

You have to give Intuit an “A” for effort. There is nothing fun about any of its products, but that isn’t stopping the company from trying (reallllllly trying) to add a little levity to bookkeeping. This week it launched the Jingle Generator, a goofy online service that basically lets businesses insert their name into a modified cover version of “Your Love.” Intuit hired a dead ringer for the vocals (I had to ask a spokesperson if they got the real band — not totally implausible because really, what is The Outfield doing nowadays?).

Unfortunately, the novelty and the nostalgia wears thin pretty quickly. At the site, “famous” record producer “Tommy Silk” walks you through the recording session where you choose your industry and insert the name of your company. Moments later your track is complete, with your corporate information shoehorned (badly) into the song. I chose the “blogging” song (hear the finished version here) which features such great lyrics as:

I wonder what I’m gonna blog about today There’s so many words to choose from I wanna spread some news straight your way You know I’d like to spark a conversation

I just wanna blog my thoughts today (Blog Name) I’m just gonna blog for you today (Blog Name)

After reading won’t you post a comment for sure I hope the topics were helpful Give me a Digg and you’ll get plenty more Please make sure that you check our site out

Intuit might have been better off getting some lyrical help from another 80s icon — like Weird Al.

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Posted by Chris Albrecht on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  2 Comments
Tags: Intuit

We’ve talked before that metered access is a boneheaded idea that is bad for innovation, bad for Microsoft and Google, and ultimately bad for you. Until today, the idea seemed like an eventuality, not an immediate reality. But then NBC and TonicTV launched a new service that lets you download video from the Olympics and watch it offline. Right next to the installation instructions was this “important”note:

That’s the first warning I’ve seen about a particular service not being recommended for folks with metered broadband access. But the real bummer? That is just a taste of things to come — especially if you’re a fan of video services like Hulu.

We’re not even talking P2P throttling, just straight video consumption. In fact, P2P isn’t even a huge deal for networks anymore (but not because of that slap on the wrist the FCC gave Comcast). DSLReports writes that as of June “AT&T traffic was about 1/3 Web (non video/audio streams), 1/3 Web video/audio streams, and 1/5 P2P.” Those audio and video streams — that’s Hulu and YouTube. And as they provide more content at higher quality, those streams are only going to increase.

If metered access becomes standard, there will come a day when you spend less time watching videos, and more time counting the number of videos you watched to avoid going over your cap.

You have been warned.

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Posted by Chris Albrecht on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  60 Comments
Tags: AT&T, NBC, Olympics, TonicTV

My weekend walks with the dog have turned from quiet reveries into trips through a neighborhood bazaar. Driveway after driveway is packed with garage sales and people selling old DVD players, lamps, old books, anything, everything. Part of this is a natural summer decluttering ritual, but with gas and food prices through the roof, it’s seems like it’s becoming a quick way to make a little extra scratch.

My curiosity was piqued by this anecdotal evidence, so I decided to check with the online gurus of getting rid of your crap, Craigslist, to see if they had any data that showed a similar spike in activity. The numbers speak for themselves. There were a total of 129,653 garage sales posted to Craigslist nationwide in May of 2007. In May 2008 there were 252,561. And while that number dipped during the winter months (too cold to sit outside), it really took off after March.

But people aren’t just hawking their junk on their front lawns; there’s also been a big increase in the number of general “For Sale” postings. There was a total of 888,7291 “For Sale” posts on Craigslist nationwide in June of 2007, that number rose to 17,795,940 in June of 2008. (A Craigslist rep said June is a little lower than other months because it only has 30 days.) That number has been on a pretty steady incline, but it too saw a big jump from February to March.

What are people selling? The top five items for sale on Craigslist are:

1. cars/trucks
2. furniture
3. electronics
4. baby/kid stuff
5. motorcycles

I also contacted eBay to see if it had similar data, but didn’t hear back.

This data won’t change the world, but it gives us an interesting peek into it — and into our neighbor’s yard.

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Europe Struggles With Three Strikes, Fox Exec Wants It Anyway NewTeeVee – by Janko Roettgers "; Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Dealing With the Avalanches In Life and Business WebWorkerDaily – by Amber Riviere ";

Posted by Chris Albrecht on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  23 Comments
Tags: Craigslist