It looks like Facebook is about to begin its own love affair with the silver screen, and no it has nothing to do with setting the record straight about David Fincher’s less-than-flattering feature The Social Network. As cinema receipts continue to slide and peer-to-peer sharing shows no sign of letting up, now is a good a time for Facebook to experiment with expanding its services beyond networking and casual gaming. After all, if you have 500 million users, why not offer them more than Farmville and Scrabble apps? Adding movies is a logical choice, but how will content providers respond to dealing with another digital distribution channel at the (possible) expense of cinema admissions and hard copy sales/rentals.
Empty seats
For any new player in media production and exhibition provision space the numbers reflect a bleak landscape of declining box office receipts, a bargain basement home entertainment market and endemic piracy. The situation in Ireland provides a decent microcosm of how the industry is faring.
According to a report in The Sunday Times there are two reasons why audience figures are tumbling.
First, a visit to the cinema is seen as being too expensive. For example, a single ticket averages at €10, with an extra euro for a 3D feature. Factor in the cost of inflated concessions and you could easily be heading for the €20 mark, that’s per person.
Cinema owners argue they offer a superior experience at a price that covers their overheads and little else. Recent investments in 3D digital projectors have set a new benchmark for image quality, but have not come cheap.
Second, according to the Sunday Times report, is the poor quality of output. At present, movies seem to come in two varieties: worthy and puerile. Oscar winners like The Kings Speech might garner critical plaudits but can’t hold a candle to sequel-friendly franchises like Michael Bay’s bombastic Transformers movies or tween fantasies like Twilight when it comes to box office.
Exhibition spaces may be suffering but the buck certainly does not stop there. Drilling down into the home entertainment market paints a similarly bleak. Video rental stores – the ones still around anyway – are relying games rentals and peripheral services like Internet access to stay viable.
Despite high definition TVs becoming the standard in households, it’s DVD, not Blu-ray that forms the bulk of movie rentals. Content delivered in full-HD is largely consumed via digital broadcasting services like Sky or gaming platforms like the Xbox 360. Blu-ray won the format war thanks to support from content producers, but somehow lost the battle hearts and minds of consumers.
If the case of digital downloads and the music industry has taught us anything, it’s that convenience wins out over quality, but a nice balance is struck with streaming rental services like Netflix, Lovefilm, Xbox Live and Apple TV. In this context why wouldn’t Facebook try its hand at becoming a rental market.
Coming attractions
Thus far a grand total of six Warner Bros. titles are being trialled. Unfortunately the selection so far – The Dark Knight, Inception, Yogi Bear, Life As We Know It – are either proven quantities that have already reached their audience or sub-par product that could only benefit from additional exposure. Not a great way to start, and if Facebook is to compete it will need a massive catalogue to compete with the dominant Netflix.
The process Facebook wants to adopt for rentals is something of a mash up of the model successfully employed by current services, only with a social element. Users have to visit a dedicated page for the movie they want to see, click the ‘watch’ button and agree to allow the embedded media player access to some of your personal data. This gives the content provider some insight into their audience as well as an additional revenue stream. Rentals are priced at 30-40 Facebook credits ($3-$4), which can be purchased on the movie’s page. As with similar services, a rental period of 48 hours per movie applies.
From a user perspective this could have benefits as well, as the number of ‘likes’ a movie accumulates can be useful for gauging the appeal or quality of a movie – using a quick social appraisal as a guide instead of the opinion of a specialist critic already works well enough for the likes of imdb – access to which is standard on Apple TV. You can also leave comments on the movie or chat with friends while watching it.
While only available in the US so far (and hardly a patch on Netflix’s $8 flat rate monthly fee), streaming movies via Facebook could be a great solution for an Irish market lacking a similar service outside of Apple TV.
For studios, the lure of gaining access to Facebook as a marketing and research platform as well as a route to market would have to be a win/win situation, and the quality of streams combined with the convenience of watching movies inside the Facebook ecosystem could be enough to dissuade some from the kind of compulsive downloading that is putting the entertainment industry under so much pressure.
Movies on Facebook? We like this idea. A lot.
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