Some YouTube Thumbnail Data

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YouTube is probably the only remaining online video site that doesn’t let you change your video thumbnail. The video thumbnail uses the frame from the exact middle of the clip and there’s no way to change the thumbnail once a video has been uploaded. This was obviously an arbitrary and expedient decision made in the very beginning of the development of the site. Why they haven’t opened things up yet is beyond me. It would mean an immediate and enormous jump in the quality of the information available on the site. Text descriptions are one thing, but a representative still from the video is worth something like 1,000 words.

Aside from making the browsing experience more informative, it would help people promote their videos better. Truth @ 15 Frames Per Second has a striking example of this. There are really only two possible thumbnails for a 15fps video. Either a still of me or a still of Jennie Tarr.

15fpsicons.jpg

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out which videos will have more viewers. Even removing the exceptionally large numbers for the Webcam Sex video (currently at 1,106,754 views, the #97 most viewed People & Blogs video of all time) the average Jennie-thumbnailed video has 24,769 views. The average Kyle-thumbnailed video has 3,604.

Never underestimate the selling power of a picture of a pretty girl.

UPDATE!: It seems that YouTube now allows changing the thumbnail. Their help pages still claim you can’t, but I was able to select from 3 potential stills at the top of the video info page as of the morning of July 3. There is a note on the page that says it may take up to 6 hours for the selection to appear on YouTube.

Movies Get Pirated

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Michael Moore’s new movie “Sicko” got posted on the Internet before it was released. Why is this news? Because Michael Moore and the Weinstein Company are making it news. I’m sure there was a press release put out by the Weinstein Company, and Moore’s going around claiming it was an inside job. Maybe it was. Or maybe it was made from a DVD screener. I don’t know the specifics of the distribution plans, but I find it hard to believe that there were no DVD screeners available for the film, considering that it’s already played at Cannes and it’s coming out in theaters so soon. Then today there were more articles wondering if the film’s box office would be hurt by all this crazy piracy. The figure mentioned in the articles is 4000 downloads on Piratebay. 4000! And “as many as 600” saw it on YouTube! Do reporters even stop to think about what they’re writing? That many people watching a movie online before it’s released is a story only because the numbers are so small. Hell, according to mininova, 2,000 people are downloading Fay Grim right now. Fay Grim was pirated 2 weeks before it opened and that’s a movie much lower on the radar than Sicko. Trust me, Sicko will do just fine even with all these dirty pirates around.

We Don’t Need More Movie Screens

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Yesterday Chris Anderson over at his Long Tail blog posted some research done by Kalevi Kilkki, Principal Scientist at Nokia Siemens Networks. I don’t really follow the math, but somehow he’s worked out that if there were a lot more movie theaters in the US and an efficient distribution network that didn’t require physically shipping prints to the theater, there would be 60-70% more revenue available to theatrical distributors because they could show a lot more movies with niche appeal. They claim there are 13,000 films shown at film festivals every year and there’s all kinds of untapped theatrical revenue from those films that everyone is just throwing away. Now, you can do a lot of stuff with fancy math that seems reasonable, but this is just ridiculous.

Theatrical distribution is the opposite of niche. The nature of theatrical presentation is that you have to herd a group of people into a particular room at a particular time. You don’t get around that by building more theaters. Have you ever gone to an art house theater on a Tuesday evening? 9 times out of 10 you’ll see 15 people in the audience.

Let’s imagine that there were enough new screens to show every movie available for theatrical distribution, and also assume there’s a network that instantly delivers HD (or better) versions of the films for playback on fancy digital projectors. In the real world, those screens would be built very small and because of the nature of niche interests, the screenings would be even more sparsely attended than they are now. Eventually as you increase the volume, the screens get even smaller and the audience for each screening dwindles to one or two. Do you know what that sounds like to me? It sounds like home video.

Theatrical presentation and home video are not two different things, they complement each other. In almost every case, theatrical is a money-losing advertisement for home video.

Now, if we could get over the stigma of releasing films directly to video, that would really be something. If respectable media outlets would review niche indie movies released directly to video rather than ignoring them and lumping them in with the fifth American Pie sequel then it would be financially viable to release all those movies that don’t make it through the theatrical bottleneck that exists for very real reasons which aren’t going to be solved by technology.

And if you’ve seen even a fraction of those 13,000 movies that supposedly screen at film festivals every year (where does that number come from?) you know that most of them aren’t really of interest to anyone outside of the friends and family of the cast and crew.