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Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back

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Re: Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back

#201

Before streaming, a movie studio actually had to convince an audience to leave their houses and buy a ticket to make money from a movie. This meant the studio had to pour a lot of money into marketing for each movie. The cost to market a movie could be up $30M to $50M range for a blockbuster movie. For a mid-budget drama like Meet Joe Black or A River Runs Through It, you could be looking at a marketing budget that m…

It's funny, I keep seeing this era the same way. There used to be such a different structure behind things. Everything was more expensive but we went to grab them because they were so superb. Also it imposed some kind of order.. those who managed to fabricate large things in front of the random nature of workgroups, social trends and audience desires got to grab the hero / fame status (for better or worse).

Today, available means flattens the whole landscape, you can indeed do everything at a fraction of the cost but so the goal vanished because there's nothing of greatness now ? (and many groups are in the "availability is key for .. whatever" .. I find the idea too naive)

This weird tension, or contrast, is interesting.

Re: Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Placer is one of many, many platforms that do this. Assume any app that requests location permissions is selling your data. Hopefully anonymized.

A few months ago I chose a random set of iOS apps to decompile and view their included libraries. Its amazing how much tracking is going on. One interesting that I recall was a Bluetooth library in a convenience store app. Seems like they had Bluetooth beacons around there store and it would use the phone to track you as you walked through the store.

Doesn't Walmart do this?

Re: Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back

#203

Before streaming, a movie studio actually had to convince an audience to leave their houses and buy a ticket to make money from a movie. This meant the studio had to pour a lot of money into marketing for each movie. The cost to market a movie could be up $30M to $50M range for a blockbuster movie. For a mid-budget drama like Meet Joe Black or A River Runs Through It, you could be looking at a marketing budget that m…

Those numbers seems incredibly low for a blockbuster.

I see the google info box saying the average movie marketing spend matches your quote, but they are talking about productions averaging only 60 millions in costs.

Blockbusters like transformers or large marvel movies are much more expensive to produce and market.

Hollywood reports sets the marketing costs of summer blockbusters at 200 million worldwide - in 2014!

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/200-mill...

Re: Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Placer is able to track cell phones that have an app installed that uses their SDK. They currently have their SDK in over 500 mobile apps. The data is anonymized, but it would probably shock people how much information I can get from this system. I just pick a location and I can see how many people walked into that location over any time span in the past 4 years, where they live, how much money they make, where else…

I'll bite. Where I live and where I shop, I can understand. But how does my cell phone know how much money I make?

It's crazy how much just having your location tracked 24/7 shows about you. It can give a pretty good idea of if you're in a relationship and sexually active (where you spend your nights and when/how often), if your parents are dead and if you're married or divorced (where you go for holidays and when you stop going there), what your life expectancy is (your zip code), if you have children (when and how often you visit schools, day care centers and play grounds/chucky cheese), what you do for a living (harder now that more folks work from home), how healthy you are (time spent at doctors/hospitals/fast food restaurants/gyms), etc.

Tracking one person's location history is invasive enough, but if they're also tracking the people around you it gets a whole lot easier. Phones spend time talking to and tracking other phones around them (even when those devices are offline or have location services disabled) along with being tracked by Bluetooth beacons and collecting info about nearby wifi connections.

Re: Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a list somewhere of apps that use placer so that I can delete those apps off my phone forever?

There was a flagged submission about a year ago about them https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22704138 I’ll go on a limb and say that apps don’t even have to integrate Placer’s sdk directly. If an app uses any monetization/tracking/ad tracking system, that tracking vendor may collect the geo data and then re-sell it to Placer (i.e. talk to Placer via a server to server API to let them know about the end user)

How much geo data can they obtain if my location is disabled for almost all of my apps?

Re: Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back

#206

I think this interview that gets at a broader point that I find depressing/scary: that the availability of so much data and analysis has ended up "quantizing" creative endeavors to the point where formulaic output is just much, much easier, and that any truly innovative or "misunderstood" productions become much harder to sustain. I really see this issue everyone nowadays, from movies, TV and music to things like the…

What would the other type of competitor be? Those sports you mention like figuring skating and gymnastics already have execution scores 'style' if you will built in. Personally, I have the opposite opinion. I prefer sports that are more quantified on difficulty alone (and the obvious 1st to finish). Looking at execution is one thing, like taking a step is clearly not as skilled as sticking it no debate there. But jud…

I mean, I don't totally disagree with you when it comes to sports, but e.g. then they should just get rid of the name "artistic gymnastics", get rid of the silly music, and just call it tumbling. Figure skating is probably more difficult to fix, but even there I'd prefer the simple fix of having "girl's" figure skating (say 18 and under) and women's figure skating separated. The current rulebook makes it nearly impossible to be competitive at a top level once someone develops breasts and hips.

Re: Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back

#207

Through my work, I have access to Placer.ai, which allows me to track foot traffic to any retail location or chain via visitors' cellphone GPS. Here's AMC's nationwide foot traffic from January 2017 through July 4, 2021. https://i.imgur.com/s3H7EYj.png

I took the liberty of overlaying the stock price over the foot traffic :) https://imgur.com/a/jTkXhtx

Of course it looks strange -- the stock price reflects a short squeeze on naked shorts, not value or growth.

Re: Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I won't mourn movie theatres (though I hope places emulate the likes of Alamo Drafthouse and do dinner, drinks and let us make an evening out of watching a movie), but I do worry about things like movie financing. It feels the industry has split in two, either making super-expensive superhero blockbusters or super cheap indie films. I'm informed by my cinemaphile friend that exactly this phenomenon has been much re…

> People who complain that nothing good is made anymore must just be looking at what's advertised heavily I can't speak for everyone but I think it's hard to find anything 'fun'. The indie films inevitably seem to be deadly serious, whether it's terrible crimes or failing relationships or the inevitably of death. If a viewer wants 'fun' then they're stuck with formulaic superhero blockbusters. It feels different. Spi…

There was a thread[1] earlier in the week lamenting how tough it is to make modern comedies. Between the Twitter mobs scrutinizing anything for insensitivity and the need to appeal to international markets, it's really hard to come up with a universally funny and PC-acceptable comedy anymore. You can't do slapstick or silliness. You can't (even gently) poke fun at "groups" anymore. Best you can do is a cynical "dark comedy" that provides awkward discomfort and doesn't actually make you laugh.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27750565

Re: Barry Diller: The movie business as before is finished and will never come back

#210

Through my work, I have access to Placer.ai, which allows me to track foot traffic to any retail location or chain via visitors' cellphone GPS. Here's AMC's nationwide foot traffic from January 2017 through July 4, 2021. https://i.imgur.com/s3H7EYj.png

Looks kinda similar to the google search trends https://imgur.com/a/bbTjUkf
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