Twilight Time / Redwind

[tenia]

That's exactly what Jamieson said : the original business model was "No sale ever", but they had to later on even if contradicting their initial guideline.

[domino harvey]

This label was a good idea when it started, but then Kino Lorber and Olive came on the scene and obliterated them in their output from the same licensors for half the effective price. TT’s response was to keep doing everything the same. TT didn’t adapt and now they’re facing the end result of that hubris. Expecting customers to thank you for overpriced releases of increasingly obscure titles cloaked in consistently hideous covers is not a great business model

[Gregory]

Many of us started critiquing their business model the very day the label's launch was announced in the LA Times. Another thing about it that was misjudged was the tactic of getting collectors to purchase TT releases as soon as possible because Hurry! This is only available for a LIMITED TIME!, which is merited when there are only 3,000 copies available of a film that has a big cult following. But it certainly wasn't true of about 98% of what the label released, so when the periodical sales started happening many learned to wait a couple of years or more if need be to get certain titles for Olive-level prices (or less). A couple of months ago I picked up a few titles from them that wouldn't have been on my radar before I noticed they'd dropped to $5.95 (e.g., Resurrected). I'm sure they took a big loss on most of the titles that ended up being sold off at those low price-points.

I bought many of the early releases only to end up wanting to sell them off when better UK releases came along. I listed several of them on Amazon and sometimes they'd sit there for a couple of years before being purchased, even in the case of an out-of-print one like Broadway Danny Rose (which I had listed for about three years before someone ordered it). This might say something about the level of demand for most Twilight Time releases. I know their hearts were in the right place and wish they'd gone about things in a different way.

[Drucker]

I cannot stress the degree to which forcing people to buy through SAE made me hate this label. I'll overpay if I really want something. I plucked down probably ~$70 for those Flicker Alley Paul Muni blu-rays because I just wanted free shipping from Barnes and Noble. There was never a reason for me to be on that site. And around holiday season when family buys me usually a bunch of blu-rays for the year, I sure hate pointing them to that website instead of easy old Amazon.

[Nw_jahrles]

I think a turning point was when they began re-releasing some of their best-sellers (which was fine), but issued "Encore" editions with betters scans/restorations ie. Journey to the Center of the Earth, Fright Night. It has become clear in the boutique Blu-Ray market that consumers will be very loyal to a label if the label proves itself to be customer first. Hence why Indicator is having success. People blind-buy their editions for the packaging/contents alone. Also, the limited-edition model has evolved to limited edition followed by a standard edition model which make people feel like they aren't being pressured to buy a release.

[tenia]

One of their main business model motto was the 3000 copies / 1 size fits all batch run.
It's probably safe to say it never fitted all. At all.
They started quite early to have very-quick sold out that yielded the need for Encore releases, negating the One size fits all strategy, while some 4 years old releases were still far away from selling out and now are heavily discounted. This only meant they were willing to compromise their sole main incentive : BUY NOW IT'S LIMITED.

They proved it's actually not that limited through no less than 3 ways : they can do Encore releases if they want (they even did one for The Train, which I never thought would warrant such a business decision to do 2 limited printings), many of them can be bought later and at a discount, and finally now, some others are getting re-released by other labels through better/cheaper releases. And that's not taking into account importing from UK or French labels.

The SAE thing also wasn't at all consumer-oriented since they don't really offer flexibility or interesting shipping fees, especially for international customers. It meant for me having to make big orders - which would potentially get caught by the customs and taxed - while the SAE website would tell me "DO YOU REQLLY WANT TO USE THE CHEAPER SHIPPING OPTION ?!! NO REPLACEMENT IF LOST !!" Well, if the other option is $45, yes I'll take the $20 one instead.

In the end, domino summed it up well : they should have evolved with the market but chose not to, even if it meant ending up breaking every rule of their business model until it ruined them. This is unfortunate for some of the movies they could have released in the future, but really is unsurprising.

Thougg maybe they actually sold 2500 copies of that $30 8 heads in a duffel bag almost barebones release and it's actually close to selling out.

[FrauBlucher]

In the end, domino summed it up well : they should have evolved with the market but chose not to, even if it meant ending up breaking every rule of their business model until it ruined them. This is unfortunate for some of the movies they could have released in the future, but really is unsurprising.

Which tells me all they were interested in was making as many bucks as they could. Especially with Redman’s view and insistence that in 5 years, if memory serves me, that physical media will disappear. Well, we are long past his arrogant timeframe. Yes, there were industry rumblings about the downturn of physical media, but no end date was applied except the one TT put on it.

When they saw that they were wrong about the demise they should’ve changed their model and made it more consumer friendly. Especially with all the heat and criticism they took from the beginning. But I believe they didn’t care. Money, money, money!

[domino harvey]

Tenia, I doubt they’ve pressed even a thousand copies up front of most of their recent titles, nevermind 3k. I think 500 is Technicolor’s minimum for pressed discs, so very likely some of the more obscure or recent titles only exist in numbers far bellow their contractual threshold

[Luke M]

I think they should've went all-in with their limited edition copies and never printed more than 1000 and released some editions with numbers as low as 300. It would've generated a lot of interest from collectors. Instead they do 3000 which doesn't inspire a whole lot of day one pre-ordering.

[tenia]

The issue is that 3000 wasnt just for limited purposes but also to capture the whole market by allowing the movies to remain in print long enough.
That's why the whole thing is silly since it also was trying to do very different things simultaneously.

Domino, it's indeed very likely they pressed less and less overtime but that also meant facing higher manufacturing costs. I don't know how much that would have weighed in their budget but if that's the case, it's financially even worse than what I thought. I seem to recall 1000 is the usual smallest batch size though but maybe it's less now.

[bugsy_pal]

I have about 20 TT releases, and got sucked in to the "buy now" thing for a few of them (eg. Journey to the Centre of the Earth - both of their releases of that film).

Thankfully, I wasn't a fan of Carpenter's 'Christine' - I remember there being a frenzy over that title, and 'Fright Night' too - they sold out quickly, to much gnashing of teeth and moaning about scalpers. I was bemused to see that Fright Night was released in my home Australia not long after, for about 10 bucks.

[captveg]

To be fair, I think Redman was absolutely sincere in his belief that physical media was decisively on its way out, and he wasn't alone in that belief—it was the subject of a zillion articles in Variety etc. I imagine he was pleasantly surprised by the tenacity of Blu-Ray even if it meant their business model ended up being a bit of a miscalculation.

He wasn't even that far off, really - nearly all catalog titles are now sold through specialty labels in the US, either of a studios' own limited runs like Warner Archive, the Universal MODs, Sony MODs, and the Disney Movie Club, or through 3rd parties like Criterion, Kino, Arrow, Shout, etc. The only exceptions are primarily the repackaged-for-4K-UHD evergreen titles. Where Redman was wrong was in artificially limiting these titles to the same 3000, something even they had to adjust higher for a couple titles they were the wrong distributor for. Seems to me the other 3rd party labels made the smarter approach by not disclosing the run size of their titles, allowing them to print more for the best sellers, and likely print far less for the majority of their riskier releases (I recall someone mentioning to me that WB archive keeps their initial batch runs to 300-500 for most titles). With several MGM releases going OOP for Kino and Shout recently it's not as if those models are perfect, either, but they are more consumer friendly in this day and age when probably 90%+ of catalog BD sales are online and they can be purchased from more than two online retailers competing with each other in price.

[tenia]

Arrow's batch size usually was 3000 but varied between 2000 and 5000, with exceptions as low as 1000 and as high as 10 000.
I'm quite sure other labels can adapt in similar ways their batch sizes to their releases' expected potentials, even if not disclosing the sizes. That seems like common sense : you can't expect The Thing to sell in similar fashion than the Nikkatsu Diamond Guys compilations, so you have to adjust according to this.

I'd argue however that when Redman was right about the state of the studios strategies, he explicitly said he expected the format to be at its twilight and to disappear much quicker than it actually does. For all we know now, there might be a sustainable small base for indie labels to keep working within and the physical market might never really die (at least, certainly not right now), which would prove Redman wrong. And even if it does die, it will be quite later than what Redman expected.

[FrauBlucher]

He wasn't even that far off, really - nearly all catalog titles are now sold through specialty labels in the US.

yeah he was. He never made a distinction between the survival from the studios to the boutiques. He said flat out that physical media will not be around in 5 to 7 years. If that was the case his marketing would have been different, instead TT had a short term business plan, because to him the end was in sight. I would wager that Becker was not a believer of that idea. He’s even said so much in declaring that physical media is and will always be their main business

[tenia]

Becker also said not a month ago that he doesn't really care about the medium, as long as they're able to make the movies available to the public, hence why they're curating with lots of care their Criterion Channel.

[FrauBlucher]

Where did he say that?

[tenia]

At a conference he gave at Lyon about 3 weeks ago.
To him, the movie comes first, the format is just a medium to make it accessible. That's why they launched their streaming channel, since it allowed these movies to get in contact with more people (because people are switching to steaming). Criterion don't see themselves so much as a movie label than rather a movie publisher, and they serve, whatever the medium, as intermediate to access the movies. The mission is key and takes over the medium, so it's not so much about the container than the content.

[whaleallright]

I am fairly sure there is no DNR at play in Leave Her to Heaven, all of the issues (mainly colour) are due to the fact that no 1st or 2nd gen original elements exist. And the DVD is definitely not a better viewing experience IMHO, it fares even worse in the colour department and most definitely has less detail.

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film4/blu-ray_ ... lu-ray.htm

If it doesn't have DNR, which I trust based on opinions more expert than myself, then *something* is creating the unnaturally waxy sheen on much of the image, including on actors' faces — something very much not present on any of the 35mm prints I've seen, which have plenty of fetching grain and texture. I found the Blu-Ray unwatchable for this reason.

[FrauBlucher]

This doesn't sound like he doesn't care about the medium.....

Is the channel going to change the way you inducted movies into the Criterion Collection when you could only offer a DVD/Blu-ray edition?

For sure. Our flagship line, the Blu-ray, is still the best way to watch a movie. No matter how great the streaming is on Filmstruck and the Criterion Channel, it’s still going to be more compressed than it would be on Blu-ray. Just to get it through the pipe into someone’s home, there’s a lot of magic that happens. It looks great. That said, the definitive, the maximal data, least compression, highest-fidelity image and sound is still the Blu-ray line. The physical object is also still very much a part of our consciousness. On the other hand, the channel frees us to be able to connect our audience with films we might either not have rights to put in physical media or that we want to be able to show in conjunction with another film we do control, as part of a double feature or a “short and feature” combination or as part of a curated series that someone has selected. So there’s going to be titles flowing through the service that we think are going to be rewarding experiences for our audience, but that are not necessarily coming out on disc. There are also going to be titles in our library that are worthy of people’s attention, but might not be able to muscle their way into the Criterion physical media schedule or necessarily survive in the tougher physical media marketplace. It’s allowed us to put our finger on the scale for a lot of different kinds of films that we have always wanted to connect our audience with, but previous marketplace realities had not necessarily been able to support them.

[tenia]

He doesn't really care, in that he's not particularly attached to the format in a definitive way. That also doesn't mean he's not realistic about the technical differences between streaming and BD, but he made it clear that BD isn't a be-all end-all for Criterion, and that if they need to change and go to steaming, so be it.I think it's an important distinction to make, and one he's actually making in the rest of your quote.
What he explained at Lyon pointed out at Criterion looking BD-releases only as a mean, a vehicle, not a goal in itself. It was DVD before, it's BD now, it'll be something else later. Only the movies remain.
BD sure offers the best quality currently possible for these movies (sustainably speaking for an indie label), but the movie remains more important, and if switching to steaming saves the movie's connection with the public at large, it'll happen, even if it means slightly downgrading the PQ. And I mean : the Channel already exists, with its lower quality, and it seems to me people aren't unhappy with this quality.

If it doesn't have DNR, which I trust based on opinions more expert than myself, then *something* is creating the unnaturally waxy sheen on much of the image, including on actors' faces — something very much not present on any of the 35mm prints I've seen, which have plenty of fetching grain and texture. I found the Blu-Ray unwatchable for this reason.

You can see on caps-a-holic the grain is here, but it indeed isn't as obvious and present than in other restorations. If I had to guess, I'd suppose that they might have used something else than the OCN, possibly an IP, and it explains why grain is here but not so much.
It also seems to suffer in parts of technicolor misalignment, which never helps.

[MichaelB]

I started my career working exclusively with 35mm, and in an ideal world everyone would be able to watch lab-fresh 35mm projected onto the big screen every single time.

But that's obviously not realistic, and I'm pragmatic enough to acknowledge that Blu-ray is currently the best compromise that we have - but I can also envisage a time when streaming bitrates make the distinction between Blu-ray and streaming much less relevant.

[FrauBlucher]

I will take this back to my original point before I went off on a medium tangent. Becker never saw a definitive end of physical media while Redman gave a specific time frame. All I'm saying is they were in different camps, with Becker being in the right camp and understanding the market better

[tenia]

Yes, they are. Becker is just anticipating the likely needs to adjust how they will, technically speaking, keep on doing what they're doing and keeping the movies central to their activites.
However, I do think that in the end, TT were BD sellers, not movie curators, which probably is the key difference here.

[colinr0380]

I think that you are all right, in the sense that probably streaming has become for Criterion what the DVD Eclipse line used to be, especially with the cost benefits of not having to produce even the minimalist largely similarly formatted packaging of the Eclipse line and ship all the sets out to retailers, and the access to a wider range of films that can be changed at a whim or according to calendar events or seasonal programming.

Yet the physical media is still obviously valued, both for providing a physical (and Criterion branded) object and a film in the best possible current quality. Though that does not mean that Blu-ray is the be all and end all, just as DVD was not. Just that there is a delay in the move to UHD for a variety of reasons, presumably from consumer adoption and costs involved in producing discs in the new format (maybe they have different technical issues in producing UHD compared to Blu-ray? I'm not sure as I have not looked into it. Maybe its down to something like the region coding being different, so that would need to get re-negotated all over again? Or just Criterion wanting to get to the milestone of spine number 1000 before taking the next step?), or maybe just being torn internally between another physical format and the current hotness of everyone jumping on the streaming bandwagon. As tenia says I don't think that Becker is really committed to Blu-ray as the format for Criterion, just that there might not be a wish to step backwards in terms of accessibility for audiences that UHD might represent, even if it could provide a jump in quality (but then Blu-ray kind of represented that 'step back' over DVD at the time and they still went for it, so who knows? Though they did wait for the HD-DVD and Blu-ray format war to get settled before they stepped in, from what I recall)

The other thing about streaming that concerns me is that even if the bitrates get upped significantly, the internet might be in use by lots of people in a family or in demand from other services (from streaming television services to videogame downloading) that might throttle the bit rate just as much as any ISP would, as well as the idea that the end consumer does not really 'own' a copy of anything that they purchase any more. Plus of course the idea that we go back to Criterion being restricted back to only being able to provide its streaming service in the US again, much as its streaming partnerships were never accessible elsewhere. Personally if we are going down the online only route I would really like to see Criterion move to something like a full download of a film for a one off fee, which would both solve the problems of providing the end user with a (kind of) 'object' for their purchase (even if it is just a file folder on their hard drive with the film file and supplemental material neatly organised) as well as getting around bitrates causing buffering or streaming issues during playback if something was pre-downloaded to a user's computer (But of course that immediately brings rights licencing issues back to the fore in a way that streaming is presumably intended to easily nullify.

[tenia]

One of the technical issue they might have with UHD is that it's quite clear now that the main upgrade (and appeal) for UHD is the HDR grade, but that many (most) 4K restorations have been performed in SDR. Releasing SDR UHDs might be considered unworthy of the upgrade by some, thus hurting the sales or possibly further slowing down the launch of the new format for Criterion. This being written, some 4K restoration ARE done in HDR, so they exist, and maybe Criterion could test the waters with those first. It's not as if people expect them releasing 3 UHDs per month straight away !

As for steaming, the issue is not the bitrate at all. The issue is the compromise for providers of paying for higher bitrate instead of simply agressively optimising the video compressiong at lower bitrate. That's why most only offers lossy compressed sound for instance : people don't really realise this anyway, so the platforms can save there. I don't know what sound package the Criterion Channel use, but I highly doubt it's LPCM, or even lossless 48/24 encodes like their BDs. It's even worse in the US since internet neutrality is basically already gone.

The other issue is that while most population are getting lines upgrade on a regular basis, some are still stuck with bandwidth akin to those from 2005, and they're obviously vastly insufficient for any kind of streaming - even SD. The x% stuck with problematic access to high-speed Internet keep on having the problem, while the other 98 (I guess) % are always the same population. This further ostracises the remaining x% by widening the gap between what is available for most of the population and what the others are still stuck with years later.

A simple personal example : in my family, we got our first computer in 1994 and our first Internet subscription around 2000. It was then 56kbps bandwidth. We upgraded to ADSL (think it was 512kbps) around 2003, then ADSL2 around 2005 IIRC (down speed would be about 7 Mbps, or practically speaking, about 1 Mbps). That's what we got until around 2014 when we switched to optic fiber (thanks to a national state-subventioned plan to roll out optic fiber in all of France), but with a limited bandwidth (down speed around 50 Mbps, or practically speaking about 8 Mbps). I moved to Belgium in 2015 and got a slightly better optic fiber bandwtidh (75 Mbps - 15 Mbps in practice) and it's only now, back in France, that I have a whooping 650 Mbps down speed (in practice, about 50 Mbps).
Meanwhile, my GF's father is stuck with a 512kbps subscription since decades, and still can't have access to anything better because his village isn't plugged to anything better. If something even better than what I have happens next year, I might get it, but he won't, only making the gap even bigger for the unlucky few.