It’s funny how pleased I am that I face yet another high-profile opportunity to have people watch the content that I create for free.  Snagfilms.com is currently featuring Independent America: Rising from Ruins on its homepage, and will distribute it through a number of other channels, including Hulu and hopefully Netflix at some point (my first film “The Two-Lane Search for Mom & Pop” is already on Hulu, and is heading for iTunes).  Sure, you can still push for more money via a broadcast TV license, but at least as an indie filmmaker, those are getting harder to find, and they’re paying less.  So we content ourselves with the “digital pennies” as the “analog dollars” slip away, with the sheer hope that online, multiple-channel exposure leads to benefits in other ways (i.e. keep your day job, build your own personal brand).

The world of content — especially professional content — continues to shift beneath our feet.  Three years ago, I used my first class as a digital media professor at the University of Washington to understand just what I had produced with that first “amateur” film of mine (I had been a professional journalist, but I had never filmed my own feature-length documentary before).  The title of the class?  “Selling the Message: The Business of User-Generated Content.”  The “business” then, was under threat from pseudo-amateurs like me, with the explosion of digital media capture tools (aka, cheap cameras) and distribution platforms (aka, YouTube).  The established, institutional studio system seemed to be under attack as this proliferation in new “voices” transformed media into yet another commodity.

But interestingly, despite this commoditization, apparent amateurization, and the uncertainty of the economy, somehow the increased availability of media online has also produced more demand for “professional” content.  Witness Steve Jobs’ remarks this week as as he introduced Apple TV: Read more…

Though we exist in a time of great media upheaval, where the Internet has made available so much story for so little effort, millions are still drawn to long-form traditional narratives. We still go to the cinema, the bookstore, the concert, the play, the big game, the event. Though so much power can be packed into a media snack – a tweet, a blog post, a text message, a sentence, a word, or even an acronym (LMAO anyone?) – we still sit down for super-sized media meals. Something must be inspiring us to pull up that chair and sup from the old media table. Inspiration seems to be the answer. What is the importance of inspiration to storytelling? In our digital world – full of bombardment from massive narrative abstraction and fragmentation, where so much story content is being communicated in so many bits and bytes and packets like bullets from a fiber-optic Gatling gun – we still find time to stick the old media morphine drip in. This happens when we do something so archaic as watch an hour-long drama on network television, spend nine innings at the baseball stadium, or, gasp, read an entire Harry Potter book cover-to-cover. Read more…

Today, the Criterion Collection launched a new feature, Online Cinematheque, that allows users to view films for $5 before they buy them.

The Criterion Collection is a home video distribution company that specializes in bringing seminal (and often difficult to obtain) films into personal collections. What makes Criterion releases unique and special is the quality of the release. Every film given the Criterion treatment turns out to be a beautiful product, from the packaging, art direction, menu design, film transfer, audio tracks to searching for lost and forgotten deleted scenes or interviews with the director. This quality product comes at a price, and that price is often double that of a standard edition DVD.

Because Criterion Collection films are often rare art house films, the ability to watch films online for $5 before deciding to lay down a decent amount of money on a movie you have never seen is a good idea. If you decide to buy the movie from the Criterion website, the $5 will be credited towards the cost of the DVD or Blu-ray.

It is refreshing to see the Criterion Collection exploring new distribution methods for important films and I hope other music and film companies follow their lead.