Amanda Congdon, sometimes
There’s something vaguely appropriate about the 100th post on Download Movies 101 going to online video star Amanda Congdon.
We all remember Rocketboom, the wacky tacky daily news report with Amanda in the anchor seat, spinning around a lot with hair close behind. After a couple of years, there came a bunch of weirdness with the show’s creator. She split in a hurry, went on a video-blogging road trip and eventually landed on ABC News’ web site, where nothing of note appears to have transpired. That lasted about a year. So was it all just Rocketboom, not Amanda?
Whatever. Our gal is back with Sometimesdaily, an “offbeat interactive variety show exploring life’s themes through the inquisitive eyes of Amanda Congdon.” It’s hosted on the 4-year-old video sharing platform Vimeo, which got into HD late last year.
Amanda’s new introductory piece looks sort of promising. She’s sharing the stage with her brother and some other young irony seekers. The real deal starts up Monday, meaning an update to this post will go right about … here.
Update: Amanda and Co. have posted two short videos. One OK, one borderline awful. (A commentator called the acting “pornified,” which only makes sense if you’ve seen porn stars try to act.)
Both videos start off with a new-agey intro that looks right out of an infomercial shop.
Video 1‘s dream sequence brings Cogdon back to an alternate Rocketboom set, declaring, “I’m going to be talking about a lot of random shit you don’t care about, every day.” She wakes up screaming and proclaims, “How 2004.” Then goes into a minute of political commentary.
Video 2 features her gal-pal co-stars as they try to rouse Cogdon from some serious funk. It’s … pretty awful.
Both videos had some initial streaming stuttering as they tried to get started. Cogdon writes that they are working up a new web site and “are definitely in beta” with video formats.
I’ll be checking back with Sometimesdaily now and then, hoping for better.
iTunes Store gets fresh movie downloads
iTunes made a much-needed upgrade to its movie download business with today’s news that major Hollywood films will be available on Apple’s retail site day-and-date with their DVD releases.
The movie downloads on the iTunes Store are flowing from Disney, 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios Home Entertainment, Sony Pictures Entertainment, as well as the major indies Lionsgate, Image Entertainment and First Look Studios.
The move already is paying off: Six of the top 10 iTunes movie sellers as of today were released to DVD within the past couple of weeks, led by “Cloverfield” (April 22). None of these titles were available for iTunes rental.
Only a couple of this week’s DVD releases are up there, but chick-flickers can score “27 Dresses” and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” All of these films are available for download on Amazon’s Unbox.
The lag time for movie downloads has made this business look kind of goofy, with digital product running a couple of months behind the home video window. So count this as a major victory for Steve Jobs’ bid to make the iTunes Store a dominant player in movie downloads.
This delay time is critical to film studio economics. The studios, movie exhibitors and the home video distributors and retailers have been fussing over the release window since the first Betamax hit the shelves. The window (delay) continues to close, to cinema owners’ dismay.
Apple’s press corp is struggling with the day-and-date concept.
The iTunes press release states: “New releases available for purchase on the iTunes Store this week, concurrent with their DVD release, include “American Gangster” and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” Sounds good, except “American Gangster” came out on DVD months ago. And, ironically, “Gangster” was a victim of big-time BitTorrent downloading shortly after the theatrical film came out.
iTunes also is selling “Juno,” “Alvin and the Chipmunks” and “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.”
The big news came out on the fifth anniversary of the iTunes Store, a massive world-changing success in the music business.Netflix stock, trying to recover from a quarterly earnings warning that sent it down 24%, took another hit with today’s news of the iTunes movie download deal. On a terrific day for the market, NFLX took a 3% hit. AAPL was up almost 3.5%. (Disclaimer: I own Apple and bought Netflix on the big dip.)