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Takeaways from The Raven, and other online shorts that went Hollywood

Liz Shannon Miller — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 07:00:58 +0000

There’s no one way for a film to get made, or a filmmaker to be discovered — but proving that you know how to direct something, even a short film, seems like a good way to start.

The latest example of a short film evolving into a feature length project is The Raven, which began life as a 2010 online video directed by Ricardo de Montreuil, and is now in development as a feature film for Universal. The premise: A telekinetic rebel with some sweet parkour skills goes on the run from a futuristic LAPD.

While the film was originally being developed as a vehicle for producer Mark Wahlberg, Deadline reported this week that The Raven is looking to sign Hunger Games star Liam Helmsworth for the lead — bringing the dystopian sci-fi action project that much closer to multiplexes.

Here are some key takeaways from The Raven‘s success:

You never know what will get you some attention

De Montreuil is an established director on the festival circuit, having already directed three feature films, including the 2008 Mancora, which was screened at both the Sundance and SXSW film festivals. But it’s this $5,000 short, shot in 48 hours, that pushed him towards directing his first big studio picture.

Sometimes the path of a successful online short film takes you directly to a feature — take the example of Neill Blomkamp, whose short film Alive In Joburg eventually evolved into the Oscar-nominated 2009 film District 9.

But other times it’s less direct, as with former Totally Rad Show host Dan Trachtenberg, who made a big splash in 2011 with a short inspired by the video game Portal.

While a Portal feature remains elusive, the buzz that resulted lead Trachtenberg to another project — directing the adaptation of Y The Last Man, an award-winning graphic novel series that has equal fanboy appeal.

The Raven is more likely on the Blomkamp track than the Trachtenberg track, but even if a feature version is never produced, De Montreuil has gotten his foot inside the door.

Making movies really does take a long time

The Raven was originally posted on April 21, 2010, and was picked up by film blogs a few days later.

But the deal with Universal didn’t come through until July 2010, and between then and now there have been few updates. Even for projects that could technically be considered success stories, the pace of the studio system requires no shortage of patience.

Put it all out there

The Raven was released simultaneously on both YouTube and Vimeo, and across both sites the description is simple and to the point — it lays out the project’s logline, the cast and crew, the tools used to create the short, and a contact email for the creator.

And the most important fact laid out is the budget for the project: $5,000, which is impressive given the level of digital effects involved.

In addition to the short film, the official Facebook page contains news updates and concept art for the future tech featured in the project, and a short behind the scenes video showcases some of the stunt work that gives the project a human edge.

All of this leads to a concept of the short film as more than a short film — as a prototype for a much larger project. Which, for filmmakers interested in this approach, is the most valuable takeaway of all.

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Vimeo on Demand launches to let creators charge for videos

Laura Hazard Owen — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 13:00:40 +0000

Online video site Vimeo is rolling out tools to let creators charge for their content, the company plans to announce Tuesday at SXSW.

The move into paid video distribution is a “natural next step” for Vimeo, CEO Kerry Trainor told me, following the launch of a “tip jar” feature last September. The new feature is called “Vimeo on Demand” and is available to creators with Vimeo Pro memberships (which are aimed at professionals, cost $199 a year and offer options like more video storage and HD playback).

Creators control price for their videos but have to charge at least $0.99. There’s a 90-10 revenue split after Paypal or credit card transaction fees, with creators taking 90 percent.

Creators also control geographic distribution and whether their content is streaming-only or downloadable. They can put it up for sale on Vimeo.com, on their own website, or both. If they choose to enable downloading, the format is DRM-free MP4.

YouTube is reportedly planning to start offering subscriptions as an additional monetization vehicle for creators. For now, Trainor said, Vimeo isn’t looking at any type of subscription offering: “The feature is targeted toward the creator, and there are no plans for a viewer package.”

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Another way to get paid for your content: Dynamo goes white label for creators

Liz Shannon Miller — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 17:51:53 +0000

Pivot alert: Dynamo, one of the first companies to make pay-to-play possible for independent creators, is taking a new approach.

Beginning in January, according to founder Rob Millis, the Dynamo player will no longer be open to any creators wishing to charge users for their content — instead, the company will be refocusing on white label services for those in need of digital distribution.

“Really, for us it’s about how the market doesn’t need a public option like Dynamo anymore — it makes more sense to go the private contract path,” Millis said via phone. “It’s been our best users and their needs who have driven this decision — our biggest users are people asking for more tailored develpment.”

Dynamo will continue to support existing projects that earn at least $100 a month — those not generating sales and continuing to use Dynamo as an archival player will have to pay a monthly fee to continue doing so. Future customers will have to contract with the company to distribute via the Dynamo player.

However, those contracts come with the options of broader services, such as iTunes distribution or custom app development. “You have professionals going to three different firms to get all these things, but we have enough expertise in these fields — we’d like to be a one stop shop,” Millis said.

Founded in 2009, Dynamo was early to the pay-to-play business model — its proprietary player, beta-launched in May 2010, let creators set the pricing and terms for their content, with a 70/30 profit split.

“Online revenue at that point was a 50 percent split with advertisers, with no real transparency,” Millis said. “Now, after being out for a few years, the market has a few options out there.”

Those options include companies such as VHX and Chill, which have both in the last few months refocused on creating marketplaces for paid content. But while Millis mentioned being intrigued by them — “VHX and Chill have interesting things they’re doing with destination sites and introducing people to content” — the company he was really interested in seeing move further into the paid content space was Vimeo.

“We’ve been waiting for them to get into this market for four years now,” he said. “If they take it seriously and move away from the tip jar beta testing approach, I’m much more confident about where Vimeo is in five years than Chill is in three years.”

When asked if there were things he’d have done differently over the course of Dynamo’s development, Millis said that while he would have made the same decisions, he might have made them faster.

He also mentioned that he “completely overestimated the foresight and innovation within Hollywood. It’s an industry and community that really wants to be more innovative but doesn’t know how to. It’s why Dynamo making changes, to help.”

“You beat piracy by making content available easily at a reasonable price,” he added. “That’s something the big media companies haven’t figured out yet.”

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Vimeo creates new tools to support and pay video makers

Om Malik — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 13:00:53 +0000

Click to enlarge the graphic

Vimeo, the New York-based video hosting site that benefited from the growing maker and creator movements, is launching new ways for video makers to make money. The first tool is called Tip Jar, and it allows viewers to contribute money and support creators of video, who then get 85 percent of the amount donated. It can be activated by members of Vimeo Plus and Vimeo Pro, Vimeo’s paid services. (I wrote about Vimeo’s resurgence yesterday.)

Vimeo is also planning to launch a new pay-to-view service that will let content creators put their work behind a paywall. A beta version will launch with limited set of feature films, and it will be made available to Vimeo Pro subscribers in early 2013. This is a smart move for the company, which has recently broken into the top 10 of web video destinations. It is a good way for the company to keep attracting independent video content creators.

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Musicplayr: cross-platform harmony for web music

David Meyer — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 10:00:41 +0000

Right now it feels as if the web’s entering a golden age for music lovers, not just because of the advent of new distribution models, but also because services such as YouTube and SoundCloud offer an easy way to embed tracks and even playlists on pretty much any kind of page.

The problem is that most things are in silos and there’s precious little in the way of cross-platform continuity for the listener. Which is why Musicplayr, a Berlin/Cologne-based service that offers just that for most free online music, sounds pretty good right now.

Musicplayr users can pull in content from all sorts of free music platforms, both audio and video, to create a unified playlist. The site’s player is itself embeddable, and on Thursday it got a whole lot prettier: audio-only tracks now get accompanying pictures, and the player window can also now be continuously visible. The startup calls it “eye candy for the ears”.

If you want to run off and check it out before reading further, fire off an email to gigaom@musicplayr.com – the first 200 to do so will get an invite. Yes, it’s not entirely open at the moment, but those who are already in can invite others.

“Technically we only store the deep links – we are not altering or caching this content,” co-founder Thorsten Lüttger told me. “We want to make all three parties happy – one party is the consumers, the others are the labels and the producers-slash-artists. All of them have to be happy. The content owner stays in control.”

Avoiding the GEMA trap

The legality of Musicplayr’s approach has been a careful consideration for Lüttger and co-founder Stefan Vosskötter. However, one party Musicplayr hasn’t even bothered approaching is Germany’s much-loathed music rights collection society, GEMA, a.k.a. the organisation that broke YouTube for Germans. As far as Lüttger is concerned, it doesn’t matter too much what GEMA makes of the startup’s business model when the company is thinking about being a global product.

“We can build this model without Germany as well,” he said. “Technically we are a bookmark service – what we are doing is open. The songs GEMA has taken down from YouTube we [automatically] do not play in Germany, but the moment you cross the border into the Netherlands, we play it for you. It’s something where the German consumer has to suffer and it’s not our mission to solve this problem. It has to be solved between GEMA and those providers; we’re just the middleman.”

Brave words. So if Germany’s not necessarily Musicplayr’s main focus, where is? Western Europe and the U.S., apparently. Lüttger believes services such Spotify, which also offers an embeddable player, have given people a taste of the idea already.

However, he pointed out that Spotify’s player is “basically a download link to their app”, whereas people listening to someone’s embedded Musicplayr don’t need to download anything.

“I believe Spotify is opening up people’s minds that you do not need to own music. This all-you-can-eat flat rate is awesome, and I’m glad they’re successful,” he said. “We are going even further, because we help you archive all freely available content.”

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Pinterest adds support for Slideshare, Etsy, Kickstarter, Soundcloud

Laura Hazard Owen — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 14:19:58 +0000

Image-sharing site Pinterest will now automatically attribute content pinned from 500px (photos), Kickstarter (projects), Etsy, SlideShare (presentations) and SoundCloud (sounds), the company announced on its blog. It already automatically attributes content from Flickr, Behance and Vimeo.

In addition, Pinterest enabled in-board play for Kickstarter, Slideshare and Soundcloud, “so you can curate great collections of projects, presentations, and sounds, and play them right there on your boards.”

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Ikea TV to run YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion apps

Janko Roettgers — Mon, 14 May 2012 22:03:17 +0000

Ikea’s Uppleva TV, which is going on sale in select stores in Europe next month, will feature apps for some of the biggest video sites: Uppleva users will be able to access videos from YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion and elsewhere, according to an Ikea spokesperson. All in all, it will feature around 20 apps per country.

Some of the other services available on the device will include QTom, a German Vevo competitor and TuneIn radio. Apps will also be available to facilitate music playback, games, VOD and catch-up video playback. Uppleva TVs will also come with an open Web browser, which reportedly is Opera for TV.

Ikea announced its Uppleva TV product, which integrates the TV into living room furniture, in April. However, the company didn’t reveal many details about the inner workings of the device. Here are a few things we have learned since:

Uppleva will come with an integrated Blu-ray player.
The TV is being built by China’s TLC.
It will come with a wireless subwoover.
Uppleva will be available with screen sizes ranging from 24 inches to 46 inches, and will start selling for around $960.
Ikea will sell Uppleva in a few select stores in Italy, France, Germany, Poland and Sweden next month, then target additional stores and territories in Europe come fall, and bring Uppleva to the U.S. in 2013.

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Pinterest adds attribution for Flickr, Behance, Vimeo, YouTube

Laura Hazard Owen — Tue, 01 May 2012 18:54:14 +0000

Pinterest is making it easier to “pin and credit content creators” by adding automatic attribution for content pinned from Flickr, creative network Behance, and video sites Vimeo and YouTube. In addition, images with sharing enabled on Flickr now have a “Pin It” button.

“We think simple and automatic attribution is a step forward for the sharing of content online,” the company says on its blog.

You have to be signed into Flickr to see the “Pin It” button. The automatic attribution looks like this:

Pinterest faces ongoing questions over copyright, with sites like Getty and iStock Photo complaining that their images are being pinned to the site without attribution or — perhaps more importantly for them — payment. Today’s new attribution policy could be expanded to other sites (it’s a “a work in progress and we’ll continue to add additional sources,” Pinterest says), but the compensation question hasn’t been answered yet.

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For social sharing, Apple turns to Twitter again

Om Malik — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:32:19 +0000

Apple’s decision to unfriend Facebook has turned out to be a boon for third-party social services that are now finding their way into Apple operating environments. The biggest winner of them all is Twitter. In iOS 5, Apple integrated Twitter. And just like that the company saw “sign-ups more than double and the number of tweets sent increase over 90 percent,” according to Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter.

Well, Twitter is about to get a yet another boost, thanks to the upcoming release of the latest version of Mac OS X, called Mountain Lion. Twitter, Flickr and Vimeo are some of the third-party services that will offered as part of new “share sheet” that allows you to share links, photos and videos directly from the app one is using on the Mac. (Interestingly, there is no YouTube in this share sheet?) Like a photo in your iPhoto? You can share it via Twitter or upload it to Flickr or email it. See a URL, you can share that through either email, the new iMessage for Mac or Twitter. A document can also be shared through Apple’s AirDrop sharing technology.

Twitter, however, is the one that is pretty much everywhere inside the new operating system. Just as on iOS 5, a single sign-on is all it takes to share via Twitter, regardless of the app — Safari, Preview, PhotoBooth, Quick Look and others. The twitter share sheet is no different than the sharing feature iPhone or iPad users are familiar with.

“When you use Twitter single sign-on, the Contacts app displays your contacts’ Twitter profile pictures and usernames right in their contact cards,” Apple says. In the near future, expect a notification when someone mentions you in a tweet or sends you a direct message.

I think the biggest news from my perspective is the developer API.

Developers can take advantage of the Share Sheet API to let users tweet seamlessly from their apps. With the API, developers can leverage Twitter single sign-on and Tweet Sheet, so users can tweet with comments and locations, right from within their apps.

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Showyou’s latest update adds more ways to discover videos

Ryan Lawler — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:00:16 +0000

Currently most online video services have a sort of hunt-and-peck approach to finding things you might want to watch. You pick a video, watch it and then when it’s done you have to hunt down something else that might be of interest. But the latest version of Remixation’s Showyou app attempts to simplify the discovery process by making discovering new videos easier and more enjoyable.

The latest version of Showyou includes new ways to navigate content by category or by the social network that they’re pulled in from. There’s also a way for users to search and see all content curated by hashtag on Showyou and via Twitter. Finally, the update provides more information about others that you follow and gives you the ability to see what they’ve been sharing b clicking on a user’s avatar.

The trick to what makes Showyou work is that videos play in-line, without users having to exit the app. That reduces the amount of time it takes between finding videos, and there’s always something interesting being shared in the grid. Showyou displays videos from YouTube, Vimeo, Break Media, some Viacom shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, as well as videos from The Verge, TED and other Internet publishers. Altogether, the Showyou app pulls in about 5 million videos a day, according to Remixation CEO Mark Hall, or about 150 to 200 each second during peak times.

That’s led to huge amounts of user engagement for its users. While session times on most video sites typically run less than 10 minutes, Showyou users watch about 35 to 40 minutes of video whenever they open the app, or about eight videos per session on average. Online video needs better discovery mechanisms for users, and apps like Showyou are helping to increase viewership and keep users tuned in.

(Disclosure: Remixation is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.)

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