Back in March, there was news of a new plan featuring major studios to stream “premium” movies via DirecTV a mere 60 days after their premiere in theaters. With the backing of Warner Bros., Sony, Universal, and 20th Century Fox, studios hoped to head off the rise of streaming and declining DVD sales without upsetting theater owners too much. The only catch was that these so-called Home Premiere movies would cost viewers about $30 per movie. Now, DirecTV CEO Michael White is saying that those prices are “awfully high.”

From Bloomberg:

Few customers will purchase the premium rentals unless the quality of the movies improves and the price comes down, White said in an interview.

“They’re priced too high for consumers,” White said. “We didn’t choose that price, but that’s where the studios forced us to be.”

This could be good news for Netflix, which has been on the ropes in terms of retaining its content, and other streaming services looking to make gains in this new marketplace. Hopefully this will be the death knell of this completely wigged out scheme, and we can stop worrying about paying double a movie ticket to stream a flick.

(Bloomberg via TechDirt)

When was the last time you saw an ad for a showing of a new movie release with subtitles? Probably never, unless you’re actively looking for them. That might not be a big deal for you, but it’s something deaf people struggle with all the time. The majority of people with adequate hearing dislike subtitled movies (I count myself in the minority), so theaters have a vested interest in not “ruining” prime time showings with them. As a result, if you’re deaf, you have access to a handful of annoying alternatives like waiting for a DVD release or catching an awkwardly-timed showing.

Well, no longer, hopefully. Sony has been working on subtitle glasses that should allow deaf viewers to have their own personal subtitles without other viewers having to be distracted by them. While it seems like a pretty simple concept, the real trick is ensuring that the viewer doesn’t constantly have to switch focus from the glasses, to the screen, to the glasses, to the screen. These glasses manage to provide the subtitles in such a way that they appear to be projected on the screen, in the same field of view as the action of the movie.

Not only is Moviepass a website that has popcorn pop with a satisfying sound each time someone signs up to the service and a manual popcorn generation button, but it actually offers a service that is like Netflix, but for tangible movie theaters, as opposed to your iPad or PlayStation 3. The service, which costs $50-per-month (an additional $3 for each IMAX or 3D movie), allows subscribers to watch unlimited movies in actual theaters using their smartphones as tickets. Using an HTML5 application (with the native app coming soon), users can search for a movie, find local showtimes and watch the flick after they check into the theater. Aside from the $50 unlimited service, Moviepass is also planning on offering a four-movie-per-month $30 limited pass.

The newest release in the long-winded Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise is now in theatres. I’m sure, somewhere, somebody is rejoicing that fact. It’s probably worth mentioning that my despair didn’t stop said movie from raking in boatloads of cash. Literal boatloads. Okay, not really. But still, a lot of money was made.  My despair also had nothing to do with Roger Ebert giving the most recent iteration fewer stars than Mel Gibson’s latest outing, The Beaver. Yes, the one where he wears a beaver puppet on his hand throughout the film. That is what scored more favorably.

This turn of events brought to mind other movie franchises that managed the trifecta but couldn’t quite pull off the fourth. Also, just to get it out of the way, I am fairly positive The Matrix would be included here were it not for the remarkably sane decision to stop at three.

Believe it or not, it’s possible for the mere presence of 3D movies in theaters to make the more numerous 2D offerings look worse. According to a very good investigative report from The Boston Globe, it’s relatively common practice for theaters that use Sony’s 4K digital projectors, which need an additional 3D lens in front of the regular lens when 3D movies are playing to allow for the polarization effect that makes the 3D image possible, to simply leave the 3D lenses in place when playing 2D fare through the same projector.The result, which the article says affects Regal, AMC, and National Amusements theaters: A dramatically darker picture, sapped of color.

So why aren’t theater personnel simply removing the 3-D lenses? The answer is that it takes time, it costs money, and it requires technical know-how above the level of the average multiplex employee. James Bond, a Chicago-based projection guru who serves as technical expert for Roger Ebert’s Ebertfest, said issues with the Sonys are more than mechanical. Opening the projector alone involves security clearances and Internet passwords, “and if you don’t do it right, the machine will shut down on you.’’ The result, in his view, is that often the lens change isn’t made and “audiences are getting shortchanged.’’

Even more insidiously, some movie theater employees say that this isn’t just a matter of oppressive DRM stumping projectionists, but that it’s official, albeit unspoken, policy to leave the dimming 3D lenses in place for 2D films: Said one, “If we knew a house would be opening ‘Harry Potter’ and it wasn’t going to be 3-D … I would ask them to swap the lens out and it would either go nowhere or come back with a negative from the regional technician, usually with the impression that it came from above.’’

(Boston.com via Boing Boing)

In order to sidestep Canada’s pervasive bandwidth caps, Netflix Canada has unveiled a new tiered service that will allow users to customize their video quality. The move comes in response to progressively lower bandwidth caps placed on consumers by ISPs, who claim that streaming services like Netflix are clogging the tubes, so to speak.

The new options offer three settings with different data rates: Good, at 0.3 gb per hour; Better, at 0.7 gb per hour; and Best, at 1gb per hour or high with HD. Since the Best setting is the only one which mentions HD, it can be assumed that HD content is only available on the Best setting. With the new settings, users who previously watched 30 hours of Netflix and rammed nearly 30gb through the intertubenet can lower their usage to a mere 9gb.

There is no indication that Netflix will be offering a lower monthly fee for users who turn down their video quality. It does, however, prevent them from maxing out the limits placed on them by their ISPs and getting slapped with hefty fines. It’s unfortunate that ISPs continue to find new ways to charge their customers and restrict access to the services they already provided, instead of fixing these alleged maladies.

(via Engadget)

Today is the birthday of celebrated actor Gary Oldman, whom you have almost certainly seen. Perhaps you didn’t realize that he portrays both persecuted wizard Sirius Black in the Harry Potter films, and as the long-suffering but upstanding Commissioner Jim Gordon in the most recent Batman films. And perhaps you didn’t know that actor Gary Oldman, 53, has also portrayed a Florida mental patient, a cutthroat scif weapons tycoon, a vampire, and Sid Vicious but it’s all true.

So,  here’s to Gary Oldman! A hundred faces, a hundred voices, but all the same incredibly versatile actor.

Film and data buff Edmund Helmer has found away for you, dear reader, to quickly and easily raise your social standing through bragging. He has produced a custom Google map showing where scenes for the top 2000 from the last 100 years of movies on IMDB were filmed. Now you can quickly and easily discover what films were made near you, and gloat obnoxiously about it to your friends. I’ve already started.

As impressive as the map is, the footnote to its creation is rather surprising. On his blog, Helmer wrote about the creation of the map, which he said was shockingly easy, though not without quirks:

[...] I used Google’s new data management tool: Fusion Tables. I was completely amazed by their functionality; all I needed to do was enter in the location data from IMDB, and the map was generated automatically. [...] Some locations couldn’t be found by Google Maps – and in what has to be the most entertaining error handling I’ve seen, those data points are mapped to the Bermuda Triangle.

Let’s all take a moment to bask in the fact that this massive collection of data — nearly 10,000 locations — was fed into GoogleMaps’ API and mapped automatically. Truly, we live in an age of wonders.

Being new to the area, I immediately zoomed in on my neighborhood. Turns out that some of the most badass movies of all time were filmed within blocks of my apartment: Goodfellas, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, Julie & Julia. Actually, I might leave that last one out when I brag about this.

(BoxOfficeQuant via Bits and Pieces)

Are you one of those people that love when the titles of movies are spoken in said movies’ dialogue? If so, here’s about two minutes of characters saying the titles of the movies they’re in. See what I did there?

(via reddit)

Warner Bros. has announced that it will soon begin testing a service that will put a selection of their movies for rent or purchase through Facebook’s movie pages. The test will be christened with The Dark Knight, a movie you probably never heard of about some guy who dresses up like a flying mouse or something. Facebook users will be able to spend Facebook credits on the service, with a rental lightening their digital pockets by 30 credits, which translates to about $3 in real money. After a user rents a movie, they’ll have 48 hours to watch it in the browser, with the ability to pause and resume when logging back into Facebook at a later time.

One may initially think competing with Netflix and other streaming sites–especially on such a limited platform as Facebook–would doom the service from the start, but Warner Bros. makes a point that is a tad difficult to refute: Facebook is pretty much the premiere thing on the Internet (aside from cats), so they might as well get in on it while the getting’s good. On top of the install base, people don’t have to pay a subscription fee for the service in its current incarnation, and users will be able to share movies with their personal network of friends and family, generating hype, which can’t be a bad thing for Warner Bros.

(via Ars Technica)