I’ve just sent a mail to someone and thought “why am I not writing this as a blog post?” So, I’ve stripped out the references to vast quantities of 15yr malt and here’s the skinny:
We spent a lot of time talking about HD and video distribution (he’s a film director who’s really into HD), and I was going on about Mark Cuban, who seems to be bullish and innovative in the distribution space.
Our conversation focused around the threat to cinema from ludicrously high-quality video content and the shift to whacking big, high-res TVs in the home. I’m not sure that cinemas are going to suffer – the experience will just shift – I’m seeing (pretty crappy, admittedly) bars and snack areas in my local cinemas, and i think that a high quality restaurant, coffee area and generally less of a pitch up, spend £10 on junk food and leave quickly will suffice – I can do that in my own home, all else (screens, sound) being equal.
With cheap distribution and creation, storytelling becomes key, does it even matter if people visit the cinema less, audiences will grow and niches will widen. The opposing view from Nigel was “are cinemas just an anachronism anyway, in the same way no-one watches news in the cinema anymore?” Good Point. Anyway, a timely clutch of articles in Wired about digitisation and Mark Cuban, which I thought were pretty spot on:
http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/13.04/cuban.html

and here’s a blog post I remember reading where Cuban is bang on – talking about hard-drive based distro of movies:
http://www.blogmaverick.com/entry/7706137582525561/

interesting perspectives – he’s got landmark cinemas (full digital) and is investing heavily in digital/HD content.
But who needs cinemas? The net is the transport mechanism for digital, grassroots video. Look at:
http://www.brightcove.com/
and on a more community perspective:
http://www.ourmedia.org/