A Crisis In The Film Industry
Recently I watched the documentary Rewind This. While the film does not really bring up any new revelations about the film industry aside from fact that there is a rise in popularity of VHS. It did manage to bring up a very good point. The life cycle for a film has change over the past 15 years. Today it is substantially shorter with large streaming services pushing to skip the theatrical release all together. From a purely capitalist standpoint this is a major loss. The old life cycle went from major theater chain, to discount theaters, to video store rental and finally retail sell threw. Each stage brought in potential revenue streams for the filmmaker.
We also had more diversity when it came to how we consumed films. From mom and pop stores to major chains. However, today there are only a handful of live streaming services available. From a consumer basis, this has brought the overall costs down but this has come at a price. The number of films available has dropped drastically. For the most part, all streaming services pool from the same dataset of around 9,000 titles, duplicating films in each section to give the illusion of more films. While places like Amazon do carry more titles (around 18,000) this still leaves many titles missing.
On average, there are some 700 to 1000 major motion pictures released every year. That should be increasing the number of films on major streaming platforms every year, however, large streaming services like Netflix have been decreasing the number of movies over the past few years. This is largely due to Netflix sales model which is based on the number of subscribers vs. the number of titles rented/streamed. As of the writing of this article in 2020, since 1910 there has been a total of more than 125,000 major films released. This still leaves some 119 to 130 thousand titles unaccounted for on streaming services and not to mention the 30 to 40 thousand amateur and adult films.
This is not good for filmmakers as it slides the scale unevenly on the side of streaming services and leaves the filmmaker in a buyer’s market.
This is where the old video store model worked for the Indy market, and to the film industry as a whole, as it allowed more companies to buy up films which would otherwise not get distribution. Furthermore, this model employed more people as each company had to hire store clerks, stock personnel, and others. This grew the industry as a whole. This is not the case when it comes to streaming services.
So how does one fix the current distribution model? First off, keep the theatrical release of films. Next would be to create a digital version of a video store by allowing people to stream their own content. This is already happening in small part on such VR platforms like Bigscreen. Other ways would allow for people to copy VHS to Mpeg as long as they can prove they own a real copy of the film. This would reopen the VHS/DVD/Blu-ray market as it would give people a reason to buy films once again. This would also give these films new value as each would represent potential revenue for the person who owns it. The only downside to this is policing the newly copied videos. Aside from random spot checks, one way would be to create a UI number (or unique identifier) for each video with the creator’s personal information along with the filmmakers information. This will enable filmmakers to track their own films, and in return, receive compensation for viewing.
While this solution is not a perfect is does add back value to the filmmaker and ultimately the studios them selfs.
