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Panelists:
Managing Consultant, davidlynch.com
Member of the European Commission for Enterprise and Information
Society
Executive Vice President, Intel Corporation
General Manager, Intel Communications Group
Moderator:
Contributing Editor, Wired Magazine
CYNTHIA SPENCE:
On behalf of Intel, we are delighted to present this panel discussion,
"WIRED in Cannes: The Promise of Broadband." We are thrilled
to be partners with WIRED on this. They are an esteemed publication
that covers the entertainment and technology industry, and they
are also part of the Condé Nast Publications family. I am
particularly delighted to introduce their contributing editor, Frank
Rose. Mr. Rose has been covering entertainment and technology for
a considerable amount of time. His depth and breadth in this category
extend to two books he has written. One, called West of Eden, is
about the Sculley-Jobs relationship at Apple; the other is a book
entitled The Agency, about the William Morris Agency. With that,
Frank Rose.
Thank you. We are here today to talk about broadband Internet access
and how it is changing the entertainment business, and the film
business in particular. Broadband is one of those concepts that
has been around for so long that people have almost given up on
it. I was talking about it with Howard Stringer, who is the CEO
and Chairman of Sony Corporation of America, and he said that if
he ever did an autobiography, he was going to have to call it "Waiting
for Broadband." It's been ten years, he said, and it still
hasn't arrived.
The Godot-like experience of waiting for broadband has tried our
patience, it's true. But it has also given us the opportunity to
experiment with what we have - to imagine, to take baby steps, and
sometimes fall on our faces. Unlike Godot, broadband will actually
arrive sometime. In fact, there are signs that it is at the door
today. It is on the verge of going mainstream now in the US, in
Western Europe, and particularly in East Asia, where in South Korea,
which is probably the most wired nation on the planet, more than
60% of homes are already wired with broadband. In the US, it is
now about 10%. The number of homes with a broadband connection has
doubled in the past year, and Americans are actually signing up
for broadband faster than they bought color televisions in the '60s,
than they bought VCRs in the '80s and cellular phones in the '90s.
So it is happening, but what is it? Well, it's a lot more than
just a faster Internet connection. It is something that transforms
the Internet from something we read primarily - Web pages - to something
we watch - video. And it allows you, as a filmmaker, to have direct
contact with the audience. As a director, as a producer, you'll
be able to offer your programming directly to the public for the
first time. Another part of this is high-speed wireless networks
in the home - things that come with geeky names like 802.11b. The
point of them is that they will link the personnel computer with
entertainment devices - with sound systems, TV sets, and game consoles.
That means you will be able to download music and video from the
Internet onto your PC and then direct it to any room in the house,
even out to the car in the garage. CDs and DVDs will probably become
obsolete within a few years. And there are other opportunities.
In Japan, for example, there is a service called PercasTV, which
stands for "personal broadcasting" and which transforms
individuals into broadcasters. You link a Handycam to a personnel
computer, you book time on a website from Sony, and you can stream
your own videos to people anywhere on the planet, in real time.
So to paraphrase Andy Warhol: In the future, everyone can be a TV
station for 15 minutes. When that happens, I think, show business
is going to be transformed forever.
The people who we have here: To my extreme left is Eric Bassett,
the managing consultant of davidlynch.com, which has been doing
"The davidlynch.com Cannes Diary" every day for the duration
of the festival. Erkki Liikanen is a member of the European Commission
in Brussels, responsible for Enterprise and Information Society,
which is a fancy word for "broadband." Wim Wenders, the
filmmaker, is certainly no stranger to Cannes. And Sean Maloney,
who is an executive vice president of Intel, is essentially responsible
for the technology that makes broadband possible. So we have a wide
range of people from every side of the business.
Wim and Eric, I direct my first question to you. Broadband combines
for the first time the production values of cinema and the interactivity,
the possibility of interactivity, of the Web. How are filmmakers
going to respond? Is film still going to be a storyteller's medium,
or will it incorporate interactivity?
For davidlynch.com, broadband allows us to create our own
TV station on the Internet and reach our customers directly. That
also means we need to produce everything. There is a fine line I
think between Internet production right now and TV or film production,
and that's one of the things we struggle with most - finding a production
model that will allow us to deliver economically to the Web. It
is a great thing, though, and it allows us to tell stories on the
Web, as I said, directly to our customers. We have a pay-per-view
model, so we take that revenue to help pay for it. Ultimately, for
David Lynch, it's the creative freedom that it gives him. Many people
have heard of the trials and tribulations with ABC over Mulholland
Drive - well, now he can create a series on the Internet and go
directly to his public, and if he does something that's very good,
he'll get money back for it through pay-per-view. So it lets the
public decide.
I want to answer not so much as a filmmaker but as a professional
optimist. And my optimism consists of the fact that I think that
storytelling in the widest sense, and cinema as an independent industry,
are a work in progress. Now, there are people who are interested
in progress - storytellers, filmmakers by definition, are interested
in anything that is innovative, are interested in anything that
enlarges their vocabulary. Our enemy, and I say that not literally
of course, is the industry as such, because they are always happy
with the way things are. At the moment we are at the birth of a
new era - the digital era. As filmmakers, we are extremely happy
because we can for once really enlarge our vocabulary, we can extend
storytelling like never before. Four generations before us were
dreaming of the possibilities we have now. We can do fantastic things,
but we do it in a dead-end street. We can make fabulous movies on
a PD-150 or whatever the tool, and at the end we have to transfer
it to film in order to get it shown. Theaters don't have digital
distribution and the only digital tool we have to show what we are
able to do today is the DVD.
So the movie industry is willing to move if somebody is firing
up their asses. And broadband is exactly what we need in order to
force television, especially television to move their asses. Maybe
it will become obsolete. And if we zap through French, Italian,
and German channels these days, maybe none of us would miss television
much, if you can have whatever you want on your computer. I wonder
what television is going to do to react. They are going to have
to react. And that's the fabulous thing, that's the great moment
we're living in at this moment in the history of cinema or entertainment.
Everything is moving. We can move beyond storytelling, we can invent
new things - David is just inventing a whole new thing that never
existed before. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. A lot of
young people are making movies that you can't even dream of, and
they are running smack dab against the wall because they have no
opening. They have to convert to film and then they still have to
find a distributor, so the whole beauty of the freedom they have
today with digital filmmaking is ruined. They run against the wall.
Broadband will make a big hole in that wall and you will see the
wall will be flushed away by everything that is going to go through
that hole.
It is obviously great for a person like you or David Lynch
to be able to have your own distribution opportunities and to reach
the public directly. But what about people who aren't well known,
people who might actually need the benefit of a studio or a television
network to promote them, not just distribute them but to establish
an identity for them with the public. What are the opportunities
there?
The opportunities are endless because even if you have no name at
all but if you make something that is worthwhile, you find a little
audience over the Internet. If it's good, it will find its audience
- I can only react as an optimist. Of course we are going to be
flooded with a million digital movies that are all bullshit, but
there will be jewels in there. They will be unknown in the beginning
and the studio will buy them, of course, they always do. The unknown
filmmakers who create notoriety will be picked up - I can promise
you that. There are enough people in Hollywood whose only business
it is to find out people who have talent, and they will find them.
And I think it will change the landscape. I envy kids who make their
first movies today because I seriously think they have a better
chance then ever before.
Do you think we have finally reached the point in the US
and Europe where broadband, via DSL and cable modem, has begun to
become a mass-market phenomenon?
Many of these statistics can stick in your mind, but the
one that gets me is, if you look at the US right now - and I think
this is true of Europe as well - the number of hours the consumer
spends on broadband now exceeds the amount of time they spend watching
television. And that is quite extraordinary, because everybody has
very difficult, busy lives and often in their difficult, busy lives
they sit in chairs like these at computers, and they go home and
instead of plopping in front of the television they choose to spend
more time on the Internet, even though it's a relatively uncomfortable
experience in front of a screen.
Why do people do that? The reason they do that is because people
are inherently incredibly inquisitive - they're curious. They want
to control their lives, they want to find out things themselves.
And that is an extraordinary opportunity. All these curious people
form this popular new mass market. Most of the traditional powers
that be are not going to take advantage of that opportunity. Clearly
over the last ten years they have looked at it and they are choosing
to see more how to limit it rather than to use it. And I think it
is going to be the newer, more innovative or independent companies
that are going to take advantage of it. But it's already a mass
market - 150 million broadband users in the next two years, up to
three people per household - we're getting into half a billion people.
It's already a mass market.
When you talk to the big, quote-unquote, "content companies"
like Disney you get the sense that, as far as they're concerned
at least, broadband is being held back by computer piracy. Twenty
years ago, Universal sued Sony and other hardware manufacturers
- this of course was before Sony was in the movie business - claiming
that their videocassette recorders were promoting illegal duplication
of film. And Jack Valenti made these wild comments that sound exactly
like the stuff you hear from him today about broadband - really,
it's a time capsule. This actually went to court. And if Universal
had won, the industry would have cheated itself of one of its most
important revenue streams. So, is there a lesson here? Should filmmakers
and producers and content companies see broadband as a marketing
opportunity instead of just a threat?
Security is a really big deal to us, especially to David
Lynch, and we have put in every possible security measure that we
can. All our users not only get a warning that's welded onto the
site, but we also have a mechanism that tracks all their actions
so we can find out if they are downloading something, and they have
to hack it to download it. It still happens though - we have a long
way to go. But in music, in film, people are always stealing things.
It is going to happen to a certain extent, but you just have to
do your best to keep it under control, and I think it would be a
terrible shame if that's what kept us from moving forward. It's
not stopping us.
As an artist you have to see that some of that pirating is your
best promotional tool. On the other hand, you don't want it to eat
up all your resources, and I have a lot of musician friends who
realize their resources are gone - for every CD they sell, five
to ten times as many are pirated. So if it ends up eating up all
your resources, then it's sort of hara-kiri, it's suicide. I think
you have to protect yourself, and on the other hand some of these
people that you protect yourself from are your best friends and
your audience - so we have to find a middle way.
I think we have to reach a solution, because we can't build
an industry based on constant theft. You can't build a business
where whatever happens could potentially get stolen. On the other
hand, the industry has to recognize the concept of legitimate consumer
use, and if somebody buys a piece of video or audio over the Web
and is then unable to make a single copy of it or use it on another
device, it is just not going to work - people are not going to accept
that. We've had ten to fifteen years of building up a common law
of reasonable consumer use, and at the moment the most extreme people
in the entertainment business are saying, If you buy it, you can't
even make a back-up copy. Well, we all know how unreliable computers
are - guilty as charged! - and if you fill your hard drive up with
Wim's latest works and it crashes and you have to go out and buy
everything again, it's not going to work. So we are going to have
to move towards some reasonable understanding of consumer rights,
and at the moment I don't believe enough effort is being placed
in that direction. But if the work is put into it, the opportunities
are enormous.
Let's talk about Senator Hollings's bill. Many of you may know that
in Washington, Senator Ernest Hollings, chairman of the Senate Commerce
Committee, has introduced something he calls "The Consumer
Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act." You always
know you're in trouble when you get a name like that. The idea of
this basically - at least my interpretation of it - is to criminalize
the computer industry if it doesn't somehow make illegal copying
impossible. In other words, it's supposed to force manufacturers
to protect their copyrights. From my point of view, it's sort of
like asking the gun industry to sell weapons that only shoot bad
people. But is this feasible? Technologically, could this even work?
I do squirm when you compare us to gun manufacturers. We've
worked for years and years and years on ways of copyrighting, protecting,
and watermarking content, and it can all be done. But it's not a
technology issue, it's a social policy issue. And it's the area
we discussed earlier on, which is that there has to be an acceptance
of consumer rights. When you buy something, you must have some reasonable
ability to use it in other parts of your life. And at the same time,
there has to be useful technology to prevent theft.
The problem we are faced with in Europe now is that they put levies
on computers, because some of them anyhow download films, so they
all must pay. What I am worried about is, if we don't have something
to see to it that those who watch films pay a price for them, it
will easily slow down development and growth.
I agree with you - the idea of putting general purpose levy
on a computer or digital device in anticipation that that person
may go buy something is absurd and unfair to consumers.
There is broadband and there is broadband. Cable modem and DSL can
reach a certain speed, but they don't get you to a speed where you
can watch a movie on your computer, or anywhere else for that matter,
the same way you can watch a movie or a TV show on your television.
How do we get to the next level? How do we get to a direct fiber
connection - which is what we are really talking about here?
The majority of Europeans now have a connection that is too
slow. I think what we need to do, because I am a policy maker, is
that we must guarantee that we have such a competitive framework
that different technologies compete. Our approach is such that we
don't pick one thing, but we try to create a level playing field
where ADSL, cable, satellite, and fiber can compete with each other,
and that guarantees maximum availability.
One last question. When the Internet allows anyone from me to David
Lynch to put up a personal Web site and charge $10 a month to access
whatever I've created, what does that mean for cable and satellite
operators - not to mention TV networks? Do they lose their role
as gatekeepers, or will governments permit them to block access
to Internet sites that don't have a monetary relationship with them?
In other words, could the Internet become a series of walled gardens?
I'm a strong believer in convergence based on the Internet
approach, which means that we need to have all these technologies
based on all these standards interoperable, so that your content
has to have access to different kinds of technologies. There are
many technologies - PCs, mobiles, digital television, satellite,
cable. If you respect this interoperability, you cannot actually
block access by one means. Next week the European Commission is
coming out with an action plan for broadband which is strongly based
on convergence and technological parity. If I want to see Buena
Vista Social Club, I want to have digital channels stored somewhere
that I can order when I need.
That's our philosophy as well at davidlynch.com. We are going to
be there some day when the TV and the Internet merge. We don't feel
that you can watch a feature film on a PC. Our longest are 10 minutes,
there's one that's actually 12 minutes, but we are going to tell
stories in that fashion until the convergence comes. We thought
it would be here by now, but we'll hopefully be there when that
happens.
Interactive television, digital television, was obviously a very
big deal in Europe, but it has yet to take off in the US at all.
What do you think about that, Sean? Do you think it will happen
in the US?
I think it definitely will. The difficulty is that a lot of these
next-generation TV devices tend to be very difficult to use. People
can't figure them out, and consumers can't understand them. As they
get easier to use, inevitably they will take off.
I don't totally agree. I was actually in Madrid two weeks
ago. We had a show, this television station showed a channel where
they had a few basic Web services - they had Yahoo.com and three
or four government services and then you could order films. Of course,
it was not the Internet. I found it almost easier to use than a
PC, I didn't have to wait this ten or fifteen seconds before it
comes on - it was on from the first second, and in a big screen,
not so bad. The key question for me is that this standard must be
interoperable so that it can work on different platforms. If we
have standards for television, then if we have different PC standards,
and a third one for mobile, we just lose it. We must keep it all
open - create competition, real possibilities.
Anything from the audience? Any questions?
Q: Actually, I would like to take issue with
your opening speech. It was very "WIRED," it was very
typical of WIRED magazine to sort of decide what something should
be and then write or speak as if that is how it will be. There is
a very big gap between where we are now and where you are talking
about, and there is an awful lot of speculation in there. The point
I want to make is, the existing level of ADSL-style broadband is
attractive to a lot of people primarily because (a) it's on all
the time, so you don't get billed by the minute, you go flat rate,
and (b) it's nice for downloading MP3 files as well as the fact
that surfing's quicker. Now, there isn't any content out there that
is going to make it compelling to people to move to the next stage
of broadband while they are watching on their computers. The devices
that link computers to TVs are fundamentally not there. We don't
have this ability to use that pipe and then shovel it into the place
where we've got the comfy chairs and so forth. So, what is going
to make it so compelling that that gap will be bridged and we'll
end up with the brave new world that the true believers want to
have?
That is a very good question. I will say that every consumer electronics
company in the world, from Japan, from Korea, from China - which
is basically where all of them are from these days - is working
on wireless home networks, local-area networks that will work within
the home, that will make it possible to download something on the
Internet and send it to your stereo or to your set-top box, or to
your PlayStation or whatever game console you have. Microsoft is
also very big in this area. But that said, it is definitely a couple
years away, and again, there is broadband and there is broadband.
What's available now, which is 802.11b, does not have the bandwidth
to allow you to, for example, stream video from your PC to anywhere
else. There is another technology in the works called 802.11a which
is much, much faster. But again, that's going to take a few years
to take off. In general, I think that we're all engaged in a huge
experiment here. Some things are going to work, and some things
are going to look incredibly foolish in retrospect - and "in
retrospect" can mean as soon as six months from now. Witness
much of the dot-com phenomenon, where you had four different companies
that all offered pet food online - you know, it's really not all
that interesting. …
I think that just like everything else, it's money-driven. If it
can be proven that people will pay money for content on the Internet,
then all the great content will come - just as people accepted that
they would pay $4 for a bottle of water when you can get it out
of a tap for free, or the crazy guys that invented HBO that gave
you movies all the time and everybody thought they were idiots and
now it's this huge, amazing network. So as soon as the money is
there and you get A-level content for all this infrastructure that's
built, it will be a very fast transition - a very, very fast transition.
That's the barrier we're trying to break down at davidlynch.com
- trying to get that kind of content that people will be passionate
about, to have a Twin Peaks-type series where people have to see
it, have to see what happens next, and suddenly money isn't an issue.
I don't think we are necessarily painting a rosy picture, we are
just discussing what is actually happening. Broadband use has been
growing at about 30 percent a year. There hasn't been any previous
technology that's grown particularly faster than that. If you go
to China, where people can get 100 megabits in their home for $10
a month, they're all signing up for it - well, they're not all signing
up, but it's going up 50, 70, 80 percent a year. People are doing
it without DVD-quality video, without all that kind of stuff, because
they want instant-on access to the Internet. I think it would be
really great if we did have more content and I'm sure it will come
along, but in reality it is growing anyway.
Q: My question is, where's the blockage? If can
take a cable input that goes into a television you can get a big,
full-screen, color image, and if you take the same cable input and
put it in a computer, you get a little box. Where's the blockage
there? There's obviously enough room on that cable to get the information
across, so why can't you get it full-screen on a computer?
MALONEY: Typically you get a 6 megaHertz channel on a cable, and
if you stick the same signal into a PC, if you handle it properly,
you can get the whole screen. Typically what people do is they use
a smaller channel to send the video signal. That tends to be a policy
issue. The technology is there to send TV-quality images. Now we
do have bottlenecks around the Web, so your server slows down and
pages freeze and all kind of of thing. So there are still problems
to be solved.
Q: How far are we away technologically from getting
full-screen video via the Internet?
If you have a proper DSL signal - and I don't mean one that
is crimped by slow service, if you get 300 to 500 kilobits per second
reception - then you can get an image which is indistinguishable
from a television image. But this is a piecemeal, because the cable
speeds up and then you find that the servers are slow, and then
you upgrade the servers and - every little thing has to be gradually,
gradually upgraded.
Q: Is it being worked on?
It is. It helps when it's not a recession, for sure.
Q: There is an infrastructure that's going to
help everybody get access and also help consumers find out what's
going on, and we're probably all carrying one at the moment, which
is the mobile phone. The opportunity, I think, is really for the
electronic program guide to move onto the mobile phone and use a
space where you don't have bottlenecks, on the whole, and you don't
have crimped access and the regulatory issue has been bypassed.
And the lesson for us all is that this isn't a model that comes
from TV or film, it comes from people instinctively learning how
to use SMS text messaging - which is something the phone manufacturers
never put in as a content channel but now everybody understands
it as a content channel. Is that something you can work with to
create compelling EPGs that become people's point of reference and
can direct them to content on a regular basis?
I would say no. At least in our model you can't. We are going to
start delivering content - I'm not sure if everyone's familiar with
a show called "DumbLand" that David did, a very crude
kind of show, but we're going to start delivering that to handhelds.
But that's all vector-based content. I don't think we could ever
deliver a mainstream dramatic series.
Two comments: I'm sure that if you had such a service available
next week in France where you can have a videoclip of a film on
your mobile phone and you can then push a button and get the whole
film in your PC, there would be millions of clients. Another comment
on mobile: Mobile is one auxiliary experience people have learned
to pay for. On the PC, people don't pay. And I think this experience
has shown that a business model at least exists.
Q: We have a Web site - Over the Moon Productions,
overthemoonproductions.com. We put away a short film in 1998, April.
So far we have 17,698 hits on it. We keep in contact with people
all over the world. So we promised them something else this year.
We are working on a very short script called "Wenders' List,"
about a good, lovely German director who tries to get his lonely
friends into a party at the Martinez. So we're all outside screaming,
"Can you get us in?" and Wenders says, "Please, get
them in, get them in. They're not anybody, they're just freeloaders!
They need canapes! "
So how many hits have you had so far?
Q: 17,698 - bordering on 18,000 in the last 3
years. In the last eleven months, we have had 8,000, just by word
of mouth. [Approaches the stage] We'd like to just do this little
bit. All you've got to say is "Please, let them in! let them
in!"
Let them in!
The next question now.
Q: Earlier you said something about this is money-driven,
and up until this point it has been very personal - personal from
a consumer point of view, personal from a filmmaker's point of view.
And since it's money-driven, I would like you to give us an idea
of this universe - who's out there and who the players are. Is it
companies? Is it people who have deep pockets? Who is in control
of what's going on? I would like a larger view, please.
Well, I think the people - the good part and the scary part is nobody
is in control, but the people who might be in a position to be in
control are deathly afraid of it. I'm talking about companies like
Disney, Universal, and so forth. They are trying to lead, but they're
trying to follow at the same time - for example, when somebody like
Universal issues CDs in Europe that have extremely restrictive copy
protection mechanisms. And therefore, it is up to people like us
- Wim and Eric and David - to do what we can.
That is the beauty, it puts it in our hands. It allows guys like
David Lynch to do it themselves - they don't have to have an MGM
or a Disney behind them. It's still expensive, but you can do it
for way less than you could as a television broadcast. I think that
is what is so exciting about it.
Q: I'd like to ask your reaction to Canal Web
- what went wrong there, and what we can learn from that? For three
years it was pretty viable as a television station on the Internet.
The money, the money. There was no real revenue model.
Content is not self-replicating, so somebody has to ultimately pay
for it.
Q: On the possibility that it may be actually
impossible to prevent people from copying digital content on the
Internet - there is significant differentiation between Evian water
and tap water, but there is absolutely no differentiation between
a zero on one hard disk and a zero on another hard disk, so you
are getting exactly the same thing. Is it perhaps necessary now
to really shake things up and develop new business models based
on giving away certain content and selling certain peripherals?
I have been developing this myself with my record label, where I
make available all the music free for download but only release
on vinyl, which has to be the equivalent of a theatrical release,
and then I do other peripherals - live events and so on.
We do that at davidlynch.com. David has a section for experiments
and then we have original series - pay-per-view series. And if one
does really well, we make it into a DVD, which we also do ourselves.
So you can see a poorer quality version on the Internet, and if
you like it we've tied them all together and you could buy the whole
two hours on the DVD.
Q: But what if somebody buys that whole two hours,
copies it, and - in the not so distant future - just emails it as
an attachment to 200 friends on his e-list?
That would be a big attachment.
Q: With very, very fast connections and the possibility
of accessing information very rapidly, it wouldn't be unfeasible.
There are certain technical things you can do - you can give them
"time to live" in programming, or you can give them how
many times they can be watched, things like that. I think that's
what would happen with MPEG-4. But you're thinking right along the
lines of what we're thinking.
Q: The concern with all these kind of programmed-in
security measures is that they're only secure if some 14-year-old
doesn't crack them and post it on the Internet.
There has been a digital content business for the last twenty years,
which is the computer software industry. And yes, people can pirate
software, but over a period of time the amount of software that's
pirated in nearly every place in the world has reached some relatively
stable amount. The majority of people understand that it's theft,
in the same way that walking into a shop and taking something is
theft. So yes, it is difficult to stop entirely, but there are ways
of making it more difficult, and there are ways of getting it within
social norms.
I am a little scared of it becoming too difficult, for one simple
reason - and I have to refer to analog times. I grew up as a pirating
kid. It was even before television. I had inherited a crank projector
and a box of eight-millimeter films from my dad, all Charlie Chaplin
and Buster Keaton stuff. So of course I was traveling with this
machine - I was at every birthday party and I was the projectionist.
And when they got too bad, because I showed them hundreds of times,
I started to cut them up, and I found this little machine - my friend
had one - that could paste them together and make new movies out
of them. And it worked beautifully - Buster Keaton and Charles Lloyd
suddenly interactive was fantastic! So I am very, very scared that
for a contemporary generation of kids that possibility to take it
and use it and do what they want to with it is all of a sudden gone,
because they block it all and it is out there but you can't eat
it anymore and use it for your imagination. So my heart beats for
every fourteen-year-old who cracks any of these.
Q: I am a film student at Northwestern in Chicago,
and we have not had cable in our dorm, ever. This year the school
announced that we're getting cable next year, except instead of
installing cable, they're going to do it all with broadband. We're
going to not have TVs in our room, we're just going use our monitors,
and the cable's going to be pumped in through the Ethernet connections
in our rooms. How are initiatives like that going to change the
way cable and broadband are connecting? And what are initiatives
like that - which I guess are pretty experimental and not very commonplace
- what is that going to do for this whole picture that we're talking
about today?
What is that going to do for our sex lives?
I was in New York last week and I met with the chief marketing officer
of Samsung, who told me that - I don't know how this relates to
their sex lives, but in Korea and Singapore and China and Hong Kong,
Samsung is working with developers who are building huge, high-rise
residential complexes to do essentially the same thing. This is
what's going to make it happen. I think when you start from scratch
and you make this kind of thing available, people find uses for
it.
Arithmetic is a lovely thing, and every year or so a hard drive
doubles in size. If you carry on - and it is going to carry on -
by 2008 the hard drive will be about ten terabytes, which means
it will be able to hold the entire US Library of Congress. Carry
that another two or three years and every movie ever made can sit
on a hard drive. So if you connect pipes into computers like that,
they can store huge amounts of content locally. It's another reason
why it's almost impossible to stop the technology from moving on.
Q: I have sort of an esoteric question. Coming
from the point of view of an emerging filmmaker, I am still holding
on to the romance, which is maybe a little old-fashioned, of realizing
a dream like Paris, Texas and seeing it on the big screen - just
the ceremony of having your work shown that way. And I've got to
say that I can't get terribly excited about doing all that to beam
out a little film on a little picture like this. Is that a dream
I should maybe let go of? I know it's great for promotion, having
broadband, but what about the ceremony of going to a big theater
and seeing a movie?
It will be much more than a great promotional tool - a tool to maybe
even remind people of all the different ways you can tell stories
and experimental movies and God knows what sort of filmmaking that
right now has disappeared. But I think I won't be scared at all
- I think the better and the more we have of this, the more theater
owners will be forced to give us the real thing. And I don't think
that in ten years theaters will be gone - they will be even better
than today, they'll be much better. And I am happy about all this
firing energy into a lethargic industry which basically wants to
keep it as it is, because they will be forced to make things better,
and in ten years you will see movies so much better than today.
We'll have digital projection that will allow theaters to be so
much more versatile. If you want to see the original version, you
come two hours later and you'll see the original version of the
same thing. Or depending on how many people show up at the box office
that want the subtitled one, you won't get the dubbed one.
I think the movie experience will continue to be the top of the
line. It will still be the biggest attraction. In the '80s everything
was always the end of cinema, and what happened? It became bigger
and better. It will become even better. Some of these things that
will be developed in these years of transition by these filmmakers
and that might only come true because of broadband - I don't know
how, but they will change the face of cinema too. In ten years you
might see filmmakers on the big screen that couldn't have made it
if they didn't have this door that they have now.
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