Lots of Techmeme discussion around news that Uruguayan producer Fede Alvarez’s $300 short film uploaded to YouTube in November 2009 (above) got him a $30m contract to make a Hollywood film:
“I uploaded (Panic Attack!) on a Thursday and on Monday my inbox was totally full of e-mails from Hollywood studios,” he told the BBC’s Latin American service BBC Mundo.
“It was amazing, we were all shocked.”
The movie Mr Alvarez has been asked to produce is a sci-fi film to be shot in Uruguay and Argentina. He says he intends to start from scratch and develop a new story for the project.
“If some director from some country can achieve this just uploading a video to YouTube, it obviously means that anyone could do it,” he added.
YouTube recently revealed the most watched videos of 2009. Britain’s Got Talent star Susan Boyle topped the chart with more than 120 million views worldwide of her debut on the show.
That last paragraph is significant. Just yesterday Techdirt’s Mike Masnick pointed to the “stunning cognitive dissonance” in Simon Cowell’s moaning that he got no YouTube kickback from Boyle’s Britain’s Got Talent appearance:
“That will change,” he told GQ. Because, eventually, if YouTube are not paying, they’re not getting the clip.
”But at the moment I’m very happy to get promotion around the world. She’ll sell 10 million albums this year because of YouTube.”
In two consecutive contradictory sentences Cowell damns then praises YouTube. Notes Masnick:
So, wait, is he upset or not? Would he have preferred that YouTube had not shown the video which it didn’t pay for, and a very small number of people knew of Susan Boyle? Or is he happy that he got free hosting, free software, free bandwidth and free promotional value that helped him sell 10 million of her albums? Maybe he should be paying Google…
Let’s remember that Boyle placed second behind Diversity (anyone heard of them?), was involved in two foul-mouthed outbursts, and threatened to quit the show. Left to its own devices, Cowell’s Britain’s Got Talent program might well have sent her back to sing in her parish church. Thanks to YouTube she became an overnight global sensation whose album had the biggest opening-week sales of any this year.
Meanwhile, Masnick expands on yesterday’s post with a piece in the Telegraph today. In that he ran out of room for some Vevo bewilderment:
It is worth noting that at least some of the industry has, in some ways, “embraced” YouTube with the launch of Vevo a couple weeks ago (though, that launch was completely bungled by apparently not expecting anyone to actually visit the site). I still haven’t quite figured out what Vevo is, however. It’s a joint venture of Google and Universal Music, with EMI and Sony Music as partners (Warner remains the major label holdout). As far as I can tell, though, it just seeks to be a separate platform to give the labels some more “control” over videos on YouTube. I still can’t figure out why this needs to be a separate company, other than to play financial games.
Exactly. You have to wonder…