Movie and TV Studios are Idiots
Nothing annoys a blogger more than to write an article wrapped around the content of a YouTube video and then find the video deleted, blocked, or no longer available because of copyright issues. By the way, there is nothing wrong with the image above - I intend the message to say "This video has been removed by the user."
In my article Most Corporations are Idiots I wrote that most major newspapers in this country are idiots for removing news articles a few weeks after publishing them online:
My readers know that I will never directly link an article to the New York Times. Why bother when two weeks later they put up a 404 - Not Found Error. Don't you think they could make more money by simply allowing advertising on an archived story? I wouldn't be surprised that they get hundreds of thousands of hits a day to a Not Found Page which generates ZERO income for them.
The same applies to movie and TV studios - they still haven't figured out how to make money with the Internet. The minute they find a short clip of their films on YouTube they send legal directives to have the offending clips removed. Are they complete morons? I wish tens of thousands of YouTubeusers uploaded videos pimping my products.
Now Toyota knows how the Internet works - they even have a channel up at YouTube- check out this great ad for the Sienna Minivan.
This morning I was reading Unreality Magazine's article Eight Foreign Actors with Great American Accents that attempted to show how various foreign actors were able to sound quite American using YouTube video clips as examples. Of the sixteen YouTube samples, nine were deleted or blocked for the following reasons:
If I ran a movie studio, I would supply dozens of clips of my films along with director comments, deleted scenes, and bloopers to the blogosphere hoping that thousands of users would upload them unto video sites and comment on them, and eventually buy the DVD's.
Instead of asking YouTube to remove content that is copyrighted, the studios should ask YouTube to add an action button that would enable viewers to download the clip to their cellphone, order a DVD, or link to the film's official website for further action. For example, in this YouTube video at the 1:01 minute mark we see an action button appear alerting the viewer that the clip can be downloaded for free to their cellphone:
That's how you promote your film. With smarts, not lawyers. My regular readers know that I do not do movie reviews. There are two reasons:
- I don't like reading movie reviews so I don't write movie reviews.
- Because Fox, NBC and other idiot studios prohibit video sites from carrying their clips, why should I bother writing a review where any included preview will eventually be removed?
How stupid can you be to remove free advertising?
The Studios Initially Fought VCRs
These are the same morons who fought tooth and nail to keep VCRs from coming to market, thinking they would destroy the film industry because of pirating. Beginning in 2002, American consumers spent more on DVDs than on movie tickets except for 2009. This past year, 3D movies which are 3 to 5 dollars more per ticket have helped increase box office numbers by 10%. So for a while we may see box office sales doing, well, box office. As soon as more homes have TV sets capable of displaying 3D, DVD sales should start to overtake theater revenues once again.
Readers my age (65) may recall that Disney Studios was one of those fighting the hardest to keep home-viewing from ever happening. According to the website The Numbers DVD sales of Disney's 1951 film Alice in Wonderland (original DVD release date: March 31, 1998) brought in $13,181,025 in sales just in the 5 weeks alone since it was released on March 30, 2010 in order to promote the new Tim Burton version. That is more than the 1951 film made in its original release, even accounting for inflation.
Disney made millions on something that now costs about 10 cents in plastic.
The studios should never have fought against technology.
Related: I saw the original 1951 version when it premiered at my local RKO theater in New York City and mentioned the experience in my article Is there any country worse than Israel?
