In the late 1990s, when I was working on physics engines for animation, I was talking to a major Hollywood director. He'd done some of the first films that had both live and photorealistic CGI characters. He wanted to get the cost down, so he could make $20 million movies. At $20 million, he could direct; at $100 million, he was running a huge operation that had to have everything pre-planned in great detail.

His model was the early CGI cartoon, "Reboot". Reboot was a weekly half hour cartoon made by a staff of about 30. He wanted to get to that level of productivity at theater quality - make a 2 hour film in a month with 30 people.

That didn't happen. Not even close.

It's been tried. "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" started as a low-budget picture rendered on Macs. In that film, if nobody touches it, it's CG. Ended up costing $70 million. Worldwide box office $50 million. Fail. "Iron Sky" was made for €7.5 million. Worldwide box office $11.5 million. Fail.

There were successful low budget directors in the past, Roger Corman being the prime example. (His autobiography is titled "How I made a hundred movies in Hollywood and never lost a dime".) It's harder to do that today. Viewers today expect incredible production value. Most TV shows have more production value today than 70s movies did. Hollywood has so many people on set because they bring a team together on short notice to do a job, then disband the team. They need many competent people with different skills to make that work. If you cut corners, it looks like Youtube crap.

On big movies, we've mostly replaced set painters and carpenters with people who sit at workstations and do the same job with CG models. "Big" is now cheap, but "detailed" remains expensive. Procedural visual content generation can generate good landscapes and vegetation now (check out SpeedTree), but as yet, nobody has been able to procedurally generate one convincing block of a city street seen at ground level. Making GTA V cost $265 million. Not seeing an incoming reduction in production cost.

Netflix has no huge advantage. HBO is in the same position - they make content to sell to their own customers, and know exactly what sold. Data collection is retrospective. Trying to figure out what movies will be box office failures in advance remains hard. That's why Hollywood generates so many sequels - predictability.

Not really, no. I expect interesting movies, and I'd say being an interesting movie doesn't have anything to do with CGI. I'm a film buff through and through and it almost literally pains me when I see that people involved in the movie industry don't seem to understand what their problem is: they don't make films for grown-ups anymore.

The only outlet that has provided interesting movie-like content in the last 10-15 years was television. There's almost no CGI in shows like The Wire, The Sopranos, Black Mirror (to just name a few), shows that have made me casually think about them while I was riding the tramway and the like years after I had last seen them.

I miss great movies.

I don't think there's any CGI in Pulp Fiction (1994) and it cost around $9 million to make in 1994 dollars. It made around $200 million worldwide. Whiplash (2014) , a more recent movie with little to no CGI, cost $3.3 million to make and made around $49 million worldwide.

The point is that people want interesting, well written movies with great stories. If that warrants CGI sure, but it's not a requirement.

A boring movie is not good. But a boring and expensive movie is terrible and that's what's mainly being put out: boring and expensive movies.

As far as movies with huge production budgets for every great movie with a justified fair amount of CGI there's tens of crappy ones many that break even or don't make their money back.

Creatively speaking there's probably never been a worse time for big Hollyood movies.

Looking back at movies from several decades ago, the credit scroll had a few hundred people at most. Now there are a few hundred animators for something like Arrival. Interestingly, Arrival's credits list about the same number of people as Terminator 2. Both excellent movies, but one is small and intimate, and the other grand and explosive - same size crew, much higher balance on visual effects in Arrival vs. practical engineering and effects in T2. Would Arrival have been significantly different or less effective if made with 1991 technology? Probably not.

"[They] were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should."

> The point is that people want interesting, well written movies with great stories.

If they did, then these films would be the blockbusters. Whereas Adam Sandler's films were routinely panned for being crap, yet routinely pulled in 8 figures.

    > Pulp Fiction wasn't created at a time where
    > home movies were so widespread

Pulp Fiction: 1994

I'm not sure what you mean, then, by "home movies." If you mean "home theater," well, even middle-class people were spending loads of dough on big-screen TVs and hi-fi surround sound.

By "home movie" do you mean the ultraconvenience of streaming Netflix, Amazon, and Youtube? Then you probably have a point, even though it wasn't that hard to drive down to Blockbuster.

  > If a movie is character-driven,
  > there's not a lot of benefit to seeing it in a cinema these days
  > as opposed to the comfort of your own home.
  > Big effects on the other hand, they benefit from the cinema experience.

  >> The point is that people want interesting,
  >> well written movies with great stories.

  > If they did, then these films would be the blockbusters.
  > Whereas Adam Sandler's films were routinely panned for being crap,
  > yet routinely pulled in 8 figures.

"were so" != "nonexistent". Compare the home movie experience of 1994 to that of 201x. 'On-demand' wasn't even a pipe dream in 1994.

> I think seeing a movie in a theater is more social than technical

Maybe for teens who gather in cliques, but otherwise we're just going to disagree there.

> He's talking about Star Wars and Lord of the Rings,

The Star Wars middle trilogy was schlock. They were terrible stories. They sold on hype, colour and motion, and brand recognition. The first one even had a damn half-hour advert for a podracing videogame in the middle of it. And Lord of the Rings was an adaptation of the most successful fantasy novel ever (the genre-defining one at that); not exactly a typical datum. How many times can you do that?

Don't get me wrong, I'm of the opinion that hollywood should spend a million less on special effects and a million more on screenplay, but the whole "people prefer good stories" just doesn't pan out when it comes time to open their wallets. For example, Lord of the Rings had been done a couple of times before in movie and TV form, and it wasn't that popular in that form... until it had mindbogglingly massive special effects and money thrown at it.

Anyway, if you think that the Star Wars prequels were good stories and that pulled the punters, I strongly recommend you watch Plinkett's reviews of them[1] - the voice is annoying, the reviews are mostly funny, but really he eviscerates the exceptionally poor storytelling in them. In there there's even an excerpt from an editor's session where Lucas and Co. are talking about a problem with the ending, where they have the viewer rotating through four very different emotions from four different plotlines in only 90 seconds, none of which can be excised as they're all concluding at the same time... and the mood is very much "we've fucked this up".

[1]http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-wars/

It's not that Hollywood has stopped making movies, it's more that it's taken to making the same movie over and over, using the same (expensive) visual cliches and script tropes. After a while the spectacle stops being spectacular. Incredible CGI turns into "Well, that's just CGI" visual filler.

LOTR was an exception because it was already well known. I'm fairly sure a Generic Fantasy Movie with similar effects would have crashed and burned.

If studios want to survive, they need to diversify by becoming less like corporate waterfall-management giants, and more like try-this-and-see experimental startups.

For the price of a single blockbuster, Hollywood could fund an entire generation of new directors/producers/writers.

Find ten or so promising YouTube shorts, give the production team a small budget and some prosumer equipment, get out of their way, and see what they do on a shoestring.

As much as you want the movies to go back to the first, the people who are paying to go to the theater now are looking more for the second. Television has taken over most of the role that used to be for movies because it allows viewers even more time with interesting characters than a two hour movie.

Also My Big Fat Greek Wedding (got solid reviews at the time). $5 million budget, $368 million box office.

It like saying to the gaming industry they should just write games like Tetris: Can be written in an afternoon and makes billions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNDMo0ax17E

http://mentalfloss.com/article/68552/20-most-profitable-movi...

Then, of course, there is the whole point about international distribution mentioned in the article. Movies for grown-ups literally don't translate well into other languages.

I'd much rather much just about any movie from the comfort of my couch, sitting in my undies (depending on company), with popcorn I made for 20c and the sound not drilling into my skull.

Theaters exist because they're the biggest consumers of movies and, because they're the biggest consumers, studios give them limited time exclusivity exists to benefit their continued existence. It's a bit of a catch 22 and change is slow.

I watched Rogue one in a regular non-3D theater and the projection was not great. The black levels were horrible. The actual 24fps (x2) frame rate bothered me. I expect to watch it again at home, streamed from Netflix, and have better viewing experience.

When I can choose between going to a theater and paying +$10 just for the ticket and extremely marked up prices for popcorn and a soda (close to another $20) for a single individual, or I can wait 3-6 months, watch it in the privacy of my home without people bringing crying babies to an R-rated movie, talking during the movie, texting or otherwise using their phones during a movie, yeah, I'm going to wait until I can get it at home. The reasons movie theaters suck basically boils down to: 1. it's expensive, and 2. other people suck, are assholes, are completely self-centered and common courtesy no longer exists.

In NYC there is an entire indie film district with four or five theaters within a few blocks. There is still good stuff being made, just not by Hollywood.

This right here is the truth, and it's been known for a while:

> " Adults were treated as adults rather than as overgrown children hell-bent on enshrining their own arrested development."

> "That leaves one quadrant—men under 25—at whom the majority of studio movies are aimed, the thinking being that they'll eat just about anything that's put in front of them as long as it's spiked with the proper set of stimulants. That's why, when you look at the genres that currently dominate Hollywood—action, raunchy comedy, game/toy/ride/comic-book adaptations, horror, and, to add an extra jolt of Red Bull to all of the preceding categories, 3-D—they're all aimed at the same ADD-addled, short-term-memory-lacking, easily excitable testosterone junkie."

> "the degree to which children's genres have colonized the entire movie industry goes beyond overkill. More often than not, these collectively infantilizing movies are breeding an audience—not to mention a generation of future filmmakers and studio ecutives—who will grow up believing that movies aimed at adults should be considered a peculiar and antique art. Like books. Or plays."

From http://www.gq.com/story/the-day-the-movies-died-mark-harris which was written in 2011.

Another factor might be exorbitant star salaries. However, I think that's a symptom, not the disease. The real problem is that Hollywood is greedy. They won't touch a $10M film with no big stars in it because it's not likely to make an 8-figure profit.

I'm fairly surprised that they were able to make that one so cheaply. Not only is it full of well known names, it was extremely well done (it's also a favorite of mine). I imagine most people involved didn't take their normal rate (or worked on residuals).

I would argue against that last part; great movies do require great writing, but you can get good to great performances out of mediocre actors if you have a great director. No amount of good acting will overcome a bad director.

I'd say you want an interesting but expect incredible production values

Which is to say I don't think it's a situation of expect in the sense of demanding but rather "expect" in the sense of "habituated to".

Production values might not be the explicit choice of that many people but a good proportion of people would choose X movie with high production values over X movie without. And that's something that's reliable. Things like plot, character and dialog are hit-and-miss if you are looking for quality. Not that they can't sell but they can't reliably sell.

Altogether, "grooming" gets added to everything because it can reliably move people's choices a little bit. Other factors may influence people more, other factors may be what people say they want but a lot of these factors are less reliable, there are a lot of factors where a change might turn as many people off as it attracts but surface unambiguous can be added. And there-in lies the secret of the mass-market surface appearance arms race (similar to the music "loudness wars").

Smoke was an interesting movie, and cost $7M. (It didn't make much more but it wasn't a failure.)

Moon was a fantastic movie, and cost $5M. The little CGI it had was pretty obvious but didn't affect the viewing experience. (It also made near-zero returns.)

Requiem for a Dream was - and remains - an outstanding film. It flopped in box office but must have made pretty penny on home sales.

Dead Man is an interesting movie, and still one of my favourites. It works on the audience for the same reason Apocalypse Now does: episodic films in general are considered "artsy" and hard to chew, but turn them into thoughtful road movies and the audience enjoys the experience.

Pan's Labyrinth is just damn good. It cost €13.5 to make, and grossed $37M. Home sales must have added even more since then.

All the films above are both interesting and, in terms of bloated Hollywood budgets, were cheap to make. I would take any one of them over the perfumed sewage that floods the film theaters. And for reference, I did see Doctor Strange in a cinema so I do have a metric for calibration. My opinion stands.

Viewers want movies to be spectacles. If we're watching something in a theater, we have high expectations of the production value. Otherwise, why even waste the time and money going to a theater? We can watch the "good", low production value movies at home.

    > Rogue One: A Star Wars Story… would be impossible to do without CGI.

They _chose_ not to make it without CGI. It wouldn't have been impossible.

edit: I'll just leave this right here - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034928/

Decades ago, Finding Dory would have been hand animated (though, even that had moved begun moving to computers in the late 80s). I haven't seen Captain America, but I would guess similar types of movies existed before hand (the 80s and early 90s are full of over the top action movies and practical effects; some of which still hold up today).

Visual story telling doesn't require CGI. It might be the most pragmatic way to do things now (due to time, cost, complexity, etc.), but it's not the _only_ way.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sZS8OVyVr4

Who can't appreciate nuanced localized plotlines.

This is an interesting point. In the past, we had the Hollywood backlot. Maybe we need the digital equivalent in the future. Instead of each production company making chunks of New York in CGI, what if there was a shared one that production companies could take as a base and alter as needed? I'm not sure what incentive structure would work best for something like this, but as long as studios don't get greedy about adding their work to it and expecting money back (which might be a tall order), open source might work.

The interesting/tough part would presumably be inter-effects house sharing/community work. I'm almost surprised that there doesn't seem to be a company focused entirely on reuseable digital backlots because that does seem like a niche that someone in Hollywood would already be exploring.

You could also see it coming from an outside direction, too. If I was Rockstar and already throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at digital open world simulations, I'd probably be shopping that around as the basis for digital backlot work. "Filmed 'on location' in GTA V's Los Santos" sounds almost silly right now, but I've got a feeling it won't for much longer. (Also, I would suspect it's Vancouver-based genre television that would be in the market for this before films.)

Again as a relatively pure outsider, it is interesting to watch the internal competition between Disney Feature Animation's renderer [Hyperion] and Pixar's RenderMan, and similarly have been curious about how much of that externally visible open source standardizing work on at least the pipelines leading to the renderers contributes and/or constrains the friendly seeming internal rivalry. Similarly with Disney now owning ILM, if ILM has or has not been building on top of some of the same production pipeline standards...

Historically, a lot of the benefit to the Hollywood studio system was that a lot of the parts were standardized and interchangeable between studios. While a lot of studios did experiment with innovations in camera technology, very few studios had to reinvent the camera from scratch.

Given how many special effects houses work on a blockbuster level film these days, I would imagine that the efficiencies in shared asset pipelines between corporate boundaries would eventually win out. It seems silly (at least as an industry outsider) that every company working on, for one example, an Iron Man film would have a different set of models/textures/shaders for Iron Man. (I get that on the one hand it's a bit like stunt work in that you don't need your A-list actor in every stunt or B-roll shot, but on the other hand, digital "actors" don't get fatigued or injured and can be in multiple places at once, they don't need body doubles/stunt actors...)

It took a while for forward thinking technical managers to convince studio executives that open-sourcing some internal tools and data formats would benefit the studio by making it a standard within the industry. OpenEXR (image format, ILM), Alembic(data format, Imageworks), OpenSubdiv(subdivison surfaces, Pixar), Ptex(texture mapping, Disney) are examples that were quickly adopted across studios. It helps that artists and engineers tend to move across studios bringing with them ideas about what worked best at the previous studio.

In general, the software teams at the studios fall under the line item of "Overhead" in a producers financial spreadsheet. There is pressure to reduce this overhead by adopting standardized tools and not reinventing things in-house.

There used to be a joke in the no-budget world - what's the difference between an indie movie and a studio film? In the indie movie you end with a car crash. In the studio film, the car explodes at the end of the first act.

(Just realized 'leased' may not be the correct term here, don't hold that against me I am not an entrepreneur by any means.)

In hollywood you are nobody until you have some credits, and you don't get any credits until you have done some work, and you don't get hired if you're a nobody so you'd better be prepared to give it away and keep giving for a while until people come looking for you, at which point you practice saying 'no' a lot and meaning it. One of my more memorable gigs was on a film that I turned down because the pay was too low. So they went with someone else but he did such a bad job they dumped him and came back to me offering twice as much midway through the production. Sadly the film never got released, as they tried to cheap out on everything the same way, resulting in injuries, some unusable footage, and an absentee director who vanished rather than get sued. Oddly enough I got a lot of follow-up gigs from that disaster - suffering builds bonds and boy did we suffer on that job.

I would think there's a clear difference between consumer and B2B solutions here. As a business, it's a clear trade-off, pay X for the base models I can presumably get for some percentage of X, or just pay someone X dollars to do it, and presumably that percentage is well under 100% because the company has already done (and hopefully used) the work once, so it's just a way to monetize and existing resource. For a consumer, I don't really have the option of making a movie myself rather than paying for it. B2B products routinely cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Now, if you're saying specifically that industry will value it that way because of the way they are, well, that might be true. Sounds like you would know better than me. At the same time, may a service like that isn't marketed towards the studios, but towards the special FX houses, and they just factor it into their costs, bids, etc.

+ by which I mean every director and producer want something nobody has ever seen before, which is the surest route to $$$.

That leads to a very zero-sum approach to negotiations; if you do not have some sort of existing contract (eg by virtue of union or guild membership and the resulting standardized pricing agreements) then as a new entrant to the market you will be asked to work for nothing. Even if you're well-established this is a big problem. A good example of this was when highly-esteemed CFX house Rhythm & Hues went bankrupt a few years ago: http://variety.com/2013/film/news/rhythm-hues-bankruptcy-rev...

As a more prosaic real-life example, I once earned myself a nice cash bonus for recovering all the footage from a project after the primary and backup drives both failed (or so it seemed to the less technical people). Had I proposed making the same investment in data protection up front, I guarantee the answer would have been No. While you do expect to work with the same people again, often over many years, every individual project is its own financial entity and producers' primary job skill is to hoard cash and minimize obligations.

This isn't just because they're jerks (although being a jerk is a necessary job skill, which is why I'm bad at being a producer lol), but because when you're in production the scarcity switches from money to time. Actors have other commitments, the weather can't be controlled, locations are rented for very short durations with large overages if you exceed the rental period and so on. So the basic business strategy notwithstanding scale is to hang on to as much money as you possibly can until you go into production, at which point you start spending money like water and trying to save time instead. Obviously an unscrupulous person can exploit that phase transition profitably, but doing so deliberately will tarnish your reputation, and your personal reputation carries far far more weight than your work product, unless your work product is really world-class and people take the time to evaluate it. Of course I'm simplifying, but consider the thousands of people who have credits on a big movie. You can't exhaustively evaluate the quality of their individual contributions when you're hiring at that scale, and most producers have limited technical and even aesthetic ability anyway, so a thumbs-up from someone they've worked carries far more weight.

I'm not trying to scare you out of participating int he industry, because in many ways it's really great and really does function on a meritocratic basis - if you're smart and innovative you can go a long way in a short time. But don't bank on a rational strategy, because the film industry manufactures dreams. Our work product is literally an escape from everyday reality that can be easily reproduced and distributed. In that sense it's kinda like doing business with a drug cartel - you can make a lot of money, but you have to approach each deal like it's the last one you'll ever make.

maybe you need to get back in with them

I joke about it now but in all seriousness bad producers are always trying to cut corners and this sometimes comes at the price of human lives, and even when people go to jail over it the costs are distributed inequitably - see this example of a director getting a 2 year sentence for causing the death of a crew member in an entirely predictable way: https://petapixel.com/2015/03/10/director-gets-two-years-in-...

At the low-budget end you have to be willing to threaten to quit on the spot no matter where you are, because you will be asked to put your safety at risk. I've never worked on a project where anyone died, but I've come close a few times. That's one reason I have such strong opinions about labor codes and safety regulations - I'm used to working outside them :-/

We did have one guy get a minor electric shock because the producer had him changing a light. He was on top of a five foot ladder but with no spotter ("Health and safety BS!") and the producer never bothered to tell him that it was still carrying current, even when the fader was right down. That's not the only time someone's fallen off a ladder, or had a shock. Not once was it reported to the health and safety people, either.

There were also cable loops standing up from the ground (we used short pieces of carpet offcuts to hold them down, never worked and people would trip up. The business manager would never authorize the cash to have flush-mount patch panels installed in the floor (a legal requirement). Also not reported.

One memory is how we had a strict uniform requirement, which often resulted in inappropriate dress for a location. There were a couple of location shoots in below-freezing conditions - in one place, three staff came down with hypothermia because they were clad in sweatshirts and jeans, another it was just one guy in a shirt and dress pants standing outside for seven hours while ice formed on car windows. That particular day, the lucky staff indoors were exposed to unsafe sound levels, with no protection, for the whole shoot. None of these incidents were reported, nor was it reported that the guy who drove the equipment truck back to the studio had been smoking pot for the whole night, in front of the senior staff at the location. Maybe he shared the joint.

Chuck in some 12+ hour shifts without breaks, people working on scaffolding who had no clue how to operate safely, or the guy who replaced an old monitor only to accidentally drop the failed unit, and ended up hauled in front of the Production Manager to account for his "unsafe" actions.

Equipment was never maintained: if something broke, it was the person using it at the time, not the 20-year-old tripod with broken spreaders and worn out fastenings. (Last time I saw that particular tripod, the spreaders had perished and were being held together by duct tape on three sides, and the tape was four or five years old.)

Oh, the stories I could tell... no, wait, that's actually a good summary right there!

(Note to folks at HN: if behind-the-scenes movies are your thing, check out Living in Oblivion with Steve Buscemi and Catherine Keener. Good stuff.)

They don't give a rats ass about reputation if you deliver what they need.

I could see them offering Hollywood a service that would allow production assistants to scout locations in Maps and then, after choosing one, get back detailed CGI models which allow all filming to happen on a green screen for a fraction of the current cost of filming on location.

I was surprised when I opened the map app and it had 3D imagery of the little barely-known city I live in.

We still have the Hollywood back lots, and studios still use LA, New York, and Chicago streets as their sets. A lot of times, it's cheaper to just pay for a filming permit than it is to recreate the real world in a computer.

Netflix has better data about what and how viewers watch, That gives it some advantage. than, a netflix one-hour episode cost about $5-$10 Million.Breaking Bad did costs $3M/ep. That's $5-$15 for a movie of content. About the cost of Iron Sky.

Than instead of spending a lot of money on marketing, they use their algorithm. And even if they do spend some money marketing online, it's easier, because consumption can be immediate and measured.

Than you have the favorable economics of TV series - it's basically a 20-30 movie sequels with very good customer loyalty. And there are no time limits - people can watch whenever they like, and the content has some value over years/decades.

I wonder where series like Louie and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia fit into this mix. They're pretty low budget and do look pretty Youtubey, especially the earlier seasons. But for some reason that doesn't detract from the quality of the show at all.

Do audiences actually need high production value if they have great acting, writing, directing?

No.

I'd rather watch 90 minutes of random "Whose line is it anyway" segmentd in 360p Youtube than the latest Transformers rendered in 8K.

Downton Abbey would not have been a hit if it had 1980s BBC production standards. Nor would the rebooted Battlestar Galactica have been as popular if it had the production values of the original.

La La Land was made with a $30M budget and has grossed >$220M already.

http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/louis-c-k-millions-horace-pe...

It is very similar to what happens at startups. No one expects revenue from day one but the losses can start immediately. Louie CK basically founded a startup and decided not to take any VC money. That means when it came time for his IPO (the digital streaming deal he signed with Hulu), all the money went directly to him making the entire endeavor profitable.

Great point. I'm always a bit shocked at the level of effort put into lighting etc. for even simple corporate talking heads sort of video. Technology has driven down the costs associated with good cameras, editing software, and CGI. But expectations have risen at least as much. (HD is also a lot less forgiving.)

There are some genuinely low-ish cost hits but they're very much the outliers.

I'm wondering if technology might also make it much easier to shoot on location. For example, given modern digital camera systems it might be possible to shoot in low-light conditions (late in the day, overcast, etc.) and correct the lighting in post to appear like broad daylight. I've also wondered if it would be possible to shoot in 3d (i.e. using 2 cameras in a parallax setup) then use the 3d data to selectively remove foreground or background parts of the image which can then be replaced with CGI. So we can continue to use the real world to provide detail, while using CGI just for the parts that give us the most bang for the buck.

Removing backgrounds is more manual than you may expect. There are commercial "clipping path services" in low-wage countries. Even when green screens are used, the boundaries may need a bit of touch-up. It's a possible application for deep learning.

That doesn't mean people don't do it all the time, it just looks like garbage.

Yes, it was done in 28 Days later on the Westminister bridge over which Big Ben looms.

Shot at night, with a camera which had a large aperture.

To be fair, Iron Sky is terrible. I mean, it has a lot of "so bad it's good" value, but let's not pretend the CGI (which is actually awesome for a script this bad) was the only problem.

I predict the hordes of animators and motion capture will be going away for all but the biggest productions within a decade.

Check this out:

http://www.goatstream.com/research/thesis/index.html

If you can combine this with more detailed physics simulations of the entire world, that will drastically cut down the amount of animation required.

This, combined with being able to easily capture objects and environments in 3-D via scanning it from a video file (SLAM[1], basically), and add in some basic mo-cap in-world via VR controllers. We can have much higher quality productions with Reboot-level (or machinima) levels of staffing.

Someone (not me!) needs to start putting this all together in an easy-to-use package.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_...

Film production is a smiling curve: on the left you have "development"; on the right, distribution. Actual content creation is 100% farmed out to production companies and their vendors (like VFX houses, et al).

I wish I could "fail" by making 53% profit on millions over what is likely less than a year. :/

Edit: Actually, I see pounds and dollars now. I would guess it was about even?

Then, as others have said, the theatre takes a cut, then the distributor takes a cut, and so in the end a movie that takes twice its budget at the box office may still be in the red as far as the production company is concerned.

This is all made even more opaque by all the accounting trickery to minimize tax exposure and make sure that the studio has to pay "points" (contractually agreed percentage of profit/revenue after some break-even) to as few people as possible.

So it has to do about twice the production costs at the box office in order to break even, that said there's that whole 'Hollywood accounting' aspect to consider.

If this holds up (since it's entirely second hand info), I would expect the total split you quoted to likely be for large blockbusters that stay in the theaters for a long time. For a small movie, or one that doesn't make much money and is forced out to make room for more popular movies, I would expect that percentage going to the studio to actually be much higher.

Corrections from someone with actual knowledge is welcome though.

Oh please. Sin City: budget $40 million, box office $158.8 million. A good director who knows how to squeeze the most out of a budget can get the job done in a cost-effective way. Just ask Mr. Rodriguez.

Video games were (?) having the same problem, so-called "indie" developers have largely stepped in to make single A-quality titles.

It's still possible to produce commercially successful low budget films with lower production values. The trick is to tell an interesting and engaging story.

I know very little about the film industry, but is the box office the end of it? I was presuming that there was always some kind of long tail of modest cash flow from stuff like video rentals (days of yore) or online streaming services (present day). Is this a wrong assumption?

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_95

It's basically a set of rules to cut down the cost and complexity of film production, to give power back to directors. I wonder whether you could have a category of films like this, aiming specifically to exist outside the normal Hollywood system.

Does it have anything to do with the size of the studios/companies? Look at Disney/Pixar, can it be that they are just too big in order to come up with anything original?

The studio knows that a sequel will have a guaranteed $ minimum return just because it is a sequel. Hence they can estimate how much to sink into production to guarantee a profit. Then they green light the movie production for that budget.

Same goes for the cast. The studio finance dept can look at previous years data and predict that $ million will be guaranteed to be made just because the movie stars Jennifer Aniston or Adam Sandler. Irrespective of the what the movie is about. Just because people see the name and wander into the theatre while on a date or buy the DVD for $15.99 at the grocery store. This provides a target production budget for green lighting the movie. Then they hire a director and try to figure what the story will be about.

The China market also affects cast and story. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8R-FQTY4KJk

Now, I am subscribed to two streaming services. I don't pirate. I refuse to watch anything with ads, happy to pay, and somewhat ironically, the only ads I watch to completion are trailers that I haven't seen. I would love to catch movies as they are released but I have to wait until they're available on the streaming service. When they are available it is usually 5$ for a "rental". Is that a joke? I used to pay that at Blockbuster, and they had a physical location and employees! They've priced their digital content in such a way that I will only pay to see the movies that I really want to see. If it was cheaper, I'd be a constant consumer.

It seems that is how most things in society get priced. Not for ultimate consumption, but to maximize the profit curve. I get that is how capitalism works, but that logic doesn't make sense to me for digital goods. They are practically zero cost to distribute once they are manufactured and your competition is people pirating them. If you're worried about audience size, lower the cost. You'll enable a lot more people to see a lot more movies.

When I started a small software company, I originally had a similar understanding. I subconsciously thought that the software should be priced to pay for its development cost, plus some profit. I was not very successful, until I realized that the product should be priced as a percentage of the value it delivered to the customer. Customers don't want you to do a lot of work, they just want their problem solved for a price that is reasonable relative to the benefit of the solution.

This idea reverses several of your conclusions:

1. The product should be priced based on how much value it delivers, and only those companies that can deliver the product for significantly less than that price will stay in business. Once a company finds a need that people will pay for, it generally makes sense to drive the cost of production down while maintaining the same benefit, thus maximizing profit.

2. The more value a company creates with the resources it uses (the greater its margin), the more left-over resources it will have to invest in producing still more benefits, or to return profits to its original investors.

So, going back to the cost of digital content, I am happy to pay for it, as long as I end up feeling the movie was worth watching for the price. And if they can produce great content without many resources (or with lower cost of delivery), all the better. My problem, right now, is that there is so much great content I cannot ever hope to watch it. But that is not a problem that really bothers me, I am happy to keep paying to have a long list of shows I'd like to watch, if I could just find the time.

This is why I hate paying Comcast's prices but wouldn't mind them if I business I didn't hate charged the same amount.

It's also why I hate paying the same price for a Kindle book as a regular book, when I can't even hand the book to someone else after I'm done with it. If it was being bought from the author, maybe. From a publisher or distributor -- no way. I'll borrow a friend's or torrent it, just to not give you money.

I am fine with people making money -- our economy is a big but closed system and the money flows in all directions. Not a problem that somebody wants to make a buck.

But when they do it in a way that most of their customers hate their guts but can't get anything else (due to monopoly or oligopoly) then eventually people find a way around you. It's inevitable.

Current prices of movies and books are insane for the value they're giving you. Not to mention Amazon has been caught red-handed several years back that they can remotely delete any file from your Kindle if they so desire. I have no doubt in my mind that Apple, Google etc. can all do the same. Business interests > consumer interests, this hasn't changed ever since the first economy in the world emerged.

It was then I took the decision to never buy digital goods from corporations. You never really own what you pay for.

So you'll pay the author, unless the author is only collecting royalties, in which case fuck the author? What are you paying for then? Distribution? But you say fuck them too. As usual, this kind of reasoning just sounds like trying to explain away "I just want it for free".

Yes, I don't want to give a retailer money if they're taking massive profit they don't deserve, even if that means not giving the author money either. A small profit for distribution is fine.

(The lifetime value of a Kindle format of a book is far less than that of a physical book. I try to pass on almost every physical book I buy to someone else for reuse.)

I would rather:

* get it for free

* get it for free, and give the author money some other way

* wait till I can get it in a less-undeserving way

* just go buy it from someone else to deny giving business to the big company that doesn't deserve it (say, to an independent bookstore.)

* buy a different format that they deserve to make more money on.

And I'll venture to guess that, if you don't understand this thought process, the buying behaviors of 'millennials' (which advertisers care a lot about understanding) are probably a total mystery to you.

> get it for free, and give the author money some other way

The amount of people who torrent a book/movie/show and then find a way to 'pay the creator' is so small as to be a fantasy.

> the buying behaviors of 'millennials' ... are probably a total mystery to you.

Aw... I like how you decide to change your selfish behaviour into a patronising statement. The distributor, whom the author has made a deal with, is 'taking massive profit they don't deserve', meanwhile you have no qualms not holding up your end of the bargain in coughing up some dough.

I have no real problem with this if people are being honest. Fuck, I spent the first few years of my adult life playing ridiculous amounts of cracked games for the Amiga. But to phrase it as some sort of social justice, that's just twisted and morally vacuous. If you want to be moral, don't consume the media. Otherwise, don't pretend that you're some sort of virtuous underdog.

As for the patronising "you don't understand millenials", perhaps you forget that we older folks (I'm an X-er) have been through our early 20s as well, and know what it's like to raise our defiant fists against "the man". You're not something special and new in the world. Each generation is a little different, but the basic patterns remain the same.

I contend that this is in no sense 'raising defiant fists against the man'. There's nothing defiant about it. It's a product of a different system of morality, but it's not a defiant action in that system. It's the result of a different formula for calculating if an action (say, a purchase) is worth it, that takes into account different variables than you use.

Patronising, whatever, but it was still obvious from your previous post that you weren't a holder of the millennial mindset, and it's still obvious from this one that you don't understand them. You're of course fully welcome to preach your morals, say that ours are bad and wrong, and call us entitled -- but nothing like that ever changes minds so what's the point?

(And I didn't say I often or even occasionally get something for free and then pay the creator. What I'll do is pick one of my listed options. That was the point of listing options. You're correct that that one is rarely picked. That's why 'get it for free' was also on the list.)

Sorry for being sarcastic. But maybe you should make a clearer point. If I did understand you correctly however, the digital goods cost cents for the distributors, at best.

Maybe you can justify selling an ebook for 800$ because when using it the customer will recover their investment.

What if your hospital/doctor/insurance starts doing that? After all, wouldn't be a good investment to not be DEAD or suffering? Wouldn't you give them a shit load of money for all that value they created for you?

It's a bullshit justification for milking people out of their money.

I prefer the Amazon/walmart approach. Commoditize aggressively and keep the competition away by having low profit margins. Make your money off volume instead of gouging a small pool of customers.

The same applies to this Hollywood crap. They are price gouging with licensing deals, geo-location restrictions, delayed releases etc. Then wonder why aren't enough people willing to pay us what we ask them to? Fuck off.

Yes, and pay everyone in between absolute peanuts. Enjoy your sitcoms farmed out to overworked Amazon Turk writers.

Amazon can get away with it because buying a book on Amazon is the same as buying one on Barnes and Nobles. Good content however costs money, and decent writers won't work for the same wages as Amazon warehouse workers.

Your argument does not apply to new products and services. Let's say you've written a new AI-driven CRM product that maintains customer contact automatically without being overbearing. How do you price it? There's a lot of risk because it's never been done before and you don't know how easy it is for other companies to copy you. You need to build in a margin that allows you to fund not only your current staff but also future improvements.

So, in short, it's important to know whether your product or service is a commodity (or whether commodities compete with your product). It deeply impacts the way you develop your pricing.

No, it's called value-based pricing. Price gouging is raising prices beyond what is reasonable. For almost all products and services charging a percentage of the value that the product or service creates is completely reasonable.

> What if your hospital/doctor/insurance starts doing that?

Sometimes it's quite difficult or impossible to calculate the value created by a product or service and in those instances attempting value-based pricing could lead to price gouging.

Then the price for playing by the rules kept going up and up. Meanwhile there was less and less, and less, I cared to see. I can't even think of the last movie I actually itched to see. Maybe I've gotten old and don't have time to search for diamonds in the rough, but I don't see any more movies like Oh Brother Where Art Thou or Fight Club or Snatch that I can't get tired of.

They can't cry poverty when every time Adam Sandler squeezes one out it makes $75 million. I know creative accounting makes it seem like they break even, but I call BS on that. If companies besides Pixar would actually pay for writing that moves people, their wallets would come with them.

We then spend half an hour looking at trailers, conclude that everything looks stupid, and Google "Best movies of `year`." I drink a few beers, she enjoys wine, we relax with a great movie.

Every once in a while, I'm willing to watch a movie in theaters, but it doesn't happen very often.

Dumbed-down movies are also a result of trying to conquer worldwide markets with massive social inequality, from Brazil to Philippines. You need a movie that everyone can understand, including partly-illiterate people and people with various cultural backgrounds (try the same facial expression in 15 languaages and you'll run into constraints). And you also need to abide by China's policy. Result: The lowest common denominator, but distributed in 158 countries.

Which is sad, because we'd prefer to see movies with half the production costs and a good scenario.

A pet peeve of mine.

Fortunately, according to my religious beliefs, there is an extra circle in hell which addresses the issue. As hell goes, it's fairly benign, no fire or sulphur or pointy things, more like an open-plan office. The time that you spend there is equivalent to the cumulative amount of time that you made other people waste during the span of your earthly existence.

There are the small-time offenders, spending a few hours in limbo due to the queues which we skipped or the prank calls which we made during adolescence.

Also, there are the big fish. Like people who forced broken processes and flawed IT-systems upon large corporations, and are now spending decades trying to file requests of a computer mouse to IT departments in Kuala Lumpur, or filling out self-evaluation questionnaires comprising 380 questions.

The DVD people are there too, each with a TV set. Watching, in seemingly endless loops, the same anti-piracy alerts and ads for Barbie films designed to lower your IQ. How long have they been here, and how long will they stay? No one knows. Hey, there's another anti-piracy warning. Happy times.

Blu-Ray seems to have avoided this slide into the adware sewer so far, which surprises me a bit. Maybe there's language prohibiting it in the spec, I dunno. They're not significantly more expensive than DVDs any more, either.

Unfortunately the content industry seems to be winning the war on ripping for BDs, so I've had to stop buying them for the time being.

Dubbing ruins the movie entirely, and I find that I can't watch subtitled movies at all, I get obsessed with both listening to the dialog and comparing it with the translation.

Around here it costs me at least $300 to see a movie in its original unaltered format when it opens in theaters, i.e. a round-trip flight to the UK + hotel, so I just don't go.

For German, Italian and Spanish I generally need subs - and the same foes for Russian, Hindi and various Chinese and Korean content.

But even for Cantonese / Mandarin and also for animated content I prefer original audio with subs.

I recently got a Netflix account (in Norway) and just like the rest of the paid services, the selection is abysmal. I only hope these "new" big companies make a push to fix broken licencing - how else are we to increase global understanding if everyone just end up watching "their own" art - and remain forever sheltered from "foreign" influence?

Torrents aren't great - direct sharing between "librarians" like in the dc++/irc days were better. But torrents are way ahead of "legal" distribution.

It's extra sad as there's no technical reason, just people to stupid to figure out a way to organise compensation in a way that promotes cultural sharing.

And when they are useful to me, like an english translation... why doesn't anyone put the captions near the speaker's mouths, so I can read and see what's going on at the same time?

I also increase the font size (a lot) and add a slightly opaque black background to it -- again it helps to lower the amount of eye fixations.

For this (and obvious aesthetic) reasons, speech bubbles are a bad idea.

I've seen anime subtitles where characters are color-coded; I find to be distracting instead of helpful; the same with the italicized font when the line belongs to someone off screen. Though I'm sure one could argue it improves the accessibility for those having hearing disabilities.

For me it's dubbing that's absolutely awful, because I want to hear the real voices of the actors, plus I learned English and a little Italian and French by watching movies with subtitles. I don't understand countries where dubbing is the norm, I hope it never catches on in my country.

The human vision is drawn to quick changes & movement, when you have an otherwise immobile scene that's mostly just dialog subtitles will pop in & out, I can't help but focus on them just like I would if something else suddenly popped into the scene.

If you have words pop into your vision you also can't help but read them, at least I can't, subconsciously reading the translation and hearing the original version at the same time is really distracting.

I found the only way to deal with them was to position myself behind some sofa so I could only watch the top 3/4 of the screen, but of course you miss a big part of the movie that way.

Those $5 streaming "rentals" are for those actually willing to pay $5 to watch that movie right now. It's worth it to them. Eventually the $5 rental crowd is satiated, and the "not more than $4" crowd gets a chance as the price is lowered to match what others are willing to pay for it. Eventually that price tapers off to "$8/month buffet" and ends up on my Netflix queue.

They DO lower the cost - as those willing to pay higher prices do so, are satiated, and the audience temporal/economic demographics shift. It's not just about price per rental, it's price plus time per rental. Some movies I'll pay $15 to watch on day of release; some I'll happily "spend" time waiting for so I only spend $1 to watch it.

And yes, I'd happily get "that, here, now" for $5 rather than pile 4 people into the car, drive to Blockbuster, ask if they have it, find out the 2 copies are out, and wander the aisles for an hour reviewing what they do have and picking something ("Masters of the Universe"!) just to not completely waste the whole exercise (and decide that just leaving would have been better than watching "Masters of the Universe" only because it was the only thing vaguely appealing at the moment). Even with Redbox I at least have the option of looking for something new in particular and reserving it, from whichever of several nearby locations, for $2 from the convenience of my phone. Come John Wick 2 I'll have already pre-ordered it and be watching it, without the crowd, the moment it's available (and happy to pay the $19 to do so, having seen John Wick twice thanks to the $1 streaming specials).

People complain about windowing, but it is a sign that the movie industry is flexible about pricing to maximize the value they capture, unlike the music industry, TV industry, etc.

When a movie comes out these days it often comes out in multiple editions with different features (not to mention Blu Ray, DVD or both) at different price points. If you want it right away you will pay a high price, but the movie they sell for $20 one day will probably be on sale for $10 or $5 at some point in the future.

Thus, go to a retail store, and you will be able to buy a movie at a price you can afford or you can pay extra to get a better edition of something specific.

Contrast that to music CD and track prices that are almost always the same, or the "take it or leave it" bundle offered by the cable companies.

Nit; it's not really an option to buy above a price you can afford.

It's certainly possible to pay more than one would normally think is fair.

This echoes a drunk-blog that I wrote once, but basically I believe our current economic model no longer makes sense when talking about digital goods. We baked the manufacturing-cost of a product into each individual item, when it cost money to make an individual item. With digital goods, it only costs money to make the first item, every duplicate is essentially free. I think Kickstarter and the like are great examples of this, because they more accurately reflect how the costs actually influence the creation of the product.

Kickstarter is huge, there is no "the" kickstarter model, but at least in physical board game and RPG dark corner of kickstarter, people get extremely unhappy if product shows up in retail before the backers get theirs delivered.

A second aspect of time preference is original OP claims there's only two services or whatever all $5, but I assure you the market is much wider and there's $2 at redbox, "free" if you watch TV and don't mind editing and commercials, "free" and commercial free if you pay your annual amazon prime membership to cheap shipping, "free" if you have a public library card... Everything ends up free at the public library eventually, but it could take years and years.

The theater portion of the industry doesn't handle this nearly as well as the distribution side. I have friends who have friends, etc, and somehow I got to see the very first public premier showing of Rogue One last December. Its a different experience seeing a new movie vs one where the spoilers are all over the internet, it was interesting. So you practically had to be in the mafia to get tickets, but aside from that financially my ticket cost exactly the same as a showing a month later. The theater, in an attempt to be "fair", is leaving a lot of money on the table. My son really wanted to see the movie and I think he would have been cool with $100 tickets because he's just so excited, not unreasonable to think the theater lost over $80 per seat that night. I'm sure 10% of the population is glad to pay 10x the cost for bragging rights or just being hyper-fans.

The local theater is slowly getting a clue... they have in theater bars and restaurants so if you want to blow $50/person at a movie you certainly can in extreme luxury and gluttonous comfort. They need to get a clue faster. Also the culture where I am is, OK with alcohol whereas I can see in some areas the local culture would just lead to obnoxiousness and police calls, so there are cultural aspects.

Just thinking out loud. I understand this can lead to increased sales, also that this refers more to "content" than apps.

There is enough writing being done for free (in terms of e.g. fanfiction) for a lifetime's reading, if only the recommendation engine was good enough. As movies get cheaper to make it will be the same for those too.

You would be crazy these days to bet your future on being a indie app game developer.

I demonstrated this physicality to a friend by showing them a pad of 580 pages, a bottle of ink, two pieces of cardboard, and some slightly heavy paper stock. All totaled up they represented about $8.30 worth of material. They had physicality and they clearly had a production cost, we agreed they were "worth" $8.30. Then I pulled out the same material except that the ink had been spread about on the paper such that it told the story of Harry Potter's adventures during one of his years at Hogwarts. Now it was valued at $34.99. What changed? It had information on the pages now that it didn't have before, and that information has some value.

I've spent quite a bit of time trying to understand the economics of information, what gives it value, how is that value captured, and how is that value lost. I can tell you unequivocally that digital goods should no more be free than automobiles, and for the same reason. It takes an action to create useful or desirable information, and that effort is an economic action which we reward by sending capital toward it. When people get stuck in the mindset that the 'bits are free' they for get that the order of the bits is not free. It is that ordering that has the value, not the bits themselves. Most people agree that the value of a DVD full of zeros is different than the value of a DVD with a movie on it. They won't agree on what what the value is, but I've yet to find people who don't think there is at least some value[1].

Digital goods should not be "free" and appropriating them without economic exchange is theft, but how 'not free' they should be is an interesting discussion.

[1] For the pedantics, yes some movies could be zeros.

> Digital goods should not be "free" and appropriating them without economic exchange is theft

This feels like a petitio principii. Legally it is incorrect, and as an argument it is unsophisticated nearly to the point of being a slight on the intellectual abilities of our fellow commentators here. I'd like to think that we all here are fairly intelligent and well-informed, and I feel that it is incumbent upon ourselves to present cogent, well-reasoned arguments, which do not trivialize the opposing side, but which are well-supported with appropriate citations. I believe that you have a valid position and that the discussion is one worth having. I read your comments here fairly often and have never yet found anything in them which would subtract the least measure of my respect, but I do think you do yourself and your position a great deal of harm by arguing in this manner.

[0] "The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind" http://thepublicdomain.org/thepublicdomain1.pdf

"However, it is a fundamental economic principle that the cost of a good will approach the marginal cost of production."

This is fundamental to the economics of goods but it clearly doesn't hold for information. When I started researching this topic in 1995 it was exactly because I was stuck in that same discontinuity of understanding. Why were people paying for a CD that had a copy of an operating system they could download for free? A goods economist would, like you state, observe that the supply of such CD's was essentially infinite or at least very high, and the marginal cost of producing one very very low, so how could they maintain a market price that was probably 20x their marginal production cost? That price has a component that is clearly not described by classic economics, what was it? In that same store the cost of blank CDRs was pummelled relentlessly by the reduction in marginal production cost. From over $10/CDR disk when things started down to about $0.43/CDR. Why are they pummeled into the ground and not the Linux Distro of the week CDRs?

I started pulling on that thread a long time ago and haven't stopped. Starting with the question, "What gives information value?" Using what I've learned over the years it has helped me understand and analyze things like what does Google sell really? or Why do non-DRMed artistic products make more money than DRMed ones? Or why did CD sales fall faster after Napster shut down? Can you price awareness? Why did "Its a wonderful Life" enjoy greater success after its Copyright lapsed? Etc.

Right, it is clearly true that pure information has no marginal cost of production. This does not contradict anything I have said. If you think it does, I am afraid that the fault is with your own understanding.

>>> Realistically, digital goods should be "free."

> I'm afraid to have to say that your argument is tangential and somewhat misleading.

???

Fundamental principles of economics dictate that this situation will not happen naturally. The author is not needed to create copies, and therefore prior to the invention of copyright, no one had any conception that he should be compensated for each copy. It's not like he labored to make the copy himself. The guy turning the handle on the press sure isn't going to be easily persuaded that the author deserves a share of the fruits of that labor. On the other hand, we as humans do really like good books, plays, music, etc, and it is considered fair to most that if someone makes a really popular work, that he get some sort of additional compensation for that. Before the wide adoption of copyright, and even through to the end of the 19th century, copyright violation was common enough that "authorized editions" were still common. Gilbert and Sullivan's British copyright on their works was not respected in the United States. American theater companies copied G&S's work almost as soon as it was performed, but people still preferred going to authorized or licensed performances, at least if they had the option, so G&S (well, really Carte) did pretty well from licensing. I digress somewhat, but I would like to note that this is actually an argument for copyright, especially as the least-market-disturbing option. The right to officially monetize some creative work is sometimes valuable enough in and of itself for there to be a market for it, just not most of the time, and there wasn't any recourse if anyone didn't want to work out a licensing deal. This worked out pretty well because copying and distributing physical media was fairly easy to detect and punish, even if the idea of owning a particular idea was understood by most to be fairly absurd.

The other fundamental issue with copyright in the digital age is that the actual marginal cost of making a copy of Harry Potter is no longer that $8.30 in paper and ink, it's a number so close to zero as to be difficult to establish. Trying to argue for a digital copyright is as futile as arguing with the tide. Whether you or I like it or not, we are effectively in a post-copyright world, and nothing will bring the old world back -- it doesn't cost money to distribute media, so we can't give any part of those profits back to the artist. We need new business models, and as it happens, and as this article discusses, Netflix seems to be stepping up to the plate here in a big way. If you would like to actually articulate a position I am sure I would be interested in further debate rather than just having the opportunity to repeat myself in slightly different words.

It improves readability.

The limited-supply good is the copyright license, not the information. The natural value of the digital information is zero, and it is still possible to sell value added services such as printing and binding for a sufficiently popular work.

The real question is for how long should the copyright privilege--and its arbitrarily set licensing costs--be extended?

(A DVD full of ones might be worth more than a movie DVD, and is definitely worth more than a DVD full of zeroes, if it is actually a blank writable disc. The zeroed-out disc might still be of some use as a diffraction grating or drink coaster.)

I see it rather differently, in part because I think this statement conflates two things. One is information value and the other is how we have tried to stuff information value into goods economy ideas. Perhaps an example will help clarify my understanding for you.

This example comes from a friend of mine at Facebook who was getting his MBA from Berkeley at the time;

Imagine you have a soda machine, it is sitting there with a selection of ice cold beverages. Now anyone who has traveled around knows that the "price" for a single beverage from a soda vending machine varies, often by a lot, from a low value when it is in a company cafeteria to a high value when it sits in the floor vending nook of a high priced hotel. But its the same soda. Our imaginary machine is different. It has a variable price right in the machine! If you give it $2.00 it will immediately dispense an ice cold soda, if you give it $1.00 it will give you a ticket that will dispense your selection 60 minutes from now, and if you pay it $0.50 it will give you a ticket that will dispense your selection two hours from now. The purpose of the machine is to capture as much value for the soda as possible, from the "I don't care what it costs, give me a soda" crowd, to the "Ok that is the same as I would pay for it in a grocery store" crowd. All from the same machine.

Now you're sitting there looking at the machine and counting out $2.00 when someone walks up to you and asks what you're going to buy, they offer to sell you their ticket, which they bought nearly two hours ago, for that soda which is going to drop in a few minutes for $1.50.

Think about that transaction for a minute. What did you buy? Did you buy a soda? Or did you buy the information that a soda would drop in a few minutes? There is no copyright here, no patent, there is instead two of the fundamental ways that information gains value, it is timely and rare. Timely, in that you want a soda now and this person knows when that soda will be available, and rare in that there isn't really any other way to get that information, only the person who bought the ticket (and presumably some timer inside the machine) has it. It was always a $0.50 can of soda, but that extra $1.00 value came from information about its availability which you bought from this stranger.

There is an interesting experiment you can run which shows this effect pretty clearly, in the experiment you have three operators and a number of test subjects. Operator #1 is offering to buy the information about where a queen is positioned on chessboard in a building several hundred yards away. You get a ticket for the information that is wanted, walk over the building, show it to Operator #2 who is standing by the chess board, they look at your ticket and move the queen to the place on the board, you return to operator #1 and collect your fee. Now you have operator #3 stand somewhere in the path between operator #1 and operator #2, they offer to sell you the information about the position of the queen for 10%, 25%, 50%, or 75% of the fee value.

You can use information economics to understand the natural value of information (vs the imposed value) and when information is "intrinsically" valuable or merely "temporally" valuable, and when you can create value out of collections of "free" information.

The takeaway though is that it is the information does have a value (again if it did not then people wouldn't miss it if they didn't have access to it) but individual assessments of value differ (why will some people subscribe to the WSJ and others only read it by going to the library and reading it for 'free'[1]).

And as a PostScript I specifically picked a DVD full of zeros because as you point out a DVD full of 1's is a blank DVD that can be programmed and a DVD full of random bits is an entropy source which can be used to improve the strength of one's cryptography, so really only a DVD full of zeros has the least value.

[1] Travelling to the library has its own opportunity costs and costs of execution (getting there, meeting time schedules, keeping a library card in good standing, Etc.)

That parasitic vending machine has another parasitic vending machine next to it, which has an ever better prediction model, such that it buys from the other two machines only when it knows that the second one hasn't bought enough to meet future instant demand. For instance, perhaps it knows the schedule for a nearby convention, when the other parasite only knows average daily purchase volume. So 2 hours from the end of the headline event, the third machine puts in a big order from the first, and then two hours before the end of the expected surge, buys out the second machine so that it can't undercut using its available stock. It then sells out at a higher price and waits for the next opportunity.

So the only time anyone ever sells a drink for $2 is when an unexpected busload of thirsty tourists drops by and buys out the entire stock of cheap, instant beverages.

In your example, you have also forced my hand. What happens if I instead buy a 2 hour ticket, right in front of the guy, and ask what his price would now be to trade my ticket for his?

A couple of interesting (and non hypothetical!) things to ponder. What is the value that motivates people to buy DVDs that are a bootable install and/or live image of a free OS for $9.99 at Fry's? Similarly, what is the purchase calculus that someone does when they buy a paperback book in an airport bookstore which is a book they already own and have a perfectly readable copy at home?

We don't have Fry's here, but depending on your 'net connection it can be cheaper / more time effective to buy a physical version instead of a download. See also physical console games.

Because you can't do this yourself. And it's not about being technically incapable, it's about you know knowing what arbitrary state to assemble them into. It's not really arbitrary. Each assemblage has purpose.

Especially with creative works, there has always been two sides to the cost of production:

1. The cost of making the physical good itself (evaporating with digital goods) 2. The cost of remunerating the creator of the work.

The second cost still exists. You pay people to reconfigure the bits on your hard drive to represent a TV show because you can't think of it all yourself. You pay others to reconfigure the bits on your hard drive to represent a useful program because you don't know how to assemble them in such a manner yourself.

I'm very much against companies that are price-gouging and trying to maintain artificially high prices based on the obsolete first cost. But people still deserve compensation for the work they do, even is the output of that work is purely digital. Otherwise, what is the incentive for them to create anything?

I'm not entirely convinced that indirectly killing off art for profit as a market would be an even mostly bad thing. Those that remain would be those that do the work they love because they love the work, not because they were expecting a payoff of some kind.

For a direct comparison, examine the entire open source software ecosystem.

Yeah, until they can no longer afford the rent and grocery bill. Then they give up their passion in order to survive. Or they spiral out of control because they can't cope with giving up the work they love and because people are withholding one of the most fundamental and powerful forms of approval and validation: remuneration.

> examine the entire open source software ecosystem.

And examine how often a well-loved technology stagnates when it's corporate benefactors fold (because they can't pay the bills) or de-prioritize the OSS projects (often because they can't monetize effectively).

At the end of the day, creators need food, shelter, etc. The most historically reliable way to provide that is to pay them for their work.

Arguably, software developers just rearrange bits into some arbitrary state. So they wouldn't be paid, either?

It doesn't. But "you need to get paid" != "I need to pay you for the copy of your work". It's only a possible implication. One that we accept in physical world, but that doesn't work well for digital one - hence my point about finding some other way in which you get your money for writing, without me having to explicitly pay for a copy of your e-book.

The thing is, that in order to enforce the requirement that people should pay per copy, we're lobotomizing the medium. In meatspace, making a duplicate of an object requires work and resources. In digital space, a copy is essentially free (electricity expenditure aside). It's a feature, not a bug. And to restrict it, you need to put in place a lot of legislation and user-hostile technologies that track everyone and make one's life miserable - not to mention destroying the concept of ownership as a collateral damage.

Yes, we can keep the pay-for-copy, copyright-everything model. We can try to enforce the rules of physical world in the digital one. But is it worth the damage it's doing to computing? I believe it isn't, and that's why I think we need to find other ways to pay the creators for the work they do.

The physical book feels like it's worth something. The digital copy doesn't. People have a moral intuition that they should pay you in the first place, and that they should not in the second, and legality is largely just the formalisation of our moral intuitions.

If this were the whole picture, it would be legal for anyone to take the text of Harry Potter and print their own copies of it. Or all books with the same physical "feel" would cost the same.

In the US, its constitution motivates copyright and patent law pretty clearly "[t]o promote the progress of science and useful arts." At least in that sense the laws are to ensure that people have some incentive to actually create new stuff and ideas. Furthermore, people inherently attribute value to the information within or else you would not see price differences in content with the same physical feel.

We largely don't see such differences though. We would assume Harry Potter is what, 3x as good as competing knock-offs? But it's always been priced comparably to other books in the same form factor, certainly not 3x as much.

This does not change the fact that your cat needs to eat.

Perhaps there's another way for you to get food for your cat, than taxing my friend for reading your book?

The primary issue I see here is the indirectness between creator/publisher and consumer for what their receiving. Similar to cable: one reason people are cord-cutting is that they'd like to pay for what they want, not the whole bundle.

The Kickstarter model addresses this somewhat, but it doesn't account for long-term continued revenues for the creators for ongoing projects. Also, there have been significant defaults on Kickstarter-type projects, and people (including myself) are becoming increasingly wary that they'll see the fruits of what they paid for.

As for the death of the advertisement industry, they do significantly foot contribute to the income for a lot of media projects, things people aren't willing to pay for directly. While people who pay for subscriptions may think that covers a lot of publishing cost for things like newspapers, it in fact covers only a small percentage of their total revenue. Compare with something like The Information: no ad revenue, small staff, relatively low output, over $300 per year for a subscription.

And, yeah, the state-level entity (which you mention more often than a private one) is going to be hugely unpopular, at least in the US. Look at public broadcasting (NPR, PBS). A small fraction of the budget, still relies heavily on supporter drives, and constantly under the knife. Not to mention the fear that anything involved with the state is propaganda.

A really tough sell, in my opinion.

There's the rub - all of that effort and money creating products with no real monetary value.

I'm not suggesting any particular model here, I like money as much as the next person, but I also believe the trend to see the price of digital media converge toward zero is valid. I don't know what the answer to that is, other than somehow convince people to pay for something they rationally shouldn't.

Temporality is a nonsense argument.

Your sandwich shop worker served you and 80 other customers last Tuesday. I'm the boss, and it's time for me to cut the checks. Wait—what am I paying for here? Today's Friday, and all those sandwiches are already out the door.

In that case, you're paying for the time your employees could have spent elsewhere - and you're likely not paying more if your employees make more sandwiches faster. Also, every sandwich is unique, and takes physical effort and resources to make - if sandwiches could be copied as easily as software, chances are you would fire all but one employee and pay that one as little as you legally could, and still charge the same price, but would that really be fair?

The problem with the economy around digital media is justifying what, exactly, the consumer is meant to be paying for.

The contractual debt you incurred when the work happened. Or, in terms of expected value received from paying, you are paying to avoid the legal consequences of not paying that debt.

The other is along the lines of what you wrote here, which I think sums it nicely:

we need to rethink the path that currently leads from "X created it, and deserves compensation" to "Y receives a copy and should pay for it".

What I'd like to hear is more about potential solutions as opposed to descriptions.

I know it changed for me too, and I think it's mostly because of having more disposable income nowadays than in the past. As a teenager, there was no way I could afford movies or video games. Now, my natural first instinct for media is buying / subscribing on Amazon, Netflix and Steam.

> What I'd like to hear is more about potential solutions as opposed to descriptions.

I've been thinking about one, and it turns out to be exactly what 'endominus described here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13523515.

Consider your ISP takes every packet that is destined for your router at your house and sorted those packets so that all the zero bits were at the beginning of the packets followed by all the one bits. They deliver this sorted data to you perfectly reliably and at great speed. You are receiving exactly the number of zeros and ones you asked for, but simply in a different order. Would you pay for this service? If not then you obviously see the value in the "arbitrary state" of data.

Because someone else took the time to create it, you didn't, and other people have families to feed. If you don't want to pay what someone's asking, write the app/game/product yourself.

If you want digital goods at all you'll learn to pay real money for them. My house & food require real money to buy, and I can either think those digital goods into existence for you to pay real money for, or I can grow that food and build that house while you don't get those digital goods at all.