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Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#61

Post by Twirrim »

wnissen wrote: post #39
Twirrim wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a story repeated ad nauseam, but the founder of Zoom came from Cisco, after having been in charge of WebEx there. Cisco had refused to let him do what he saw needed done to radically improve WebEx, and so he left and created Zoom and did it there. Cisco just saw a product that was successful at the time, and a senior exec that wanted to spend a lot of money to ultimately still only have video conferencing softwa…

The weird thing is that even with Cisco $$$ Webex still isn't as good as Zoom at streaming. I wanted to watch a Youtube stream simultaneously with friends and tried it out with Webex, Hangouts, and Zoom. Hangouts was unwatchable, maybe 1-2 frames/second, but hey, it's a "free" product. Webex made it possible to see what was going on, but honestly it was pretty crappy. Zoom looked more or less like the original stream…

I've been using Zoom via work for over 4 years now. It has been a stable and very good video conferencing solution for all that time. It is the first time I've honestly dealt with video conferencing software that "just works", which is a huge deal. I've never sat in meetings with people dithering about trying to get it to do what they needed.

Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#62

Post by alfiedotwtf »

vmception wrote: post #54
teach wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I "participated" in a less nefarious strategy. In 2010, when the collection of short stories "Machine of Death" was about to be released, the editor Ryan North asked us not to pre-order. Instead, he suggested that we all wait and purchase the book on the same day from Amazon. The strategy worked -- the book was #1 in its category that day, which certainly led to increased sales over time. Probably didn't hurt that it…

> Instead, he suggested that we all wait and purchase the book on the same day from Amazon. The strategy worked -- the book was #1 in its category that day. In my instagram marketing last decade thats what we did. While others were imagining that people "buy likes", or actually were dealing with bots, we were doing this for our clients. Basically you get meme accounts to do a promotion of a profile that is currently…

I just vomited a little in my mouth

Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#63

Post by sp332 »

wnissen wrote: post #39
Twirrim wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a story repeated ad nauseam, but the founder of Zoom came from Cisco, after having been in charge of WebEx there. Cisco had refused to let him do what he saw needed done to radically improve WebEx, and so he left and created Zoom and did it there. Cisco just saw a product that was successful at the time, and a senior exec that wanted to spend a lot of money to ultimately still only have video conferencing softwa…

The weird thing is that even with Cisco $$$ Webex still isn't as good as Zoom at streaming. I wanted to watch a Youtube stream simultaneously with friends and tried it out with Webex, Hangouts, and Zoom. Hangouts was unwatchable, maybe 1-2 frames/second, but hey, it's a "free" product. Webex made it possible to see what was going on, but honestly it was pretty crappy. Zoom looked more or less like the original stream…

Have you tried using Google Meet instead of Hangouts? I'm just curious if it's noticeably different.

Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#64

Post by ansible »

jcelerier wrote: post #40
ansible wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would venture that the problem with Google's products is that they run in the browser and in spite of all the improvements in browsers these days its just not ready yet when you need the kind of quality and performance that huge meetings demand. Disclaimer: I have not investigated how Zoom and other video conference apps work, but I do work with real-time video. I don't see why the browser would be the limiting f…

You have much more leeway if you can tune ffmpeg decoding settings manually, skip frames whenever you want, etc than if restricted to what webrtc gives you. Also Zoom is built with Qt which is pretty efficient :-)

So it seems the limitation is more the API for recording video, is this correct?

Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#65

Post by geoffreyy »

david_draco wrote: post #45

Movies with similar concepts, which were surprisingly good: - Searching (2018, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7668870/ ) - Unfriended (2014, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3713166/ )

- Unfriended - Dark web (2018, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4761916/) aren't you thinking of this one instead? I've seen it and it was pretty good. When I saw your comment I was like, no way it was from 2014.

Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#66

Post by addicted »

reaperducer wrote: post #26
ascar wrote: post #15

While reading this I wondered how they ended up at a box office of $25,488. Did they really spent $25,488 and consider it as a "small fee" to be the first in box office?! If I interpret the information about "four-walling" correctly, they actually paid the Cinema a much smaller fee to get all seats, but can then report all money they make of these seats as Box Office earnings. The Westhampton Beach Theater has 425 se…

Did they really spent $25,488 and consider it as a "small fee" to be the first in box office?! According to the TV news this morning, yes, they did buy all of the tickets themselves. Which kinda makes the "$0 Budget" headline a little iffy. $0 to make the film. But $26k to achieve their goal.

Even if they did buy the tickets, they paid themselves with those tickets.

They paid a small fee for four walling (which they probably got for a token amount because of COVID and the fact that one of the guys might know the owner since he worked there). And that was pretty much it as far as actual costs were concerned.

Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#67

Post by sincerely »

papeda wrote: post #58
vmception wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead, he suggested that we all wait and purchase the book on the same day from Amazon. The strategy worked -- the book was #1 in its category that day. In my instagram marketing last decade thats what we did. While others were imagining that people "buy likes", or actually were dealing with bots, we were doing this for our clients. Basically you get meme accounts to do a promotion of a profile that is currently…

> Basically you get meme accounts to do a promotion of a profile that is currently private, and all the followers to a private profile get queued up, you can queue them up in the thousands or hundreds of thousands. I'm confused, why is it easier to get people to line up to follow a private account based on...nothing?

Based on an endorsement from a page they already follow. Private meme accounts with tens of thousands of followers or more are not uncommon, so it's not especially suspicious

Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#69

Post by chadcmulligan »

DevKoala wrote: post #9

I find it amusing that Zoom’s user experience allowed it to capture the market to such degree that is now making waves in pop culture. How did Google, Microsoft, Cisco, etc get it so wrong all of these years?

They do have some patents https://patents.justia.com/assignee/zoom-video-communication... so there was some innovation required. I thought they may use middle out compression, but couldn't see its mentioned

Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#70

Post by Jedd »

parsimo2010 wrote: post #55

"So they pay a flat fee to the theatre..." "In that sense, "we made a slight loss" on the movie, Mr Tabach said." Oh, so it's not a $0-budget movie. I suppose they probably get at least that much value in free publicity from articles like these and us talking about them online. Now they can pitch their next project as coming from the brilliant minds of chart-topping filmmakers. Bravo to some guys that figured out how…

> Oh, so it's not a $0-budget movie.

Note that the movie's actual production cost / budget was indeed $0.

In order to then get to the top of this particular list on IMDB - by showing the movie in an actual cinema - that bit cost some small number of $'s, according to TFA.

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