As I mentioned last time, I am finally delivering a long-promised post on the topic of the future availability of content.
I’ll acknowledge up front that I am likely a voice crying in the wilderness. Most people like to consume mainstream content. They like movies with big names, they want music from the pop charts, they read paperback books suitable for the bus or beach. They’ll take what they can get, and like what they consume, if it meets minimal standards for entertainment.
I was finally moved to write this based on a recent article in the New York Times on the DVD format, but most of the key elements also apply to books and music.
Here’s the vital point raised by the article’s author, Dave Kehr:
…if your interests range beyond recent Hollywood releases — into, say, older, foreign or nonfiction films — the prospect of another change in format brings a mixed sense of hope and fear. Hope, to the degree that the new distribution strategies may make it economically feasible for a broader range of movies to enter the marketplace; fear, grounded in past experience that suggests format changes invariably leave legions of once widely available titles in limbo.
That’s it, kids. That’s the point I’ve been reaching for all this time.
Content is almost always owned by somebody. Most of the time, that entity is a corporation. They have an interest in holding on to their intellectual property rights as long as they can; their interest in making the material in their libraries available for public consumption is driven by profit.
Those libraries are vast and there are many reasons why some piece of pop culture that used to be available has now disappeared. Sometimes, a movie studio doesn’t want to spend the money to transfer a movie because there’s little profit to be found in a release in order to offset the cost of remastering a print to a decent viewable state. Some TV series have been held up for years because of the music rights of their original soundtracks.
On other occasions, I suspect the reason is benign neglect. Kehr’s article notes that it can costs $40,000 to prepare a film for Blu-ray release, but only $600 to prep it for a streaming video service such as Netflix or Hulu. There are now devices that can rapidly scan books and either create images of the original pages or use optical character recognition to convert the text to a digital format. In other words, is it always cost that prevents availability?
I’m a big fan of the works of author Frederic Brown. I’m not sure when his books started going out of print, but in the Seventies, I could easily find them in used bookstores. Not anymore.
I was recently chatting on Twitter about Paul Mazursky’s Academy Award-nominated film An Unmarried Woman. It was brought to my attention that the DVD is apparently no longer available, not new, anyway. It’s also not on Netflix in any format.
Kehr’s article quotes film critic Roger Ebert’s claim that he can “choose to watch virtually any film you can think of” through a number of online sources. Kehr then points out the limited availability of films by John Ford, Ernst Lubitsch and Jean-Luc Godard.
I often find the exact same issue with music on iTunes. For many artists, who were once hugely popular, you might be able to buy one or two original albums and then some kind of Greatest Hits package.
Pop culture has always had the issue of availability. Things go out of print. But with a massive shift to digital platforms, cutting across a wide variety of works, deliberate decisions have to be made to bring a piece of content over. Otherwise, it simply drops by the wayside.
A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers study looked at consumer attitudes about buying, renting and watching movies. They list three reasons to own a physical copy.
- Build a film library.
- Acquire movies with unique content.
- Get the ability to watch a movie over and over.
But, of course, there’s an additional rationale related to these three: As a safeguard against the film someday becoming unavailable. One day, it’s available for streaming on Netflix; the next, their deal with the studio expires and it’s not.
I wrote that it was mostly an accident that consumers were ever allowed to own copies of artistic works. The only way for a publisher to sell you a book was to print a copy and allow you to posses it. But, from their perspective, they retained ownership. As a point of convenience, why would you ever need to own any piece of pop culture, as long as you could always get access to it, anywhere and anytime?
Yes, that’s correct – as long as that access is granted.
FOOTNOTE #1: One way DVDs were marketed was by offering additional content: deleted footage, commentary by the filmmakers, alternate endings, multiple edits of the whole film. The company releasing the DVD typically owns the content, except in the case of distributors like Criterion or Anchor Bay, who would only own what they created. If DVDs die, it’s very likely that all this bonus material will vanish as well. A lot of this stuff was useless, but some of it offered valuable insights for students of cinema.
FOOTNOTE #2: It’s important to recall that we’re not talking about works that have been lost, like the full version of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed. These aren’t missing; they’re typically sitting in a storage facility somewhere: the master tapes of an album, the negative of a film. Obscure movies air on Turner Classic Movies. MP3s of vinyl albums pop up on the Internet. We’re truly talking about broad, legal availability to interested consumers of material that’s just locked up somewhere.