It seems the past couple of months brought a whirlwind of media attention. It seems my intuition is correct about our cell phones becoming "mini entertainment" centers. Most of you know that I launched Zoie Films in 1990s and this year, my company is embarking on a new mission;
"Zoie Cellular Cinema Festival". That's right. Mini movies streamed on your cell phone. Print and online and TV from the Netherlands, Asia, Brazil, France, Miami, L.A., NYC among other media outlets has written about this exciting new venture.
For now, I thought I'd post an interview with the INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE:
INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE
Wireless: Showing films on phones
Kevin J. O'Brien International Herald
Sunday, October 10, 2004
BERLIN Over the next year, broadcasters and mobile phone carriers will be working to deliver more streaming video to cellular handsets - including the phone medium's very own film festivals.
"In entertainment, this is the next big thing," said Victoria Lynn Weston, a Marietta, Georgia, filmmaker who in December is sponsoring the Cellular Cinema Festival. The fest is designed to be a virtual competition of video clips, one to three minutes long, displayed on mobile screens.
Weston said she was expecting 100 entries from around the world. One entry, a silent clip called Mini Driver, tells in 3 minutes and 48 seconds the story of a woman driving a Mini car in Portugal, who by chance meets a new beau at a stoplight.
"This is an exciting way for filmmakers to get exposure to a huge audience," said the clip's producer, Dawn Westlake, a Los Angeles independent filmmaker who also stars in the film.
How big the viewing audience will ultimately be, and whether consumers will be willing to pay to watch video on cellphone screens measuring just one and a half inches, or 3.8 centimeters, is being hotly debated within the industry.
Weston's film fest is not alone in focusing on mobile cinema. In March 2003, a Los Angeles company called BigDigit put on the first competition for cellular video, called the World's Smallest Film Festival, at a trade fair in New Orleans.
Like Weston's contest, BigDigit's film festival is a virtual event - there is no celebrity-packed hall with tuxedoed guests. Instead, filmmakers mail in or submit their works over the Internet and a panel of judges periodically selects winners. In Weston's contest, the top prize is a week at a Philippines golf resort.
"Big Hollywood entertainment companies are starting to take notice," said Beau Buck, founder of BigDigit. "Many people are realizing this has the potential to reach a very large viewing public."
In Buck's festival, winners have the chance to reach the masses through his distribution company, mFlix, which is one of eight premium streaming video channels being sold to U.S. mobile phone users by Sprint.
Buck said that Sprint customers were viewing 700 short films from mFlix each day, a figure he said doubled every month. Based on Sprint data, Buck estimates he has 20,000 Sprint subscribers.
Analysts say the technology in general faces several hurdles, including a lack of affordable mobile phones for streaming video, the rough quality of phone video, and the costs to consumers of viewing mobile video.
"The technology for cellular video is demonstrable now," said Mike Brooks, chairman of mobile applications at Digital TV Group, a London-based association of British broadcasters, mobile carriers and equipment makers. "But handset makers are waiting for carriers to commit to providing services, while carriers are waiting for handset makers to produce phones in large volumes."
Since August, Sprint has been selling mFlix and other mobile video-on-demand channels in the United States with the cellphone maker Samsung, whose MM-A700 phone displays video at 15 frames per second, compared to broadcast quality of 24 frames.
"The response so far has been very, very good," said Leslie Lett, a Sprint spokeswoman, who declined to release figures on the number of subscribers. "More and more people are watching."
In the United States, Sprint customers typically pay $24.99 per month for unlimited data downloads, which enables them to watch the Sprint Channel, a mix of clips from NBC Universal, Fox Sports, Comedy Time and the Weather Channel. The video charge is on top of regular monthly calling charges. Sprint is selling the MM-A700 for $249.99 including a rebate. Premium channels like mFlix or CNNtoGo cost an extra $4.95 per month.
One of the most watched videos so far, Lett said, has been a clip of a speech in August by the New Jersey governor, James McGreevey, in which the married politician announced he was resigning after saying he was gay.
International Herald Tribune
Copyright © 2004 The International Herald Tribune
It's been a very busy few weeks. Our new Zoie Films Festival is launching its first annual *Zoie Films Cellular Cinema Festival* - movies for the cell screen. We are pleased to have partners in the Pacific Rim including Singapore, Phillippines... who provide mobile content to more than a dozen Telco companies. This brings us up close and personal to more than 28 million users.
We won! President Bush has been re-elected. Much as my psychic impression more than one year ago, we would see Bush elected by millions of votes.
