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

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

#31

Post by bryanlarsen »

scubbo wrote: post #8
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…

> Ryan North is also the author of the popular webcomic "Dinosaur Comic". And of "To Be or Not to Be: That Is the Adventure" and "Romeo And/Or Juliet", CYA retellings of Hamlet and R&J; and of "How To Invent Everything", a handy-dandy guide to bootstrapping modern technology if your time machine malfunctions. AND he is the human of Noam Chompsky, a Very Good Boy.

OK, that's the third time I've seen "How to Invent Everything" recommended in 3 very different places. Ordered.

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

#32

Post by xcavier »

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…

My take is it is inferred box office receipts.

When they ‘four wall’, they pay a single fee to rent the entire cinema (the ‘small fee’ they paid to a friendly cinema owner.

They then ran 5 viewings.

So they are claiming being sold out for each of the viewings. (5 * seat capacity * ticket price), but didn’t actually pay themselves for all the tickets (no revenue - small fee = small loss)

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

#33

Post by cecilpl2 »

manjalyc wrote: post #25
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?

I would say the most important part, and where every company has shot themselves in the foot is the need for an account. With Zoom you can join meetings with just a link/code, and while it may seem trivial to us thats a huge plus for nontechnical people. That and the fact Zoom had seamless integration with large meetings with relatively little-to-no performance/quality costs is a huge benefit. The luck of timing & ad…

This is exactly it.

In March, when everyone suddenly wanted to do group video calls with their friends and family, most of whom are nontechnical, we settled quickly on Zoom for ease-of-access. Of all the options, it was the easiest one for me to get my parents into a family call.

You message someone a link, and they click the big buttons until they are in a call. No account, no confusion. We had 100% success rate on getting people in.

Also, it's asynchronous unlike something like FB messenger or Facetime (ie it doesn't push you the meeting, you can pull it at your convenience).

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

#34

Post by foobarian »

manjalyc wrote: post #25
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?

I would say the most important part, and where every company has shot themselves in the foot is the need for an account. With Zoom you can join meetings with just a link/code, and while it may seem trivial to us thats a huge plus for nontechnical people. That and the fact Zoom had seamless integration with large meetings with relatively little-to-no performance/quality costs is a huge benefit. The luck of timing & ad…

So much this. My kid's school went with Google Meet for the online class chats, and gave us meeting codes. So far so good. I get the app, wants a Google account. I would have stopped right there if it was an option. Then, constant problems and apologies from presenter, just like in the bad old days of laptop presentations and projector resolutions. App is not the best either - rookie UI mistakes like the meeting code text box obscured by a CTA. A UX so bad that it boggles the mind.

The school district ended up distributing their own Gmail credentials to use for the meetings, too, which was behind a hard-to-find edu-website login. That's a lot of friction that Zoom solves.

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

#35

Post by foobarian »

cecilpl2 wrote: post #33
manjalyc wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say the most important part, and where every company has shot themselves in the foot is the need for an account. With Zoom you can join meetings with just a link/code, and while it may seem trivial to us thats a huge plus for nontechnical people. That and the fact Zoom had seamless integration with large meetings with relatively little-to-no performance/quality costs is a huge benefit. The luck of timing & ad…

This is exactly it. In March, when everyone suddenly wanted to do group video calls with their friends and family, most of whom are nontechnical, we settled quickly on Zoom for ease-of-access. Of all the options, it was the easiest one for me to get my parents into a family call. You message someone a link, and they click the big buttons until they are in a call. No account, no confusion. We had 100% success rate on…

This was another annoying feature of Meet. The meeting organizer is special and needs to be connected to let people in.

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

#37

Post by ansible »

manjalyc wrote: post #24
marcod1419 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would really like to know what went wrong with Google especially. They've had years to develop Hangouts and Meet, yet it's so, so behind in both performance and quality. Are both of these products just riddled with technical debt to the point that these improvements take significantly longer than normal?

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. Also and perhaps more importantly, Google's approach is tied into its own ecosystem but anybody can join a Zoom meeting with just a link/code. Google had everything they ne…

> 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 factor in performance / quality for videoconferencing.

What is the local client doing? Recording video and audio, and playing a real-time video stream. Sure, you want it to be low-latency, which involves its own bag of tricks.

But native-code libraries and/or hardware are doing all the heavy lifting (like H.264 encoding or whatever they use), the browser (and Javascript) is just the UI.

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

#38

Post by mattmanser »

pmiller2 wrote: post #28
reaperducer wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seems more like $0 to make the movie and $26k for distribution. Do traditional movies count distribution costs in their budgets? Hollywood accounting is weird.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

Read the article, the GP is wrong.

They paid to rent the cinema (small fee), then "sold" themselves the tickets. So their expenditure might have been $26k, but their income would have been $26k. In reality, I assume no money changed hands. It's almost more fun to imagine they sold each other one ticket at time handing the same ten dollars back and forth between themselves.

They held 5 viewings, making roughly $5k per viewing.

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

#39

Post by wnissen »

Twirrim wrote: post #20
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?

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. Pretty amazing for a product that until last year was mainly known security holes.

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

#40

Post by jcelerier »

ansible wrote: post #37
manjalyc wrote: post #24

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. Also and perhaps more importantly, Google's approach is tied into its own ecosystem but anybody can join a Zoom meeting with just a link/code. Google had everything they ne…

> 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 :-)
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