Oscar-winning actor Morgan Freeman has gone from Driving Miss Daisy to driving old-school Hollywood insane. In July, Freeman announced that he was teaming up with Intel to launch ClickStar, a startup based in Santa Monica, California, built to distribute movies to computers at the same time they're released in theaters. ClickStar, Freeman announced, is designed "to deliver first-run premium entertainment to film fans around the world--and to make film easier to buy than to pirate." The company won't be building any actual hardware, just tapping its Hollywood connections to deliver movies to platforms built by companies such as Microsoft or TiVo. Theater owners may not like ClickStar's plan, but the company thinks it has found a way around their objections: Pay them. The service is set to launch sometime in 2006.
Harvey Weinstein can't play the underdog for long. After splitting with Disney (and losing the Miramax library, which includes Pulp Fiction, Good Will Hunting, and Shakespeare in Love, not to mention the company that made $4.5 billion at the box office and collected 53 Oscars in 10 years), Harvey and brother Bob did what any heavyweight entrepreneurs would do: They started over. And now, with a little help from Goldman Sachs, the Weinstein Co. is on track to build a new $1 billion machine with interests in film, Broadway musicals, music, publishing, and video games. Harvey has already inked deals with directors such as Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. And a strategic Cablevision pact should allow him to control everything from production through multiplatform distribution.
"Scary" isn't a word people often use to describe Comcast CEO Brian Roberts. But as head of the country's largest cable operator, he certainly has the bandwidth to strike terror in the L.A. establishment. In late October, Roberts upped the fear a notch by announcing that Comcast was increasing its video-on-demand content by 250 titles, to a roster of 800 movies a month. That may be only one small step for Comcast customers, but it's a giant leap toward Roberts's philosophical goal of releasing films simultaneously on cable and at theaters. And with his call for the major networks to feed their programs to cable operators on an on-demand basis (much as ABC will be piping Desperate Housewives to iPods), Roberts isn't going to be soothing many nerves in Old Hollywood.
No one would accuse the film studios of being early adopters, but if one studio was ahead of the pack in seeing the huge potential upside of the DVD, it was Warner Bros. And now, with that cow running dry, Warner has given the nod to Kevin Tsujihara, the man it hopes will lead the studio into the next green pasture, video on demand. Tsujihara, an 11-year Warner veteran, was promoted in October to head video, wireless, and online operations, as well as games and antipiracy. As if that weren't enough, Warner also gave him its new digital distribution unit (video on demand, electronic video sales and pay-per-view). That puts the 41-year-old Tsujihara in charge of the most important technological transition the studio has faced in decades (no pressure, Kev!). Meaning he'll be Warner's next superhero--or its next fall guy.
Bud Mayo began his career as an IBM computer salesman in 1965--and he's still selling. Mayo founded AccessIT in hopes of getting every theater in America converted to digital distribution and projection. He has already committed AccessIT to making 150 screens operational by year's end and some 4,000 by October 2007. He even predicts that all 36,000 American screens could be retooled in a decade. To get people to even listen, though (especially theater owners terrified of the $100,000 cost of conversion), took some smooth talking. "Everyone in Hollywood was waiting for someone to show them the way," Mayo says. His mantra is "No theater left behind," and his recent partnership with projector maker Christie Digital Systems should achieve that. It standardizes format, delivery, and distribution--and even creates a payment plan to keep out-of-pocket costs for theaters on par with analog.
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