Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 30th, ’24

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"One day, you’ll be the one to come and barter a loaf of bread for our DVDs." – Christina






































March 30th, 2024




A Return to Blu-ray as Streaming Value Evaporates

As Streaming Gets Worse, Lets Save the Movie-Disc!
Wayde Robson

In this article…

• Unsustainable Streaming Flood
• Peak Streaming
• Drunk with Growth Potential
• 2023-2024 - Streaming’s Real Cost Passed to Consumers
• Streaming Will Only Get Worse
• Back to Physical Media

Physical media may be on life-support, but rumors of its demise are overstated. Its heyday as a significant slice of film industry revenue may be over, but there’s good reason to believe the movie-disc will live on as a healthy niche that struggling film industry can’t afford to ignore into the foreseeable future. There may even be some optimism that physical media has already seen its rock-bottom and can only go one direction from here.

Those of us who stopped paying cable bills anytime through the 2000s lived through it. We cheered-on streaming video or the “Subscription Video on Demand” (SVoD) market as it threw a hand grenade into the cable TV industrial complex. But we may not have expected physical media would be collateral damage. A 2023 report from the Digital Entertainment Group says, after over a decade of declines, movie-disc media (DVD/BD/UHD) revenue dropped an additional 28% through 2023. I wish I had more firm good news for movie-disc media, but I’m remaining optimistic that as the SVoD market matures and passes from its experimental disruptive technology phase, more of us will return to the value in owning the disc again.

Peak Streaming TV

When streaming came along, video on Demand (VoD) was not a new concept. Cable and satellite services experimented with VoD services as far back as the 90s. But the real innovation with on-demand TV and movies would arrive in the high-speed Internet-era, and it was called Netflix. Honestly, what’s not to love about an ad-free, all-you-can-watch video buffet that can be consumed on any connected screen?

Netflix NBrief Rise of Streaming Timeline:

• Netflix, an obscure mail-in DVD rental service announced web-based video on demand in Jan. 2007, just days after Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone

• 2010 Netflix goes international, starting with Canada before conquering the world

• 2013 First net-reduction in total US cable/satellite TV subscribers numbered a quarter-million as “cord cutting” enters the American lexicon

• 2019/20 Disney+ & HBO Max (Warner), major studios enter the SVoD market

• 2023 Cord-cut US households outnumber cable TV

• 2023 Physical movie-disc media sees its sixteenth straight year of sales decline

By the 2010s households across America were replacing monthly cable bills that averaged between $80-$200 with a broadband Internet connection and an inexpensive ad-free, unlimited streaming video service called Netflix. When the first major SVoD service was the only game in town it built an audience on licensed TV programming and movies from nearly any network or film studio. Early adopters may remember when a Netflix subscription was only $8/mo and paired with a free, ad-supported Hulu subscription you had a popular one-two punch for movies, legacy and current TV with no cable bill.

Unsustainable Streaming Flood

Did anyone really think the economics of an $8/mo centralized streaming service could last? The cord cutting trend took a lot of potential revenue out of the entertainment industry. Meanwhile, movie theater attendance had been in steep decline since long before the virus struck in 2020. Cable TV may have simultaneously been among America’s most profitable and hated businesses, but it had it all! From outrageous bills to network advertising, cable providers and the networks it carried had such large, often captive markets that it could afford to fund what we call the “golden age of TV” in the late 90s & 2000s.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but early streaming adopters were taking part in an experiment with the Netflix library in its $8/mo-era. We got away with it while we could, but what we were viewing was provided at losses, covered mostly by borrowing and investors to provide us with a preview of a home entertainment future. It was the proverbial free sample of crack to get us hooked. One way or another, the real cost was coming to our homes to roost.

In 2023, big-tech unlocked the “Disrupt Home Entertainment” achievement trophy when cord cutters outnumbered cable subscribers. The big media companies were already working on getting that revenue back when they began to imitate Netflix. The media conglomerates started tech-companies to launch their own streaming services while Netflix built its own legitimate media production company—what could possibly go wrong?

Anonymous TV Industry Insiders | Vulture, June 2023:

“Everything became big tech — the Amazon model of ‘We don’t actually have to make money; we just have to show shareholder growth.’ Everyone said, ‘Great. That seems like the thing to do.’ Which essentially was like, ‘Let’s all commit ritual suicide. Let’s take one of the truly successful money-printing inventions in the history of the modern world — which was the carriage system with cable television — and let’s just end it and reinvent ourselves as tech companies, where we pour billions down the drain in pursuit of a return that is completely speculative, still, this many years into it.’”

“I think we may be in the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme.”

Peak Streaming

Now that we’re years into competitive streaming we’ve started to see the cracks. According to one media analyst, as the seemingly unlimited growth of the SVoD market has begun to taper off, only Netflix has proved profitable as a standalone streaming business. For some companies, losing money in streaming may be seen as an investment in a retention or marketing strategy for other profitable services. Amazon and Apple may use streaming to promote their services or ecosystem. Disney may have even pitched streaming to its board as marketing for its theme parks and theatrical releases, but that doesn't seem to be working. For film studios sinking in losses at the movies, starting a streaming service has been like throwing it an anchor.

Hollywood ExecBehind-the-Scenes Hollywood Legend Talks Streaming

Rob Long is a Hollywood writer/executive and podcaster that shares his often humorous takes on the entertainment industry as co-host of the Glop Culture podcast. The natural humor he brings to his writing and podcasting is a gift he’s employed since he started in the business writing for the comedy TV show Cheers. Long has had a lot to say about the sorry state of entertainment production in the age of streaming. He seems to imply that production companies building streaming services and tech companies (Netflix, Apple & Amazon) creating studio productions is just bad business. But he says they’ve been able to get away with reckless spending due to a period of low-interest rates and relatively free-flowing investment capital. On the Unspeakable podcast with Meghan Daum Rob Long said:

”Netflix grew on borrowed money… [while production studios] spent on building these stupid companies [streaming services]. There is no reason on Earth why the world needs, or where the economically rational choice would be to build “Paramount Plus”. It’s so lazy, they spent so much money and didn’t even think… they just named everything “Plus”! There’s even an MGM Plus!… When money was essentially free, they made poor decisions… ”

Long has told stories about one important job of a movie producer, working the phone to acquire investment into movies. The business has always worked this way and Long says that throughout film history, the most successful business-sectors in any given era will reliably invest in Hollywood despite its risks. Fortunately for these producers, big companies and the powerful people behind them are charmed by the glamor and prestige of being part of Hollywood while wanting their brands associated with it.

In earlier eras of entertainment this may have resulted in Mutual of Omaha putting its name on a wildlife documentary series. But the consumer electronics industry took its relationships with Hollywood to the next level in the 1980s by acquiring them, and giving us preview of what was to come. GE acquired RCA which included NBC. Sony bought Columbia pictures to create Sony Pictures. Comcast bought NBC-Universal from GE in 2011. But these days, the most successful business sector is big-tech, which is simultaneously investing in the industry, while gravely disrupting it. The two business-worlds seem to be merging after a catastrophic collision with Netflix that turned the tech-startup culture of investment spending over to Hollywood.

Drunk with Growth Potential

The COVID restrictions of 2020-2021 arrived just as Disney+ and a revamped unified HBO Max (HBO/Warner/Discovery) began. The SVoD market was already ripe for growth, but the COVID-era may have seduced streamers into exaggerated impressions of demand. According to a Deloitte Digital Media Trends study soon after the start of widespread COVID restrictions, the percentage of Americans that subscribed to one or more streaming services jumped by about 11%, while the average American household increased the number of streaming services from 3 to 4 while subscriber churn only declined slightly. That’s a little smaller growth than I would have guessed but according to Neilson, the real growth during the high-pandemic months was in viewing time. From Neilson Insights:

“During the height of countrywide shelter-in-place orders across the U.S. amid the COVID-19 pandemic, weekly time spent watching connected TVs grew along with overall media use, rising by more than 1 billion hours as the weeks passed.”

- Nielsen Insights

2023-2024 - Streaming’s Real Cost Passed to Consumers

By now we’ve all seen a parade of streaming service price hikes accompanied by lost revenue. Worst of all, we’ve seen movies and shows pulled from the services that produced them. Much of streaming’s new lost media were only produced over the last few years and are now locked away by its intellectual property owner, potentially never to be seen again. That the cost of streaming specific titles is higher than the rewards of its presence on the service speaks to an industry that drank a bit too much of its own Kool-Aid. The money being saved could be hosting cost, per-stream residuals and maybe the service gets a tax write-off. But for some of the freshly pulled Disney+ plus content, it could be a form of reputation management or damage control to keep subscribers from accidentally watching that Willow remake.

Loss... or "investment" into Direct to Consumer (DTC) streaming by media company 2020-2022

Streaming losses

Timeline of a Broken Streaming Video Business:

• Oct 2022 - Why Streaming Content is Becoming the Newest Form of Lost Media

• Nov 2022 - Warner Bros. Discovery Lost $2.3 Billion

• Jan 2023 - Netflix will pull cheapest ad-free plan after latest price hike

• Jan 2023 - Netflix is preparing investors and users for more price hikes in 2024

• April 2023 - 16 Fantastic shows that have been inexplicably yanked from their streaming services

• June 2023 - Disney Takes $1.5B Write-Down After Removing Shows Off Disney+ and Hulu

• Sept 2023 - Streaming Has Reached Its Sad, Predictable Fate

• Oct 2023 - Disney Plus Price Hike

• Nov 2023 - (HBO) Max’s Standard No-Ads Plan Is Dropping 4K Ultra HD Content, Reducing Concurrent Streams From Three to Two

• Nov 2023 - Disney+ Loses $283-million

• Dec 2023 - PlayStation owners rage over plot to delete downloads you’ve paid for with NO refund

• Feb 2024 - Prime Video Removes Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos Unless You Pay More

Streaming Will Only Get Worse

Where will streaming video will go next? My guess is that media conglomerates with ties to communications companies will form a team-up. Comcast (NBCUniversal) and AT&T (Warner) may partner with Disney to take the lead on at least one unified streaming service in a sort-of Hulu 2.0 enterprise that will compete with or absorb Netflix. They’ll find clever ways to sneak more advertising throughout user-interfaces and content, even on more expensive premium “ad-free” subscriptions. Soon, we’ll forget about “cord cutting” and a not-so-new term will re-enter the American entertainment lexicon: “Bundles”. Perhaps a new generation of bundles will be tied to your ISP or wireless network fees and they may even involve contracts to lock you in. It will be just like cable TV, but in the cloud. Streaming can't continue operating at losses for much longer, eventually its true cost will be passed on to consumers. I'm hopeful this may present opportunity for physical media.

Back to Physical Media

James MadisonI’m not here to tell you that you can stick it to the man through consumption. But by collecting movies on optical-disc in any form, you will at least support a more reliable and egalitarian method of media consumption. You’ll achieve the only real ownership of your movies in the true constitutional sense that exercises your right to private property. If James Madison permitted himself such frivolities, he would almost certainly keep a collection of his favorite movies on disc. If you care about sound and video quality, the new generations of optical disc is your best bet this side of Kaliedescape.

After over a decade of decline, there’s still a robust, if niche market for physical movie-disc media—but it needs your support! It may be too soon to provide any solid sales data to support it, but I believe the market for DVD, Blu-ray & 4K Ultra discs may be on the rise. There were plenty of anecdotes from the collector market of individuals unable to obtain Oppenheimer on 4K Ultra HD the week after release due to demand and that’s a good sign. If physical media can achieve broader market acceptance again, it will have a much better chance of surviving streaming. Streaming affords the studios absolute control of its intellectual property's distribution. But a formidable revenue stream is a fair incentive to include a physical media release into a new movie's life-cycle. But I can only wonder if a niche collector's market will be enough to entice physical media releases far into the future.

Conan the Barbarian (1982)

The movie that got me back into physical media recently was Conan the Barbarian (1982). It has long been one of my favorites. I grew-up reading the old DeCamp edits of the books by Robert E. Howard and the comic adaptations by Roy Thomas. While the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie can be criticized by Howard purists for not giving the character the same backstory as the books, the screen-writing duo of Oliver Stone and John Milius succeeded in capturing the true spirit of the character. I will be grateful if the character never receives a new film adaptation that updates Conan’s Hyborian Age for modern audiences. But I have finally been treated to the definitive Blu-ray version of the classic I've been waiting for.

Arrow Video is a boutique video-disc company that curates classic movies and performs high-quality audio/video transfers for DVD, Blu-ray and 4K UHD. I heard the company had released a limited, definitive remaster of Conan the Barbarian (1982) in UHD with a new Dolby Atmos soundtrack and video lovingly transferred from the original film's negatives. I was hooked because it also includes the classic Milius/Schwarzenegger commentary that I've only heard on an old DVD release, no subsequent Blu-ray until now included it or the ambitious restoration that Arrow performed. The commentary is a must hear for any fan of Milius, Schwarzenegger or the 1982 movie, it's comedy gold hearing Milius philosophize over each scene through his distinct "survival of the fittest" outlook while Schwarzenegger only really speaks up about his injuries while filming or about his female co-stars.

I couldn’t find the disc anywhere in stock soon after its Jan 30th 2024 release date. It must have been in high demand if the Sold Out label on every retail web-page was any indication. Stock of the disc eventually returned to one online supplier the next month and I finally got it into my hands.

When I finally got it home, opening the small box that includes a booklet, silly two-sided poster and hard cardboard slip-cover accompanied by that distinct smell of new media brought back a flood of fond memories of collecting great movies. At no time did I make a conscious decision to abandon physical movie-media, it just sort-of faded out. The fade can be dated across my modest collection at around 2015 when it ground to a halt. But for movie viewing at home, I for one will be subscribing less and the halt on my physical media collecting ends now!
https://www.audioholics.com/news/a-r...lue-evaporates





Boutique Blu-ray Labels Keep Physical Media Alive — and Preserve Film History in the Process

The curators behind Vinegar Syndrome, Radiance, Fun City, and Cinématographe are keeping jewels of film history from falling through the cracks.
Jim Hemphill

The supposed demise of physical media has been well covered and long lamented, with each passing year bringing reports of yet another nail in the coffin of the once flourishing DVD and Blu-ray market. Fall 2023 brought a double whammy of bad news: Netflix shipped its final discs to customers before closing up its DVD department for good, and a month later, Best Buy announced that it would be phasing out the sale of physical media. Yet, while DVDs are no longer the massive revenue generator for studios that they were throughout the first decade of the 2000s, it has never been a better time to be a physical media enthusiast. Thanks to independent labels like Criterion, Kino Lorber, Shout! Factory, Arrow, Imprint, Indicator, and many others, every month sees the release of well over a dozen exceptional titles, often lovingly restored and with indispensable scholarly extras.

That we’re living in such a flourishing golden age in terms of quality, even as the economics seem increasingly discouraging, is thanks to an intrepid community of cinephiles. Their passion has led to boutique DVD and Blu-ray labels that release titles — both well-known and obscure — that might fall through the cracks if left to the vagaries of corporate overlords. The excellent coming-of-age film “Little Darlings,” for example, was released by Paramount in 1980 but never given a proper home video presentation until independent label Vinegar Syndrome’s new sub-label Cinématographe put out an exquisite 4K Blu-ray. While Paramount never saw the value in releasing the film in its correct aspect ratio or fidelity to its intended color and sound mix, Cinématographe producer Justin LaLiberty felt that licensing the title and creating a new transfer from the original negative was in keeping with Vinegar Syndrome’s mission to fill in the gaps of film history.

“The canon of American cinema from the late ’60s through the mid-’90s is bigger than ‘The Godfather,’ ‘Taxi Driver,’ ‘Nashville,’ ‘Blue Velvet,’ ‘Pulp Fiction,’ etc.,” LaLiberty told IndieWire, noting that, even when Cinématographe releases movies by major directors, it tends to focus on their lesser-known works. “Many of the filmmakers we revere haven’t had their entire story told,” he said.

Providing a sense of discovery for movie fans tends to be a motivating factor for many boutique Blu-ray producers, as Radiance founder Francesco Simeoni explains. “Radiance was created because I had my fill of major classics,” Simeoni told IndieWire. “While I was very fortunate to release so many of my favorites [when working for another label], from ‘Carrie’ and ‘Night of the Hunter’ to ‘Salvatore Giuliano’ and ‘Branded to Kill,’ I felt like I wasn’t finding new films anymore but going over ones I already knew.” Thus, Simeoni created Radiance to showcase filmmakers few viewers had ever heard of, like the great Italian director Luigi Comencini.

Similarly, Fun City Editions founder Jonathan Hertzberg created his label to shine a light on maverick directors like Arthur Barron (“Jeremy”), Norbert Meisel (“Walking the Edge”), and Ivan Passer (“Cutter’s Way”), and has also released boxed sets devoted to TV movies of the ’70s and ’80s that might otherwise be lost forever. He acknowledges that getting the word out about such movies is always difficult. “It’s a niche business, and we are often releasing films that are only known to a niche portion of that niche,” Hertzberg told IndieWire, adding that his job largely consists of “trying to get an audience to take a chance on something new, often by relating it to something better known to them.” Hertzberg also notes that while the customer base for boutique Blu-ray labels is dedicated and passionate, it is also finite — a major challenge given the high costs involved with keeping a label running.

Those costs are largely front-loaded, as studios require minimum guarantees in the form of initial fees, as well as a percentage of royalties once the discs are released. One of the added difficulties is that no two studios are alike, and even for the same studio different titles dictate different terms. “Each studio has its own way of doing things,” Vinegar Syndrome‘s Joe Rubin told IndieWire. “If we want titles from their catalog, we have to bend to their rules; they’re not going to change things to suit us.” Rubin’s company has become one of the saviors of international cult cinema, restoring and preserving important independent titles alongside the movies they license from studios. That introduces its own set of challenges, especially since Vinegar Syndrome insists on presenting each film with an archival-grade restoration.

“The biggest challenge we tend to have when dealing with independents is tracing missing materials,” Rubin said. “We want each film we release to look as close as possible to the final answer print, and we never employ digital tools to alter the image in ways which would not have been photochemically possible at the time the film was made. The amount of time it takes to complete a restoration can be anywhere from weeks to months, depending on the condition of the materials.” According to Hertzberg, when dealing with independent films one must become a bit of a detective to hunt down the rights holder and find the best materials. “And then, can you make it make sense business-wise? It boils down to some combination of: Is the film available and can you afford it? Does it fit your brand identity or goals? Do you like it and to what degree? Are there accessible, extant materials from which to create a new master, or is there already a new master?”

With studios, a whole other kind of detective work may be required. “It’s a matter of internal clearances,” Rubin said. “Especially when dealing with films made before the digital era, music often wasn’t cleared for all distribution mediums. Or certain documents might be missing that will make a studio legal division uncomfortable with a license. Just as it can sometimes take years to find the rightful owner of an independent film and then many more years to track down suitable and complete film materials, it can take just as long for a studio license to work its way through all the layers of their internal legal system. Unlike with independent films, many internal parties must sign off on all license terms when dealing with studios. But we’re fortunate to work with people at all the studios who share our interest and passion in having their catalog titles restored and given quality home video releases, so they’ll go to bat for us on more difficult titles.”

Often, studios don’t have their own HD masters, which means an independent label must determine whether it can afford to create the new master itself. “The easiest kind of title to license and release is the one that’s been out 10 times before,” Simeoni said. “The hardest kind of release is the one where you need to dig to find the rights, where you need to dig to find the elements to restore it, where you need to find anyone alive who was there to talk about, to find experts who know the obscure film and can speak about it in an informative and interesting way.” Many Blu-ray labels survive by producing a mix of the two types of titles, but everyone who runs these companies agrees that the more challenging movies are also the more satisfying ones to release. “The reward is when we put one of these little-known films back out into the world and we witness the rediscovery of that film,” Hertzberg said.

The difficult detective work that’s often required to yield those rediscoveries is, for Rubin, its own reward. “Unearthing thought-to-be-lost film elements — which is what enables us to release something — is still the greatest pleasure,” he said. “And I’m pleased to say that we are still coming across amazing collections of lost and forgotten films.” This year, Vinegar Syndrome has already released “Santet” and “Santet 2,” an extraordinary pair of Indonesian horror films rarely screened in the United States. For LaLiberty, whether or not audiences embrace the films he and his peers release is less important than the fact that they maintain access to them. “At the end of the day, I want these films to be seen,” he said. “Even if they may not ultimately be celebrated, I just want them to be accessible and part of some historical record, whatever, or whoever’s, that may be.”
https://www.indiewire.com/features/c...ia-1234950671/





The Film Fans Who Refuse to Surrender to Streaming: ‘One Day You’ll Barter Bread for Our DVDs’

As more movies vanish from streaming services, cinephiles are rallying to physical media. Can they save a seemingly dying format?
J Oliver Conroy

When a hurricane struck Florida in 2018, Christina’s neighborhood lost electricity, cell service and internet. For four weeks her family was cut off from the world, their days dictated by the rising and setting sun. But Christina did have a vast collection of movies on DVD and Blu-ray, and a portable player that could be charged from an emergency generator.

Word got around. The family’s library of physical films and books became a kind of currency. Neighbors offered bottled water or jars of peanut butter for access. The 1989 Tom Hanks comedy The ’Burbs was an inexplicably valuable commodity, as were movies that could captivate restless and anxious children.

“I don’t think 99% of people in America would ever stop to think, ‘What would I do if I woke up tomorrow and all access to digital media disappeared?’ But we know,” Christina told me. “We’ve lived it. We’ll never give up our collection. Ever. And maybe, one day, you’ll be the one to come and barter a loaf of bread for our DVD of Casino.”

Streaming was supposed to kill physical media, and has come very close. The DVD and Blu-ray market fell from $4.7bn in revenue in 2017 to barely $1.5bn in 2022. In September, Netflix ended its movie-by-mail service. Best Buy has removed physical media from its brick-and-mortar stores, and Target and Walmart may follow. Some new films may never be released physically at all.

Yet a counterrevolution has been gathering. Some film fans never gave up physical media: they’ve spent years quietly buying thrift-store discs, discarded by the many US households that no longer have DVD or Blu-ray players, and waiting for their chance to rise again. Other fans, frustrated by streaming’s limitations, have recently rediscovered physical media and trickled to join its rear-guard army.

Physical media will never regain its heights, but it may live to fight a little longer – supported by loyalists and by a cottage industry of independent and boutique film distributors that license classic and cult films and sell high-quality physical editions to eager, sometimes frantic, fans. Some of these labels offer streaming channels or video-on-demand as well, but still find business in Blu-rays. “We’ve grown rather than shrunk,” Umbrella Entertainment, a distributor in Australia, told me.

And when Universal released Oppenheimer on 4K Blu-ray this fall, the initial run sold out, with feverish Christopher Nolan fans pillaging the same megastores that are moving to drop physical media. 4K Blu-rays are currently the smallest slice of the film disc market, and require ultra-high-definition players and TVs, meaning that the Oppenheimer run was driven by a niche within a niche. But the episode seemed to indicate that a market exists – especially when it has champions.

Nolan himself had encouraged fans to rally to physical media: “If you buy a 4K UHD, you buy a Blu-ray, it’s on your shelf, it’s yours,” he told IGN last year. “[Y]ou own it. That’s never really the case with any form of digital distribution.” Oppenheimer’s producers also resisted the recent trend of giving films perfunctory theatrical releases, or none, then rushing them online.

My Damascene moment came last year, after one too many times I couldn’t find films I wanted on my streaming services. I started borrowing DVDs from the public library, and buying my favorites on Blu-ray. I wondered if other people had come full circle. On a recent evening, I posted on some online forums for movie buffs, asking if anyone still bought physical media and wanted to talk.

I got 180 emails. People cited all sorts of reasons for refusing to give up physical media: desire to protect old or obscure films; nostalgia; fear that streaming services will retroactively censor films; physical media’s dramatically better audiovisual fidelity; fondness for behind-the-scenes featurettes and other bonus content included on discs; distaste for the numbing nightly ritual of scrolling streaming menus.

Several people said that owning physical films made family movie nights feel more intentional, or that they prize their old movies because Hollywood’s recent output disappoints them. “Last week my older son chose Cast Away,” Ken, in Seattle, told me. “It was such a memorable family film, and drew us in more than any flick highlighted on the AppleTV home screen.” Others said they live in rural areas where slow internet makes streaming unreliable.

Every person said they worry about losing access to films – a not irrational fear. Cillian Murphy just won the Oscar for best actor for Oppenheimer, but the movie that made him a star, 2002’s critically lauded and commercially successful 28 Days Later, is virtually impossible to stream. It’s also out of print on disc, with used copies fetching $60 or $70 on eBay.

It’s partly for this reason that the actor Timothy Simons, best known as Jonah on Veep, prefers physical films. There’s a notion that, “you know, ‘Everything’s available on streaming,’” he told me. “Well, it kind of isn’t. And the thing that is available on streaming could just not be tomorrow, if two companies you don’t care about get in a fight about licensing.”

Some enthusiasts are intense, even maniacal, collectors. On the Tonight Show, the actor Carrie Coon recently said that she and her husband, the playwright and actor Tracy Letts, have 10,000 Blu-rays: “My husband’s a very sick man,” she joked, who meticulously researches films on a website called DVDBeaver. “I thought he was looking at porn.” Other people are more casual and recent converts, like the recovering “minimalist” vlogger who recently issued a sheepish mea culpa on YouTube: “I regret decluttering my DVDs.”

Physical media fans of all types tend to see themselves as survivalists prepping for apocalypse – “When the streaming sites took off,” someone told me, “people thought I was crazy for still collecting, but now I feel like my time has finally come” – or like the Irish monks and Arab scholars who, during the Dark Ages, are said to have protected the knowledge of antiquity while Europe burned books as firewood.

Streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, and Apple TV+ were going to make physical media – and cable – pointless. We would be able to access our favorite films at any time, according to the theory, by finding them on our subscription services, renting them by video-on-demand, or buying digital copies that would be stored for us forever in a mysterious cloud.

It was all so glorious: we would have fewer boxes to carry when we moved. Our Ikea bookcases, freed of the agonizing weight of literature and film, could instead carry the random decorative art pieces for which they yearned. Instead of movies, we would watch prestige miniseries, which are like films, but padded out to eight hours by unnecessary subplots and trauma-related backstories.

Blu-rays – which look like DVDs, but are high-definition and store more data – had the misfortune to arrive in 2006, a year before Netflix unveiled its streaming service. By as early as 2012, more Americans were paying to watch movies online than on physical media; DVD and Blu-ray sales have declined since. But holdouts remain.

“I’m bummed. I go to Target now and I see their selection has gotten smaller and prices higher,” Amanda Bowman, in Michigan, told me. “I just feel like [companies] are trying to herd people into streaming. It’s frustrating. It’s also isolating.” She once worked at a video store and misses its sense of community.

Physical video rental stores have almost vanished, though you can still rent from one of thousands of Redbox vending machines left in the US, the non-profits Scarecrow Video in Seattle and Movie Madness in Portland, and a lone Blockbuster that stands vigil in Bend, Oregon. People “have come from all over the world to rent movies”, the Blockbuster’s manager wrote in the Guardian in 2019. “[W]e’ve set up close to 5,000 new memberships. Maybe 20% of those were one-time users who just wanted the Blockbuster card, but the rest are regulars to varying degrees.”

Derek Loman, in Missouri, told me he was so nostalgic for the old days that he turned his home office into a replica 90s video store, complete with a candy aisle and a door in the back marked ADULT. Ken, in Seattle, used to look forward to stopping by retail chains to browse new DVD and Blu-ray offerings; now, “I’ve kind of lost all my interest in visiting Best Buy at all,” he said. Physical media was “kind of like their Costco hotdog”.

Streaming isn’t wholly bad – it’s convenient, still cheaper than cable, and can give people outside metropolitan areas easier access to new series and films, including international pictures, like 2019’s Parasite, that might have been slower to circulate in the Blockbuster days. Amy Jo Smith, the president of the Digital Entertainment Group, a home video trade association, thinks consumers like having different format options.

“Sometimes you want steak, sometimes hamburger, sometimes just feed me whatever,” she told me. “And I think what you’re seeing now is that consumers realize that they’re in the driver’s seat.” She added that she can’t predict the future of physical media. “I think it’s continuing to decline except you don’t see it actually going away, for the reasons you might call out.”

Yet physical media’s decline has had side-effects – including, according to Matt Damon, worse films.

“The DVD was a huge part of our business,” the actor explained in 2021. You could “afford to not make all of your money when [a film] played in the theater, because you knew you’d have the DVD coming behind the release, and six months later you get, you know, a whole ’nother chunk.” When “that went away, that changed the type of movies that we could make”. Financing more adventurous or offbeat films became “a massive gamble in a way that it wasn’t in the 1990s when they were making … the kind of movies that I loved”.

And, contrary to streaming’s promise, you can’t actually watch whatever, whenever. Constricted by licensing and pressure to promote their own content, streamers seem to have ever weaker and more unpredictable libraries. Consumers who thought they would only have to pay for one or two subscriptions ended up with three, or four or five.

Film fans have also been unsettled to discover that the digital versions of films or series they love are not always what they remember. Disney removed a racial slur from 1971’s The French Connection in a way that sanitized its ugly protagonist, “Popeye” Doyle. Other times, iconic needle-drop moments now have different music, for rights reasons.

The other irony is that consumers who ditched physical media as old-fashioned effectively downgraded, technologically. Movies on disc don’t get pixelated or need to buffer. Ryan Verrill, who runs a news resource called Disc-Connected, worries that people are so used to streaming that they don’t realize they’re being ripped off. Streamers “say, ‘Hey, you can stream 4K,’ but it’s not 4K,” he told me. “It’s compressed beyond belief and encoded way worse than even a [regular, non-4K] Blu-ray is. Consumers pay more for a ‘4K plan’ that isn’t 4K. It’s ridiculous.”

The notion of “owning” films digitally has also soured. In 2018, longtime iTunes customers who thought they’d purchased films forever were shocked to notice that Apple sometimes deletes titles from users’ libraries for licensing reasons. Last month customers of Funimation, an anime streaming service that was acquired by Crunchyroll, learned that titles they’d bought from Funimation would be deleted.

Film discs probably aren’t permanent, either, though if stored properly they are estimated to work for at least two decades and often far longer.

“It became clear to me, roughly at the time of Netflix’s transition from sending hard-copy discs to your home to the streaming era, that there was value in retaining your own physical media,” the writer and podcaster Sean Fennessey, of The Ringer, told me. “Sometimes they just didn’t have discs I wanted. But when they moved to a streaming platform, they didn’t have anything. They had one-100th, one-1,000th, of what I was looking for.”

Fennessey was talking by video-call from his converted garage; behind him were shelves containing “north of 3,000” titles. He increasingly uses his platform on The Big Picture and The Rewatchables, two film podcasts with avid followings, to evangelize for physical media – a stance that even his co-hosts find “baffling”, he said.

On a recent podcast, however, he recalled people approaching him after a live event he had hosted: “Almost all of them wanted to tell me about their most recent physical media purchases. There were questions about organization. They wanted to know [the] best labels. Something is happening. Something is growing.”
selves of dvds

Jesse Nelson noticed things change during the pandemic. The modest online store that he and his wife ran from their home near Philadelphia, DiabolikDVD (“Demented discs from the world over”), began doing such brisk business that he moved the operation to a warehouse and hired four employees. These days he gets several hundred orders a week. The shop mainly caters to fans of horror and cult films, but customers have also started requesting more mainstream titles, like the recent sports family drama The Iron Claw.

People kept in by Covid signed up for Netflix and other streamers at unprecedented rates. Yet some – perhaps nostalgists keen to dig up childhood favorites, or cinephiles with time on their hands and itchy fingers – also found their way to physical media distributors. Arrow Video, a popular boutique distributor, saw a growth of 72% in its US business from 2020 to 2021, according to Variety.

Arrow, Criterion, Kino Lorber and BFI are probably the best known distributors, but in recent years a number of others have thrived, including Shout! Factory, Vinegar Syndrome and Severin in the US; Eureka, Indicator, Radiance and Second Sight in the UK; and Umbrella and Imprint in Australia. Some labels inspire cults of their own, with disciples arguing over which has the best remasters, special features or packaging. To help cover costs up front, many boutiques focus on limited editions; calls for preorders can inspire feeding frenzies.

Boutiques tend to begin as shoestring operations serving small but highly motivated audiences, Nelson told me. “A studio says, ‘We sold 10,000 copies of this, that’s terrible.’ But Vinegar Syndrome says, ‘We sold 10,000 copies, amazing.’”

“What we picked up on a couple of years ago,” James Keogh at Umbrella told me, “is that a lot of people now look towards distributors as tastemakers, or curators, of film. There’s a whole bunch of film movements and people want to track those movements and understand more about those directors and groups.”

As with vinyl records – which are enjoying an extraordinary renaissance – the appeal is also partly aesthetic. Streaming can’t replicate the “pleasure of holding the physical representation of a cinematic experience in your hand”, Bret Wood at Kino Lorber believes. Boutique releases in particular often have beautiful packaging. Online, collectors brag of recent hauls and post “shelfies”. Discs’ special features are a wealth of information, as well; fans as well as many film-makers have described discs’ behind-the-scenes featurettes as a free film school.

Fans have been excited by the growth of 4K Blu-rays, which offer what may be the final format of home theater. “The quality blew me away,” one fan told me. The discs’ greater expense (for both producers and consumers) and technical requirements, however, have limited their market. Some newer video game consoles, such as the PS5 and Xbox Series X, play 4K film discs, which could conceivably help popularize them, but at the same time an increasing number of gamers are choosing consoles that don’t have disc drives at all.

Collecting physical films can become an expensive hobby quickly, though Timothy Simons urged me to remind newcomers that it doesn’t have to be: “I swear to God, most of my collection I got at one pawnshop in Atlanta that was selling Blu-rays for $2 a piece. And if you are going to buy something new, look for boutique places and homegrown stores. Support indie labels.”

There can also be an information curve, with novices navigating a dizzying number of labels and an online community given to arcane debates about the merits of particular remasters. A classic rookie error is importing a Blu-ray from abroad, then discovering it won’t play; discs are often region-locked for rights reasons, though the motivated soon find workarounds.

Fennessey doubts physical media will ever again be the household staple it was in its DVD heyday, but he hopes more movie fans will rediscover – or just discover – its virtues.

Physical media “is a ‘you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’ proposition”, he said. “If you care about movies, and movie history, and you want to be able to see the things that you love over time, it’s the best way to ensure that, if you can afford it. That’s my pitch.”
https://www.theguardian.com/film/202...d-for-our-dvds





My Streaming Fatigue Got So Bad, I Started Collecting DVDs

After spending too much time and money on streaming services, DVDs have officially reentered my life.
Emma Roth

Here I am at Walmart, elbow-deep in decades of movies as other shoppers wheel by without so much as a glance. The bin, about four feet tall, is overflowing with DVDs, to the point where I have to start piling them up on one side just to get anywhere near the center. I’m picking out the movies I’m going to indulge in over the weekend, shuffling through copies of Sonic the Hedgehog, an all-in-one Ben Affleck movie collection, Gremlins, and a hodgepodge of other flicks.

I pull out some old films I’ve never gotten around to watching, like The Ring and the Crank collection (yes, I know I’m behind), and toss them into my shopping cart. The variety in Walmart’s DVD bin is seemingly endless: and for a price of about $5 per disc that you can hang onto forever, you can’t really go wrong. (So long as you don’t care about the highest-quality viewing experience.) The movies will soon make their way into my PlayStation 4 and will hopefully save me from having to pick something out on a streaming app. Walmart isn’t the only place I’ve started looking for DVDs, either. Thrift stores, flea markets, the library, and even my local mall’s FYE have also become places I frequent to get my hands on oft-ignored discs.

After spending years reassuring myself that I don’t need physical copies of movies because of streaming, DVDs have officially reentered my life.

There’s just something far simpler about sifting through a mountain of DVDs that I can pick up and hold in my hands, as opposed to flipping through the thousands of movies across the several different streaming services I’ve subscribed to. Plus, unlike streaming, the cost of DVDs is only going down. I also don’t have to worry about triggering auto-playing trailers when I just want to read the synopsis on the back of the case, and I’m certainly not stuck staring at a screen for hours as I exhaust myself with too many choices. The pile of movies at Walmart is another form of chaos, but it’s the one I’d rather deal with.

It makes sense to subscribe to all these services if you’re into the exclusive content on each one and have the patience to sift through their massive libraries. However, all I’ve been watching lately is the junk on Discovery Plus, simply because I’m too tired to find anything else — especially when the extremely specific shows and movies I want to watch keep switching services or just aren’t available. One of the most devastating examples of this was when both The Office and Parks and Recreation moved from Netflix to Peacock, disrupting the casual binge-watching sessions that I would default to when I was done with work.

The overwhelming amount of content isn’t the only thing that’s giving me streaming fatigue; the cost of having a digital library available has also become a factor. Within the past year, nearly every streaming service has raised its prices, including Netflix, Disney Plus, Hulu, Paramount Plus, Discovery Plus, and Apple TV Plus. Not to mention that Netflix is cracking down on password sharing, which means I can’t even leech off of my parents’ subscription anymore.

And if you want to get an endless supply of shows and movies on the cheap, you’re stuck with the service’s ad-supported plans, which is arguably worse than having a subscription at all simply because of the sheer amount of ads you have to sit through. With DVDs, I don’t have to worry about commercials interrupting my movie — I can bask in nostalgia while watching all the front-running promotions for the “new” releases that came out 15 years ago.

It’s not just the cost of streaming that I have to worry about, either. Last year, I nearly exceeded my ISP’s data cap after I downloaded Baldur’s Gate 3 and kept up my heavy streaming habits. That was all the more reason for me to invest in DVDs.

I’m not saying DVDs are flawless: there’s a reason no one wants them anymore! After all, it doesn’t always make sense to buy a single film as opposed to paying the same (or lower) monthly subscription for an all-you-can-watch streaming service. They’re also not that practical to store, either, unless you want a backlog of movies filling up your bookshelves, sitting in storage bins in your house somewhere, or in binders, and they aren’t as convenient as a movie you can queue up in a matter of seconds on a streaming platform.

Despite this, it’s still nice to have something that you physically own and don’t even need an internet connection to use. So when Best Buy confirmed it would stop selling DVDs this year and rumors emerged that Walmart would do the same, I was pretty disappointed. I can’t imagine Walmart without its bin of DVDs, nor can I even see Best Buy without its already-shrunken selection of movies.

It’s 2024, and I’m not ready to say goodbye to DVDs — in fact, I’m just getting started.
https://www.theverge.com/24044151/st...dvd-collection





Tired of Streaming? Free Blockbuster Libraries Offer an Alternative.

The neighborhood lending libraries have popped up around North America, offering a nostalgic return to DVDs.
Livia Albeck-Ripka and Aimee Ortiz

Streaming services have transformed the way we view film and television, leaving us isolated on our couches, subject to the suggestions of an algorithm. But a small group of film buffs with a fondness for physical media are hoping to lure people back into the real world — one abandoned newspaper box at a time.

The Free Blockbuster project began in 2019, when Brian Morrison, a film and television producer in Los Angeles, and a former Blockbuster employee, painted the company’s blue-and-yellow logo onto an old box and filled it with DVDs. For many, the brand evokes memories of the trip to the video store with friends or family to browse the shelves and to pick up a film and a bag of popcorn.

“There’s a nostalgia attached to it that is resonant for a whole generation,” he said of the nearly obsolete Blockbuster chain, which operated thousands of video rental stores worldwide at its peak in the early 2000s. “It means something to a lot of people.”

The Free Blockbuster movement slowly gained traction and eventually, more than 200 other community boxes had opened from Louisiana to Canada and even Britain — though it is unclear how many remain operational.

“We are social animals; we want to go out into the world and engage with each other,” said Mr. Morrison, who keeps a lending library outside his home. He often refills it with DVDs and VHS tapes including TV series, horror movies and, on occasion, signed independent films, and said that it had encouraged interaction with his neighbors.

Andrew Kevin Walker, a Los Angeles-based screenwriter, said he had visited secondhand stores especially to seek out films to leave in the boxes — including two sealed James Bond box sets and a copy of “Cobra,” a 1986 film written by Sylvester Stallone. “It’s an opportunity for people to really share their love of cinema, whether it be their favorite guilty pleasure, or their favorite movie of all time,” he said.

Viewers with streaming fatigue say they are tired of chasing content that moves around an ever-expanding array of platforms or even disappears altogether, and some long for the physical media that was dominant until streaming took over.

“I think it’s great that folks are doing this — keeping the spirit of DVDs alive, circulating film in and exchanging them,” said Joe Pichirallo, a film producer and professor at New York University.

Shortly after Free Blockbuster was launched, a lawyer for DISH Network, which now owns the Blockbuster brand, sent Mr. Morrison a letter asking he stop using the company’s logo and name.

A spokeswoman for DISH did not respond to questions about the letter, but said in an email that the company was “aware” of the Free Blockbuster initiative. “DISH continues to explore and evaluate different opportunities that would best fit the iconic brand,” she said.

Blockbuster opened in Dallas in 1985 and by 2004 had grown to more than 9,000 stores around the world. In 2000, the company turned down an offer to buy Netflix, now worth about $265 billion, for $50 million.

Last year, Netflix ended its DVD service, and Best Buy recently announced it would stop selling discs. Physical media can still be borrowed from most public libraries.

“Consumers have found it much more convenient to watch something where, when and whenever they want,” Professor Pichirallo said.

The award-winning filmmaker Ava DuVernay called the the recently renewed interest in DVDs vital and refreshing. “It is something that I very much embrace,” she said in a phone interview.

When it comes to art, “nothing beats holding it in your hand,” Ms. DuVernay said.

“That tactile intimacy of touch is something that sounds kind of flighty and unimportant, but touch is a sense,” she said. “It is a part of the experience of consuming and experiencing art.”

Ms. DuVernay lamented the loss of the director’s cuts and commentary that often came with DVDs but are now largely absent from films on streaming services. “That’s how I actually learned to make content,” she said. “I picked up a camera when I was 32, I listened to directors talk about their films to the picture.”

As Free Blockbusters have opened across the country, the last Blockbuster in Bend, Ore., continues to rent out films on DVD and Blu-ray. But Sandi Harding, who has managed the store for the past two decades, doesn’t see them in competition: The more people who engage with the Blockbuster brand and physical media the better, she said.

The store, which became the last in the world after franchises in Alaska and Australia closed their doors, now largely draws summer tourists, in addition to some regular customers, said Ms. Harding, noting that about 80 percent of the store’s income now comes from merchandise, and the remainder from film rentals. But it became increasingly challenging to scope out new releases on DVD and Blu-ray online, or at local department stores, she said.

“I don’t think it’ll ever go back to where it was before. But I think it’s kind of like vinyl records,” which have resurged, she said.

Alfonso Castillo, who co-founded a Free Blockbuster on Long Island with his son, said the lending library sees regular turnover with people both taking and dropping off movies, including older people. “My sense is that for them, it’s less of this cool novelty sort of ironic thing and more like, finally, there’s a place to get DVDs again,” he said.

At a Free Blockbuster in Sun Valley, Calif., customers have included an Amazon driver, passers-by on horseback and those who have ventured from afar after hearing of the lending library on social media, said Alyssa Kollgaard, 37, who opened the library outside her home earlier this year and stocks it with season-specific films, subversive books and free candy. She said she hopes it gives people “the experience of browsing and holding things in your hand.”

Farther south, in Hollywood, two other Free Blockbusters appeared empty on a recent Sunday, and the original, outside a grocery store in Los Feliz, has been removed by the city. But the one outside Mr. Morrison’s home in the quiet neighborhood of Los Feliz was filled with DVDs, including the film “Pay it Forward,” several seasons of the series “Burn Notice” and the 2000s sitcom “How I Met Your Mother.”

Two men in their 20s noticed the box as they walked past, but said they didn’t realize it had DVDs inside it. Neither watched films on physical media anymore, they said, preferring subscription services or YouTube. “It’s just kind of like on the nostalgia factor, for sure,” Sevag Halajian, 23, said of the box, recalling how as a child, he used to visit the video store with his friends.

“It was a fun time,” he added. “This has inspired me to go back to the old ‘Tom and Jerry’ DVDs I have and watch them.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/a...ovies-box.html





‘He was Always Voraciously Watching’: Scorsese’s Secret Life as an Obsessive VHS Archivist

The Oscar-winning director has donated over 50 storage boxes of tapes that show a devoted interest in recording films and shows from the '80s to the 2000s
Jake Malooley

In the basement of the University of Colorado Boulder’s main library, an 85-year-old stone fortress built in the Italian rural style, the archives of the school’s Rare and Distinctive Collections occupy rows of shelves as far as the eye can see. Here, amid yellowed books, historical maps and medieval manuscripts, Martin Scorsese has quietly made public a very private preoccupation. More than 50 storage boxes hold thousands of VHS tapes that contain films and television programs Scorsese recorded directly from broadcast television. The renowned director and film preservationist, it turns out, was also, for decades, a prolific guerrilla archivist.

Long before YouTube and Netflix gave the world instant access to a deep repository of media, Scorsese began the project of amassing his own private on-demand video library. In each week’s TV Guide, he would note the movies and shows that caught his interest. A full-time video archivist in Scorsese’s New York office would then record the telecasts from a kind of audiovisual hub made up of multiple VCRs and monitors, which could often be active at all hours. The tapes were meticulously labeled, cataloged initially using a library-like card system and later a computer, and filed away for Scorsese’s personal viewing and research.

Spanning the 1980s through the 2000s, the Martin Scorsese VHS Tape Collection contains more than 4,400 distinct titles, including features, documentaries, shorts, history programs and award shows. Perusing the online catalogue, you’ll find everything from European arthouse masterpieces to an episode of Live with Regis and Kathie Lee featuring Scorsese’s beloved mother, Catherine, who made regular cameos in her son’s films. As the archive steadily grew, Scorsese made the videos an essential part of his film-making process. Typically during pre-production, he would ask his archivist to pull tapes of various films, many of which were not otherwise available on home video. He would then hand out the tapes to the cast and crew to serve as reference materials.

“I do that on most of my pictures,” Scorsese said in a written interview. “For the actors, it’s usually about tone, mood, a certain emotional state, a suggestion of the world we’re working to create. With crew members, it’s often a cut, a camera movement at a specific point in the story, a certain way of framing. Not copying anything, but suggesting a way of approaching the question of how we’re going to tell the story.”

The collection is also a physical manifestation of his famously omnivorous appetite for visual media. Scorsese has frequently spoken about growing up asthmatic in a New York City household that lacked books but was one of the first on the block to get a television set in 1948, when he was six years old. For young Marty, who wasn’t able to play in the streets as frequently or vigorously as other kids, the 16-inch screen of the black-and-white RCA Victor in the living room became his window to the world – and, critically, his first exposure to great cinema.

On Friday nights, a New York station would show Italian neorealist films, and he would sometimes watch them in the company of family members who had immigrated from Sicily; he was struck, particularly, by the work of Roberto Rossellini, which he would later explore in his 1999 documentary My Voyage to Italy. In the mid-to late ’50s, Scorsese’s eyes were peeled to Million Dollar Movie, a program that showed the same film twice a day during weekdays and three times a day on weekends, allowing him, on multiple viewings, to begin thinking about how a movie like Citizen Kane was crafted – the movement of the camera, the use of music, the employment of effects such as slow motion. From grade school through his NYU days, Scorsese would do his homework as images from a muted TV flickered in front of him; much later, he brought the habit into the editing room while cutting his own films with his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker. He has admitted to feeling a sense of loneliness outside the presence of a television.

“He was always voraciously watching, absorbing, learning,” said Paul Mougey, who was an NYU film student when he became Scorsese’s video archivist for four years in the mid- to late ’80s. Shortly thereafter, in 1990, Scorsese formed the non-profit Film Foundation, which has since helped to restore more than 1,000 films. “Marty wanted to get every movie there ever was, and we recorded everything,” Mougey says. “He felt part of his mission as a preservationist was to create this amazing library – and share it with his friends.”

Mougey fondly recalls the day at Scorsese’s office, then located in New York’s historic Brill Building, when “Bobby” De Niro turned up in boat shoes to pick up a VHS tape containing a film Scorsese wanted him to see before they began shooting Goodfellas. “I just remember thinking he was such a relaxed dude. Very quiet, very polite, very nice,” says Mougey, who landed a cameo as Terrorized Waiter in the 1990 gangster classic. One of Mougey’s successors, Kent Jones, would rise from video archivist to regular Scorsese collaborator, including co-writing A Life of Jesus, which is slated to be Scorsese’s follow-up to last year’s Killers of the Flower Moon.

Several years ago, Scorsese began slowly donating the VHS collection. The wide availability of high-resolution DVD and Blu-Ray, as well as the rise of streaming, had diminished the usefulness of much of the hulking tape archive. Scorsese’s longtime film archivist, Mark McElhatten, and Scorsese’s final video archivist, Gina Telaroli, were friends of Erin Espelie, an associate professor of film at the University of Colorado Boulder. They collaborated to facilitate the university’s acquisition of the collection. In 2021, the final boxes of tapes arrived in Boulder from Scorsese’s Sikelia Productions office in Manhattan.

The University of Colorado Boulder might seem a curious home for Scorsese’s collection. The 81-year-old is cinema’s foremost chronicler of New York life. He is a New York University alum and onetime teacher at NYU’s undergraduate film-making program. In 2021, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts established the Martin Scorsese Institute of Global Cinematic Arts, which encompasses both a production center and cinema studies department that bear his name. Still, the Rare and Distinctive Collections in Boulder has positioned itself as a center for scholarship on the history of film and video. It houses significant collections from the influential experimental film-makers Stan Brakhage and Ken and Flo Jacobs.

“Ultimately, I believe Scorsese honored the experimental film roots of the University of Colorado Boulder and respected our interest in intertwining archival work with teaching,” Espelie said via email. “Our hope in the Department of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts is that students, scholars, and community members will come to the Scorsese VHS archive for various purposes: to learn more about how Scorsese relied on the work of others to inform his film-making practice; how Scorsese was a voracious viewer; what movies and programs he watched (and then often shared with cast members); and, from a more documentary perspective, what was playing on television.”

The broadcast recordings include commercials, bumpers and other marginalia, which Espelie said “are as fascinating, in some cases, as the originally desired main recording events. Because of the way television lacked backups, these VHS tapes may provide some of the only copies of these ‘interstitial’ materials.”

For the archivists at the Rare and Distinctive Collections, the most pressing issue at the moment is the preservation of the Scorsese collection. Magnetic media degrades as it ages. It is believed that a VHS tape begins to progressively lose image quality after only 10 years. Some of Scorsese’s tapes are more than 40 years old. And so the entire archive must be digitized – a major undertaking. Converting thousands of hours of analog recordings is slow, tedious work. For the moment, the university requires the person requesting materials to pay for the digitization of any tape that hasn’t already been converted.

Once the collection is readily accessible, the University of Colorado Boulder associate film professor Tiel Lundy expects researchers to begin conducting comparative analyses, pinpointing what Scorsese was watching at a given time and how that media may have informed the work he went on to create. “This could be a tremendous book project,” she said.

Upon being informed of the existence of the Scorsese trove, John Klacsmann, an archivist at Anthology Film Archives in New York, immediately became intrigued by the notion that the director may have captured some true rarities on tape. “I’m certain there are some very rare and interesting copies of films, television broadcasts, and director’s cuts within this collection: deep cuts and obscurities that may have never been released on videotape, commercially or otherwise,” he said via email. “What kind of 1980s viewing list led to cinematic masterpieces like The King of Comedy and The Last Temptation of Christ? I’m certainly curious to know.”
https://www.theguardian.com/film/202...ection-archive





Vinyl Records Outsell CDs for the Second Year Running

Last year’s vinyl revenue in the US more than doubled the amount spent on CDs.
Wes Davis

People bought 43 million vinyl records last year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). That’s 6 million more than the number of CDs sold in 2023, marking the second time since 1987 that’s happened and reflecting the steady 17-year-running growth of vinyl sales.

Vinyl, which tends to be pricier than the newer format, also far outstripped CDs in actual money made, raking in $1.4 billion compared to $537 million from CDs. The RIAA’s report shows that CD revenue was up, too, but in terms of physical products sold, people actually bought about 700,000 fewer CDs in 2023 than the year before. (If you’re curious, nearly half a million cassettes sold last year, too, according to Billboard.)

That doesn’t come close to touching streaming, of course — paid subscriptions, digital radio services like SiriusXM or TuneIn, and ad-supported services accounted for 84 percent of music revenue for the year, or about $14.4 billion. The RIAA says that’s a record.

In a press release shared with The Verge, RIAA CEO Mitch Glazier said this year’s growth comes despite “the mushrooming threat of generative artificial intelligence,” which the RIAA says threatens the “dynamic growth and cultural reach” of music. While it’s not entirely clear that human-made music is at all in danger, the industry is grappling with things like AI lyric distribution and voice clones.

But it’s not hard to see why record sales are trouncing optical discs. CD players aren’t nearly as ubiquitous as they used to be. New cars mostly don’t ship with them anymore, and neither do computers. Plus, it’s impossible to impress anyone with your collection of jewel cases. But invite either your cool audiophile friend over or their nostalgic parent, and either is probably equally likely to pore over the tattered spines of your collection of garage sale scores, special-edition records, and concert trophies — and engage with you when you say things like, “Vinyl is cool, but it’s not actually better than a CD.”

But despite streaming getting a much bigger slice of the pie overall, it hasn’t managed to Pac-Man physical sales any more than it did last year. In fact, the ratios were more or less the same as last year, with physical media accounting for 11 percent of sales, music sync royalties taking 2 percent, and digital purchases, which physical sales overtook in 2017, garnering 3 percent of the overall share.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/26/2...physical-media





US Recorded Music Industry Revenues Hit $17.1 Billion in 2023
Murray Stassen

The US recorded music industry generated $17.1 billion in 2023.

That’s according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which published its 2023 Year End report today (March 26).

The RIAA report shows that on a retail basis, recorded music revenues in the US (money spent on streaming subscriptions, as well as physical and digital music), grew 8% YoY, marking the eighth consecutive year of growth for the world’s largest recorded music market.

On a wholesale basis – i.e. the money that makes its way back to record labels, distributors and ultimately artists – the US recorded music industry generated $11 billion in 2023 (see below).

According to the RIAA data, that was up by 7% and marked a record high for wholesale revenues.

Breaking down RIAA’s data reveals that retail revenues from paid subscription services including the likes of Spotify Premium and Apple Music grew 9% to $11.2 billion in 2023, and accounted for 78% of streaming revenues, and nearly two-thirds of total revenues.

In July 2023, Spotify increased its flagship subscription prices in 53 markets, including the US, typically by around 10%.

In addition to Spotify, price rises were implemented by other streaming services such as Apple Music (October 2022), Amazon Music (January 2023), and YouTube Music/Premium (August 2023).

RIAA reports that revenues from limited tier subscriptions (services limited by factors such as mobile access, catalog availability, product features, or device restrictions) fell 4% YoY to $1 billion. Services like Amazon Prime, Pandora Plus, music licenses for streaming fitness services, and other subscriptions are included in this category.

Total streaming revenues (including paid subscriptions, ad-supported services, digital and customized radio, social media platforms, digital fitness apps and others) grew 8% to $14.4 billion in 2023.

These services collectively accounted for 84% of total revenues in the US for the second year in a row.

RIAA also reports that the average number of subscriptions for 2023 grew 5.7% to 96.8 million, compared with an average of 91.6 million for 2022 (see below). These figures exclude limited-tier services, and count multi-user plans as a single subscription.

Meanwhile, RIAA reports that music revenues from ad-supported on-demand services (such as YouTube, the ad-supported version of Spotify, Facebook, and others) grew at “a slower pace than previous recent years”.

Ad-supported revenues grew 2% to $1.9 billion. Ad-supported services contributed 11% of total 2023 recorded music revenues.

Elsewhere in the market, revenues from physical music formats reached $1.9 billion in 2023, up 11% versus the prior year (2022).

Revenues from vinyl records grew 10% to $1.4 billion, marking the 17th consecutive year of growth for the vinyl format in the US.

Vinyl accounted for 71% of physical format revenues in the US last year, according to the RIAA.

Additionally, RIAA points out that for the second time since 1987, vinyl albums outsold CDs in units (43 million vs 37 million) in the US last year, even as revenues from CDs also showed growth, up 11% YoY to $537 million in 2023.

Elsewhere, Digital and customized radio music revenues grew 8% to $1.3 billion in 2023.

RIAA notes that this category includes SoundExchange distributions for revenues from services like SiriusXM and Internet radio stations, as well as payments directly paid by similar services, included in this report as “other ad-supported streaming”.

SoundExchange distributions grew 5% to $1.0 billion, while other ad-supported streaming revenues of $318 million were up 22%.

“Recorded music keeps reaching new heights as labels’ ‘all of the above’ commitment to meet fans everywhere they want to be continued to pay off for the entire music community,’ said RIAA Chairman & CEO Mitch Glazier.

He added: “Licensing of social networks, fitness apps, and short form video are adding new value […] and physical sales once again boomed, with vinyl records delivering yet another double-digit increase,”

“For artists, songwriters, and fans, this strong and sustained growth signals a time of incredible opportunity – with new formats, styles, and sounds rising up across innovative platforms and emerging ways to listen.

“As new services continue to get fully licensed at rates reflecting music’s incredible value, revenue for artists and songwriters will only continue to grow.”
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.c...llion-in-2023/





Tennessee just Became the First State to Protect Musicians and Other Artists Against AI

Country stars Luke Bryan and Chris Janson said they’ve had their voices replicated without their consent as artificial intelligence tools make it harder to tell real from fake. A new Tennessee law aims to protect musical artists and songwriters from the potential dangers of AI.
Kimberlee Kruesi

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee on Thursday signed off on legislation designed to protect songwriters, performers and other music industry professionals against the potential dangers of artificial intelligence.

The move makes Tennessee, long known as the birthplace of country music and the launchpad for musical legends, the first state in the U.S. to enact such measures. Supporters say the goal is to ensure that AI tools cannot replicate an artist’s voice without their consent. The bill goes into effect July 1.

“We employ more people in Tennessee in the music industry than any other state,” Lee told reporters shortly after signing the bill into law. “Artists have intellectual property. They have gifts. They have a uniqueness that is theirs and theirs alone, certainly not artificial intelligence.”

The Volunteer State is just one of three states where name, photographs and likeness are considered a property right rather than a right of publicity. According to the newly signed statute — dubbed the Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security Act or “ELVIS Act” — vocal likeness will now be added to that list.

The law also creates a new civil action where people can be held liable if they publish or perform an individual’s voice without permission, as well as use a technology to produce an artist’s name, photographs, voice or likeness without the proper authorization.

Yet it remains to be seen how effective the legislation will be for artists looking to shield their art from being scraped and replicated by AI without their permission. Supporters like Lee acknowledged that despite the sweeping support from those inside the music industry and unanimous approval from the Tennessee Statehouse, the legislation is untested. Amid ongoing clashes between the GOP supermajority and handful of Democrats, this level of bipartisan agreement is a shocking anomaly.

Many Tennessee musicians say they don’t have the luxury to wait for a perfect solution, pointing out that the threats of AI are already showing up on their cellphones and in their recording studios.

“Stuff comes in on my phone and I can’t tell it’s not me,” said country star Luke Bryan. “It’s a real deal now and hopefully this will curb it and slow it down.”

The Republican governor held the bill signing event at the heart of Nashville’s Lower Broadway inside a packed Robert’s Western World. The beloved honky tonk is often overflowing with tourists eager to listen to traditional country music and snag a fried bologna sandwich.

Lee joked that he and his wife, Maria, sometimes sneak into Robert’s for an incognito date while other lawmakers swapped stories about swinging by the iconic establishment on the weekends.

Naming the newly enacted statute after Elvis Presley wasn’t just a nod to one of the state’s most iconic residents.

The death of Presley in 1977 sparked a contentious and lengthy legal battle over the unauthorized use of his name and likeness, as many argued that once a celebrity died, their name and image entered into the public domain.

However, by 1984 the Tennessee Legislature passed the Personal Rights Protection Act, which ensured that personality rights do not stop at death and can be passed down to others. It states that “the individual rights … constitute property rights and are freely assignable and licensable, and do not expire upon the death of the individual so protected.”

The move was largely seen as critical to protecting Presley’s estate, but in the decades since then has also been praised as protecting the names, photographs and likenesses of all of Tennessee’s public figures.

Now Tennessee will add vocal likeness to those protections.
https://apnews.com/article/artificia...65abce2ee45091





Song Lyrics Getting Simpler, more Repetitive, Angry and Self-Obsessed – Study

Researchers analysed the words in more than 12,000 English-language songs across several genres from 1980 to 2020
Agence France-Presse

You’re not just getting older. Song lyrics really are becoming simpler and more repetitive, according to a study published on Thursday.

Lyrics have also become angrier and more self-obsessed over the last 40 years, the study found, reinforcing the opinions of cranky ageing music fans everywhere.

A team of European researchers analysed the words in more than 12,000 English-language songs across the genres of rap, country, pop, R&B and rock from 1980 to 2020.

Before detailing how lyrics have become more basic, the study pointed out that US singer-songwriting legend Bob Dylan – who rose to fame in the 1960s – has won a Nobel prize in literature.

Senior study author Eva Zangerle, an expert on recommendation systems at Austria’s University of Innsbruck, declined to single out an individual newer artist for having simple lyrics.

But she emphasised that lyrics can be a “mirror of society” which reflect how a culture’s values, emotions and preoccupations change over time.

“What we have also been witnessing in the last 40 years is a drastic change in the music landscape – from how music is sold to how music is produced,” Zangerle said.

Over the 40 years studied, there was repeated upheaval in how people listened to music. The vinyl records and cassette tapes of the 1980s gave way to the CDs of the 90s, then the arrival of the internet led to the algorithm-driven streaming platforms of today.

For the study in the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers looked at the emotions expressed in lyrics, how many different and complicated words were used, and how often they were repeated.

“Across all genres, lyrics had a tendency to become more simple and more repetitive,” Zangerle summarised.

The results also confirmed previous research which had shown a decrease in positive, joyful lyrics over time and a rise in those that express anger, disgust or sadness.

Lyrics have also become much more self-obsessed, with words such as “me” or “mine” becoming much more popular.

The number of repeated lines rose most in rap over the decades, Zangerle said – adding that it obviously had the most lines to begin with.

“Rap music has become more angry than the other genres,” she added.

The researchers also investigated which songs the fans of different genres looked up on the lyric website Genius.

Unlike other genres, rock fans most often looked up lyrics from older songs, rather than new ones.

Rock has tumbled down the charts in recent decades, and this could suggest fans are increasingly looking back to the genre’s heyday, rather than its present.

Another way that music has changed is that “the first 10-15 seconds are highly decisive for whether we skip the song or not,” Zangerle said.

Previous research has also suggested that people tend to listen to music more in the background these days, she added.

Put simply, songs with more choruses that repeat basic lyrics appear to be more popular.

“Lyrics should stick easier nowadays, simply because they are easier to memorise,” Zangerle said.

“This is also something that I experience when I listen to the radio.”
https://www.theguardian.com/music/20...obsessed-study





Facebook Let Netflix See User DMs, Quit Streaming to Keep Netflix Happy: Lawsuit

Facebook Watch, Netflix were allegedly bigger competitors than they let on.
Scharon Harding

Last April, Meta revealed that it would no longer support original shows, like Jada Pinkett Smith's Red Table Talk talk show, on Facebook Watch. Meta's streaming business that was once viewed as competition for the likes of YouTube and Netflix is effectively dead now; Facebook doesn't produce original series, and Facebook Watch is no longer available as a video-streaming app.

The streaming business' demise has seemed related to cost cuts at Meta that have also included layoffs. However, recently unsealed court documents in an antitrust suit against Meta [PDF] claim that Meta has squashed its streaming dreams in order to appease one of its biggest ad customers: Netflix.

Facebook allegedly gave Netflix creepy privileges

As spotted via Gizmodo, a letter was filed on April 14 in relation to a class-action antitrust suit that was filed by Meta customers, accusing Meta of anti-competitive practices that harm social media competition and consumers. The letter, made public Saturday, asks a court to have Reed Hastings, Netflix's founder and former CEO, respond to a subpoena for documents that plaintiffs claim are relevant to the case. The original complaint filed in December 2020 [PDF] doesn’t mention Netflix beyond stating that Facebook “secretly signed Whitelist and Data sharing agreements” with Netflix, along with “dozens” of other third-party app developers. The case is still ongoing.

The letter alleges that Netflix's relationship with Facebook was remarkably strong due to the former's ad spend with the latter and that Hastings directed "negotiations to end competition in streaming video" from Facebook.

One of the first questions that may come to mind is why a company like Facebook would allow Netflix to influence such a major business decision. The litigation claims the companies formed a lucrative business relationship that included Facebook allegedly giving Netflix access to Facebook users' private messages:

By 2013, Netflix had begun entering into a series of “Facebook Extended API” agreements, including a so-called “Inbox API” agreement that allowed Netflix programmatic access to Facebook’s users' private message inboxes, in exchange for which Netflix would “provide to FB a written report every two weeks that shows daily counts of recommendation sends and recipient clicks by interface, initiation surface, and/or implementation variant (e.g., Facebook vs. non-Facebook recommendation recipients). ... In August 2013, Facebook provided Netflix with access to its so-called “Titan API,” a private API that allowed a whitelisted partner to access, among other things, Facebook users' “messaging app and non-app friends."

Meta said it rolled out end-to-end encryption "for all personal chats and calls on Messenger and Facebook" in December. And in 2018, Facebook told Vox that it doesn't use private messages for ad targeting. But a few months later, The New York Times, citing "hundreds of pages of Facebook documents," reported that Facebook "gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages."

Meta didn't respond to Ars Technica's request for comment. The company told Gizmodo that it has standard agreements with Netflix currently but didn't answer the publication's specific questions.

Facebook’s streaming ambitions

Facebook announced Watch in 2017 and eventually released a Facebook Watch app. Besides Red Table Talk, Facebook was entangled with numerous other original shows, including Sorry for Your Loss, which lasted two seasons and starred Elizabeth Olsen, a Steve Harvey-hosted talk show called Steve, and content from National Geographic. Facebook also said that there would be one MLB game per week on Facebook Watch, as Ars reported in 2017.

But Facebook Watch never really took off as a full-fledged TV/movie streaming effort à la Netflix or Amazon Prime Video. And in 2023, efforts essentially ended when Facebook said it wasn't renewing any Watch shows and laid off development and programming head Mina Lefevre. Lefevre was one of many layoffs suffered during that time period. And it seemed plausible that Facebook simply thought it couldn't compete in streaming. At the time, Meta said it was going to focus on making VR experiences instead.

But the recently revealed court documents claim that Watch's budget was pilfered years prior, while Hastings sat on Facebook's board of directors. The letter claims that Facebook spent over $1 billion on Watch from 2016 through 2017. During that time, Facebook discussed interest in buying scripted 30-minute shows, as well as short shows with 5- to 10-minute-long episodes. In May 2017, Business Insider, citing anonymous sources, reported that Facebook used House of Cards, which is a Netflix original, and Scandal as examples of the kinds of shows it would be interested in buying.

Eventually, the potential for competition between the two companies became apparent. Then-Netflix CEO Hastings was asked about it at the 2017 Recode conference. He said: “There’s not a big conflict yet. They’re not doing House of Cards. We’re not bidding on the same shows. So not a big deal there.”

But per the unsealed documents, Hastings had regrets about his answer and later emailed Mark Zuckerberg and other Meta executives, allegedly saying: “Let me know if you think there was a better way to handle. In hindsight, I wish I added a materiality qualifier like ‘not generally bidding on the same content.’”

The plaintiffs' letter claims that in January 2018, then-COO Sheryl Sandberg "went to Netflix for a 'Fireside Chat' in front of '500 senior [Netflix] people' (with 'Strict no recording') in which she and Hastings carefully deflected, using scripted banter, the companies’ 'direct video competition' and 'FB professional video strategy.'"

The plaintiffs also claimed that after Facebook was confident about having enough budget to license the likes of Dawson's Creek "in competition with Netflix" in 2018, the Watch budget was mysteriously and suddenly slashed by $750 million that same year. Zuckerberg allegedly said via email in May 2018 that the budget changes were based on "knowing what I know today about our strategy and financial outlook."

The letter alleges:

Despite... protestations, Zuckerberg’s abrupt new Watch strategy became policy—Facebook began dismantling the multi-billion dollar original content business it had built over the past two years… Amidst the sudden pivot in Facebook’s video strategy, the data partnership between Netflix and Facebook reached new heights.

Those new heights included, per the litigation, a new data-sharing agreement in July 2018 and Netflix reaching $200 million in advertising spend with Meta by 2019.

Good riddance?

To be blunt, Facebook has a poor reputation regarding customer data and advertising. For someone concerned about Meta's record with privacy, misinformation, and more, it may seem like good news that Facebook doesn't have its own Netflix competitor.

There's also reason to believe that Facebook Watch was more about boosting ad sales than a yearning to distribute quality TV shows. As noted by the April letter filed in the US District Court in the Northern District of California, Facebook sought to boost “a slowdown in ad pricing growth by Q4 2015/Q1 2016.” The document claims that “Facebook began entering distinct 'verticals' to obtain signals for the AI/ML systems powering its ad business," adding that "one of these new verticals was" Facebook Watch. With TV watching today often feeling like a big data grab already, we're likely better off without Facebook Watch.

Meanwhile, it remains possible that Meta, like other companies, including Snap and YouTube, decided that it's actually pretty hard to make money off of original video content.

That said, Netflix and Facebook's chummy relationship does raise questions about how much ad dollars and corporate partnerships can limit customer choice. You may not have been eager to see Facebook Watch take off, but a leading streaming company using its pull to squash a budding streaming service would be concerning—especially if that service was potentially valuable to streaming users.

With streaming services already showing rapid evolution that's expected to continue accelerating this year, it's a notable time to consider which players are welcomed into the streaming arena with a fair shot and how inter-company politics and partnerships can impact the streaming options available to consumers.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024...g-biz-lawsuit/





Majority of Americans now Use Ad Blockers

We're dreaming of a white list, because we're just like the ones you used to know
Thomas Claburn

More than half of Americans are using ad blocking software, and among advertising, programming, and security professionals that fraction is more like two-thirds to three-quarters.

According to a survey of 2,000 Americans conducted by research firm Censuswide, on behalf of Ghostery, a maker of software to block ads and online tracking, 52 percent of Americans now use an ad blocker, up from 34 percent according to 2022 Statista data.

More striking are the figures cited for technically savvy users who have worked at least five years in their respective fields – veteran advertisers, programmers, and cybersecurity experts.

The Censuswide report indicates that 66 percent of experienced advertisers, 72 percent of experienced programmers, and 76 percent of cybersecurity experts use ad blockers.

For the general public, the rationale for doing so tends to be more about protecting privacy (20 percent) than blocking ads (18 percent), with another 9 percent wanting faster web page loading.

And among the expert set, protecting privacy is cited with greater frequency – 27 percent, 30 percent, and 29 percent – for advertisers, developers, and security pros respectively.

"People who know how the internet works – because they work as developers or in security or in advertising – they've all over the years decided that it was a good idea to use a tracker blocker or content blocker or adblocker, whatever you call it," said Jean-Paul Schmetz, CEO of Ghostery, in an interview with The Register. "It's pretty unanimous that people who work in this industry and know how these things function want to protect themselves."

Schmetz said one surprising finding had to do with the extent to which people trust various companies that collect online data. "It's quite amazing that Google is still trusted, even though it is the biggest collector."

Asked how likely big companies would be to abuse their data, Americans were most wary of TikTok (59 percent), followed by: Meta (56 percent), X/Twitter (49 percent), OpenAI (48 percent), Google (44 percent), Apple (41 percent), Amazon (40 percent), Microsoft (38 percent), Comscore (32 percent), and Adobe (31 percent).

Again, concerns were higher among the more experienced set.

As Schmetz observes in the report, these results show that the American public is less aware of data collection by companies with a lower public profile.

"Whether you work in advertising or as a developer or as a security expert, you tend to know that a web page is not just one thing like a magazine page or newspaper page or video or TV," said Schmetz.

"It's a bunch of components that come together in your browser. And you tend to know that a lot of these components are just there for tracking and spying. And that they are unnecessary for the page.

"So you know that if you don't load them, you're going to be more private, because people will be able to build less profiles of you. You will have less ads because they have less profiles of you and your browser will be faster."

Schmetz said people are still generally not aware of the scope of third-party data collection. "It's normal for Amazon to know whether you're buying at Amazon," he said.

"What is less normal is for Tiktok to know what you are reading in the New York Times or at other sites. Maybe a better example is if you're going to, let's say Planned Parenthood or something similar, especially in this day and age. I think it would surprise 100 percent of the visitors to know that other companies are looking at that visit." ®

Bootnote

Feel free to add us to your white list if you do use an ad blocker. We have full-time ops staff whose job it is around the clock to keep our sites clean of anything naughty. Some of you have asked for an ad-free subscription to support El Reg, which is thoughtful. But truly the best way to support The Register is to sign up for a free account, comment on stories, share our links, and spread the word of our honest independent IT journalism. Thanks for reading.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/...ca_ad_blocker/





Matter and Privacy
Sean Coates

When I was still working at Faculty, we took on a new client that was not yet named Matter. We eventually transitioned from an agency-client relationship to a startup relationship, where I became the VP of Technology. This is what I've been doing for the past two-ish years.

Chris wrote some good background on founding Matter, so I won't repeat all of those details, but I've been wanting to write a bit about the origin story from my perspective.

When we were trying to figure out how to turn some of the neuroscience, existing material, and lots of our CEO Axel's ideas into a product, we started discussing the idea of building an app around the concept of allowing users to log memories that they could later recall to improve their happiness. As a natural skeptic, it took me a little while to come around to believing that this was even possible and wasn't just hand-wavy wellness stuff. I've since been convinced that we have technology that—when employed correctly—can actually improve happiness by having our users recall positive experiences. And we have actual science (which I will link in the future) that proves that their brains will create/release neurotransmitters ("happiness chemicals" in the context of what we're working on) in line with their original positive experience, making them feel happier. For real.

So, as a very bare concept, we landed on the idea of allowing users to store photos of these positive experiences, as well as logging ratings of the emotions they experienced so they could recall them later to stimulate these neurotransmitters.

At one point Axel asked me "what do you think of that?" I said "To be honest, I have to ask: why would I ever send you a private photo and a positive rating for a sexual desire emotion? I would never send something like that to another party like Facebook, so why would I do it for us?"

This led us down an interesting—and mostly unique—path to how we handle private user content, and how we model threats against this private data. We adopted user privacy as a core value, and how we think about this informs many other decisions we make with the app and the whole ecosystem handling our users' data. This became so important to us that we knew it needed to be one of the foundational aspects of how we work and this decision informed the product, not the inverse. We knew it was not something we could bolt on later—that trying to add this once we'd already exposed user data (to even ourselves) would be error-prone at best, and impossible at worst.

Early on, we set out some core principles:

• we need to build trust with our users so they can believe what we say when it comes to how we handle their data (advanced users can audit traffic over the network to help build this trust, if they desire)
• we need to protect our users from mistakes we might make (we shouldn't be able to suffer a data leak of our users' data if we have a weak password or our code has a bug)
• even if we are competent enough to prevent a leak from ever happening, and even if our users trust us to do what we say, we must be resilient to being strong-armed by a future controlling power (e.g. if someone we don't trust buys us)

We also had some extremely unusual conversations related to parameters around how far we can go with this:

• "should we build our own datacentre for this?" "no, probably not. We can use an existing host if we're careful about what data we collect and how we collect it." "but would our things be safer if we did?" "honestly, someone much larger than us will do a much better job with the physical layer… I don't think we want to spend our funding on hollowing out a mountain and hiring a militia."
• "we can have the best intentions, but we can't always rely on those intentions. If one of our users' data became valuable to an evil nation state and they kidnapped my family, I'll be honest, I'd probably have to hand over the data."

Given these criteria and extremes, we decided that our best course of action is to just never have our users' private data.

This means that when you rate something high "pride" in Matter, we can't tell you've done that. We've intentionally set up our metrics system to refuse to collect this kind of personal data, and we (the people and systems at Matter) simply never get it (only the app running on your device gets this data). We don't store the data on our servers (outside of analytics—and even then never the data we consider private like emotion ratings); it always stays on your device and within your device's datastore. (Matter is an iPhone app, so we store data on your phone with Core Data, and in a private database that syncs within your iCloud account, but is set up in a way that even we can't access it. The app code that runs within our developer credentials, on your device, can read and write this data, but it is never sent to us and we have no way of accessing it through Apple's tooling. It's truly private to you.)

We (again, the people and systems at Matter) do get the product of some of those inputs, but never in a way that we can reverse it. A very simple version of this is if we were to collect the product of an a multiplication operation with the value "600", we don't know if the inputs were "1 × 600", "100 × 6", "30 × 20", "12 × 50", etc. We don't know what went into a Matter Score for a memory but we do know the score. We know the "600" but not the "8" or the "75". We don't even know how you described a memory or what's in a photo you attached. All we know is that there is a memory, it has a score of 600, and it belongs to a numbered account.

Numbered account? Well, we also don't know who—specifically—our users are, and this is maybe the most controversial of our decisions. We don't have accounts; we don't even currently have email addresses, outside of our mailing list. There is no forced association between our mailing list users and our app users. In the future, we may allow users to opt in to self-identifying, but even then we'll continue to be careful about never collecting private data.

When users add memories to the app, they'll usually add content such as images. We don't want to (and we don't) hold these, either—at least not in a way we can see them. We primarily store these images on your device, but because the size of this storage is limited, we do have a system for storing assets such as images that have been encrypted on-device, and the actual photo contents or the decryption keys are never sent to us. We store data for users, here, but to us it looks like random noise (the binary ciphertext), never like a photo of whatever it is you're storing a photo of. I intend to write more about this in the future, since we expect to publish some open source tooling related to this.

So, we don't have your data in a database that we can access in any way (again, beyond collecting metrics on user-driven events that we don't consider private, so that we can know number of active users, performance in the system, etc.).

This poses a couple serious problems. The main problem is: if I lose my data, how can I recover it?

Well, the short answer here is: we can't. We can't identify you by email to reset your password. We don't have your email address (associated with your data, at least), and you don't have a password. Even if we did have those things, we don't have your data so we can't restore it.

Right now the app has backup/restore functionality and we expect users to use that to protect themselves from data loss. We've put a lot of thought into storing these backups for a user, but having that user identify themselves is a difficult problem. Storing that data on behalf of the user, in a way that we can't get to it is also a problem. But a very interesting problem. I think we have good solutions to these problems that we expect to build into the app before we're out of beta, and I also hope to post about this in the future.

There's a bit more info in our Privacy Policy, which we're bound by.

I've been working on lots of technology things at Matter, but overseeing our privacy implementation has been one of the most rewarding.

One time, almost a year into working on this stuff, Axel said to me "I love that you're thinking about this stuff and coming up with these kinds of solutions" to which I barely held back a tear and replied "I've been thinking about this stuff very seriously for over a decade, and I love that you're the first person who's really let me implement it."
https://seancoates.com/blogs/matter-and-privacy





4.5 Million Times Faster Internet? Aston University Makes it Possible

This rate is the fastest ever recorded, achieved by utilizing specific new wavelength bands that have not been previously used in fiber optic systems.
Rizwan Choudhury

In a new groundbreaking development, researchers at Aston University have achieved a internet’s data transmission speed that is a staggering 4.5 million times faster than the average home broadband. This unprecedented rate is the fastest ever recorded, achieved by utilizing specific new wavelength bands that have not been previously used in fiber optic systems.

As part of an international collaboration, the team transferred data at a rate of 301 terabits per second, or 301,000,000 megabits per second, using a single, standard optical fiber. To put this into perspective, Ofcom’s UK home broadband performance report published in September 2023 stated that the average broadband speed is just 69.4 Mbit/s.

Behind the breakthrough

The successful transmission of data was the result of the collaborative efforts of Professor Wladek Forysiak from the Aston Institute of Photonic Technologies and Dr. Ian Phillips. They worked in conjunction with researchers from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan and Nokia Bell Labs in the U.S.

As the demand for more data increases, it is expected that this newly developed technology will help keep up with future demand. The scientists used optical fibers, small tubular strands of glass that pass information using light, a medium that regular copper cables cannot match in terms of speed.

Science behind the speed

The team achieved this feat by opening up new wavelength bands that are not yet used in normal fiber optic systems for internet. Different wavelength bands are equivalent to different colors of light being transmitted down the optical fiber. They accomplished this by developing new devices called optical amplifiers and optical gain equalizers to access these bands.

Dr. Phillips led the development of a management device, or optical processor, at Aston University. He explained, “Broadly speaking, data was sent via an optical fiber like a home or office internet connection. However, alongside the commercially available C and L-bands, we used two additional spectral bands called E-band and S-band. Such bands traditionally haven’t been required because the C- and L-bands could deliver the required capacity to meet consumer needs.”

“Over the last few years Aston University has been developing optical amplifiers that operate in the E-band, which sits adjacent to the C-band in the electromagnetic spectrum but is about three times wider. Before the development of our device, no one had been able to properly emulate the E-band channels in a controlled way,” Phillips added.

Future implications for internet

Professor Forysiak added, “By increasing transmission capacity in the backbone network, our experiment could lead to vastly improved connections for end users. This groundbreaking accomplishment highlights the crucial role of advancing optical fiber technology in revolutionizing communication networks for faster and more reliable data transmission.”

“Growing system capacity by using more of the available spectrum—not just the conventional C-band but also other bands such as the L, S, and now E-bands can help to keep the cost of providing this bandwidth down. It is also a ‘greener solution’ than deploying more, newer fibers and cables since it makes greater use of the existing deployed fiber network, increasing its capacity to carry data and prolonging its useful life & commercial value.”

The results of this groundbreaking experiment were published by the Institute of Engineering and Technology and were presented as a post-deadline paper at the European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) held in Glasgow, in October 2023. This achievement not only represents a significant leap forward in data transmission technology but also sets a new benchmark for future research in this field.

The successful transmission of data at such high speeds by the team at Aston University is a testament to the potential of optical fiber technology. As we continue to demand more data, innovations like these will be crucial in meeting those demands while also providing a greener solution for our digital future.
https://interestingengineering.com/i...es-it-possible
















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