“…except, of course, that the actually numbers say exactly the opposite.”

To: except, of course, the numbers actually say exactly the opposite.

Amirite?

Seriously, fuck these people, where talking about renting movies that have paid for them selves several times over already.

Its free fucking MONEY

Ill start charging $.059 an hour to undercut their prices.

I highly doubt this company with 4 whole kiosk is a blip on anybodys radar. Much less have them actually make any money at this price point. Another example of why the studios are trying to put an end to these cheap rentals because look where they lead to. I don’t understand why they just don’t give it away there’s no need for making money anyways.

Why can’t they apply that sort of pricing to online streaming, then? (if they have, I haven’t seen it)

Pay-per-view for 6p an hour of streaming + ads… their margins will probably larger than physical stores that way.

I’ve seen something like this before. When I started graduate school (Anthropology, then History), university libraries commonly put scarce books on two-hour reserve. This applied especially during the critical first year, the “boot camp,” when people were being put through the wringer. The situation was that fifteen or twenty people would all be trying to read the same book, of which the library had only one copy, over a period of two or three days, before the next class session, so it had to be put on two-hour reserve in the interests of fairness. Of course you couldn’t read a book, at least, not the kind of book I’m talking about, in two hours, but you could make photocopies. Then, if you rationed yourself to four hours sleep, you had just barely time to read the book in time for class, write a reading note, and to be able to orally answer the professor’s oral questions. Being in such a program was incompatible with any kind of part-time job, of course. The professor and the library turned a Nelsonian blind eye to the photocopying. They couldn’t ask starving graduate students to spend fifty or a hundred dollars a day on books, even if particular titles were still in print, but they could, by God, require them to _read_ that many books. Even if the books were in print, unless the professor had pre-ordered them through the bookstore, there simply would not have been time to find copies, this being before Borders Bookstore took off. The professor was in the position of either saying that graduate students were either required to buy a book, or required to photocopy it. The professor decided what the poorest member of the class could afford, and acted accordingly. Of course, photocopying cost about as much as mass-market paperback books would cost, but these weren’t mass-market paperbacks. This kind of copying did not have much economic implication, because it involved only a tiny elite of hardcore liberal arts graduate students, compared to whom both law students and MBA students were both affluent and lazy. The difference, this time around, will be that automation will supply the place of labor. When people rent movies by the hour, they will, of course, rip them, return the originals, and watch the ripped copies at their leisure. The only practical defense the movie industry will have will be to sell movies outright for rental prices.

Hollywood is not going to find a painless marketing formula which allows business as usual. It will have to get its costs down. Hollywood will go to Bollywood, that is, it will move its operations to India. As “Anonymous Coward” (Dec 11th, 2009 @ 10:19am) notes, the vast majority of the people involved in making a movie do not appear on screen. They are cameramen, gaffers, grips, soundmen, lighting men, carpenters, electricians, costumers, make-up specialists, film editors, and a hundred other specialized trades. However, this means that it does not matter if they are Indians. The Indian film industry is one of the most vibrant ones in the world, producing huge numbers of films in multiple languages, and distributing them to Indian audiences who are film junkies in ways which American have not been since the 1930’s. At some point, American directors and leading actors will tap into this system.

Now, as for the extras, walk-ons, etc., the largest category of actor, such people have traditionally moved to Los Angeles, registered with casting agencies, and then found themselves ordinary jobs to live on while waiting for screen calls. They have worked as waiters or cab drivers, or the like, dead-end jobs where the employer expects a high turn-over, and doesn’t particularly mind people leaving without warning or notice, and will hire someone on a day’s notice without references. Allowing for precariousness of employment, bit-part actors have been paid approximately minimum-wage for the net time lost from their table-waiting jobs. Of course, an expatriate cannot do that kind of thing in India, but living expenses are much lower, and someone who is stage-struck can work in the United States for a couple of years, in the kind of job for which one does need references, eg. teaching school, and save up enough money to live in India for a couple of years. Indian producers and directors will discover that they can make movies for the American market, working with Americans who are not affiliated with the American film industry.

Once an industry moves offshore, its political influence diminishes. It is no longer a source of steady high-wage employment for Americans. The political base of the movie industry is someone like a cameraman. The cameramen, etc. are not like actors– they are craftsmen. Within reason, a good cameraman can film any kind of movie, which means that the cameraman can work steadily at high wages, filming whatever is being filmed. He votes for whoever favors the film industry, just the way autoworkers used to vote for whoever favored the automobile industry. As the movie industry moves offshore to cut costs, it will leave the union cameraman behind. It will no longer have its own congresscritters like Howard Berman or Mary Bono.

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