THE DOWN LOW

A couple spoof training videos that The Office (the British one) star and creator Ricky Gervais did for Microsoft UK in 2004 were leaked to YouTube and Google video, where they've been ranking among the top 25 downloads.

The satirical videos feature Gervais playing clueless boss David Brent offering job tips such as “It’s easier to find a job when employed than when not…Use time at Microsoft to find that new job…they’ve exploited you, get em back.” Brent also pulls out his guitar at one point to sing a song of mock importance with lyrics like “look in the mirror and you will see you.” So true! (and a tad reminiscent of Stephen Colbert's Charlene song line "every time I see you I think of you")

YouTube pulled the vids down apparently at Microsoft's request, but they’re still up on Google.

So in honor of release day Tuesday, I decided to experiment yesterday and see which new releases I could find and download online and how easily I could find them. It’s late August, so no huge box office movies debuted this week, but there are a couple big TV DVDs out. I trolled around the Internets for downloads of new release movies Akeelah and the Bee (Lionsgate Entertainment) and TV season sets Arrested Development (Fox Home Entertainment) and Desperate Housewives (Buena Vista Home Entertainment.)

The Search Engines
Google wants to be the search engine for video across the Internets - so I gave them first try. I typed "Akeelah and the Bees" in on Google video. I get five (just 5!) results, one’s a trailer, one’s a Charlie Rose interview with one of the film’s stars, the others are video reviews. None are links to downloads of the movie.

So I decide to switch to AOL Video, which also wants to be a video search engine and in its search bar even says “search videos across the web.” I put in Akeelah. To start with, I have more search results, at least 8 pages worth - not sure if that’s good or bad yet. The first page is all clips or local TV reviews. Same with the second page. I notice at the top you can narrow the results down to just movies, so I do. 25 results - ALL Trailers! What the?? I realize Akeelah isn’t the biggest film released on DVD, but it’s one of the biggest this week, it had a Starbucks promotion behind it! And shouldn't these video search sites at least be able to search through known movie download sites CinemaNow and Movielink?

The Legal Download Sites
Because I know Lionsgate is a backer of CinemaNow and has a deal with them, I start there and type in Akeelah in search - it doesn’t come up. Finally I find it under the “buy Hollywood hits” tab. It won’t tell me the price since I only have a Mac. I can’t even search on Movielink because I don't have a PC.

Because I write about all this stuff regularly, I know that Lionsgate doesn’t have announced deals with anyone outside of CinemaNow, Movielink and Apple iTunes, but iTunes doesn’t sell movies, at least yet.

Next I checked out TV, which is found on more places online, so you’d think I’d have better luck.

Desperate is on iTunes. Well, Arrested, I quickly remember after a search on iTunes and CinemaNow, will only be on MSN through a deal made with Fox. And it's not up there yet. I search the MSN site to try to find details on when - I looked under TV, but they want my zip code and to know if I have cable or satellite to give me a listing. I check under video - It’s all music videos. I go back to the main MSN page to search. It does an Internet search giving me results of stories saying that MSN will stream free full-episodes of Arrested later this year.

The Peer-to-Peer sites
Out of curiosity, I go next to the peer-to-peer sites, where users can upload files, sometimes pirated ones, to see what's available. I try BitTorrent, which has made nice with Hollywood (even signing a download deal with Warner) on its promises to fight piracy. Eureka! Endless copies of various seasons of Arrested. Of course, the files are all 1 gig or larger and I’m too chicken to download for fear of running out of space on my hard drive or downloading a virus or the fact that they're pirated copies or I don’t know. But they’re there. And same with Akeelah and the Bee.

On to Guba, another peer-to-peer site that has made nice with Hollywood and signed download deals with Sony and Warner. No Akeelah here, at least that's easily findable.

But there are Arrested episodes posted by users. Guba allows me to stream it, download it, transfer it to my iPod or PSP or email it to friends. The video quality on the stream isn’t bad for the Internet. It’s almost equal to TiVo quality, except it’s on a much smaller screen.

Maybe this was an unusual week given the titles, but I have to say I was kind of surprised about how limited the download offerings were - at least the legal ones - given that it seems like movies are everywhere online with new download deals announced every week.

In an attempt to be the coolest kid on the block, Burger King is offering free downloads of some Fox TV shows on its MySpace page as part of a promo deal it began in May. Included in offerings from the King, who has 112,000 or so MySpace friends, are full-length episodes of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, 24, American Dad, Pinks, and First Hand.

I was totally ready to sell out and become a friend if I had to to watch episodes of the I'm-going-to-hell-for-laughing-at-this-hilarious It's Always Sunny, but the downloads don't play on Macs. bah!

Instead, I settled for some clips on its MySpace page

The L.A. Times takes a look at how studios are banking on Blu-ray to save the day now that DVD sales are slowing. The proof of Blu-ray’s hotness? One Best Buy guy says his sold out of its 10 copies in a week - which admittedly isn’t bad. It’s just odd given recent complaints over Blu-ray from retailers and others that the story about the industry's hopes for Blu-ray doesn’t delve into sales any further. In fact, most of the piece retreads over Hollywood fears of slowing disc sales (apparently people are getting choosier so films may have to actually be good to do big sales(!)…) Meanwhile, HD DVD, barely gets a mention, except at the bottom, when the story notes the format war.

One of the more interesting, yet foreboding, quotes comes at the end from Netflix’ Reed Hastings:

"DVD sales will go down this year because consumers know about high definition but they don't know which format to buy," says Reed Hastings, chairman of Netflix, the online DVD rental powerhouse that has been growing at the expense of traditional video stores. "The problem with picking sides is that creates consumer anxiety, and so they'll just stop buying, period, or slow down their buying. The solution to getting the business growing is to have the studios support both formats. In videogames, the two main formats are Xbox and PlayStation, and the market does well with two formats."

The Daily Show mock news spinoff The Colbert Report (which, if you watch it, you know it's like the greatest show on these days) has been running a Jedi Video Editing Contest, where fans can add in a background to a video of host Stephen Colbert doing a Star Wars fight scene with a light saber in front of a green screen. The fighting setup is a joke on a popular video emailed around like a year or so ago (before YouTube’s Internet days…), with a kid goofing around doing a Star Wars fight scene with a mock light saber.

Colbert has some clips featured on his site and there are dozens more on YouTube, including this one that mixes the original fighting clip of the kid with the one of Colbert.

Techie blogs have been abuzz over whether the 32-bit version of Microsoft Vista, the upcoming version of Windows, will support HD DVD after one of the company’s execs told developers in Australia last week that it wouldn’t.

Microsoft reps refuted that. And on home entertainment geek site AVS Forum corporate VP Amir Majidimehr, who heads the Consumer Media Technology Group shot down the talk, writing from vacation:

As I suspected, there is no merit to these stories. Vista will not in any way block playback of HD content (HD DVD or otherwise). We do have facilities in the operating system for applications to query whether there are unsigned drivers in the kernel, and as such, may be a potential risk to secure playback of high-def content.

There are a gazilion knockoffs of the Mentos and Diet Coke video that was passed around earlier this summer that even the Today Show took note of.

this one, with a guy eating mentos and drinking diet coke has gotten more than 1 million hits since yesterday. I'm posting it because it's gotten so many downloads, but really it's kind of just, eh.

I haven't downloaded or seen this yet, but here's a link to a documentary on Sweden's movie Piracy movement by the pirates themselves. (I realize this is a bit like posting a pro-Bush doc on Moveon.org or whatever the vice-versa would be, but hey, always good to know the other point of view, no?) The site, Steal This Movie, lets users download part 1 of the doc for viewing on an iPod or computer or get a DVD copy and promises a Part 2 once they raise some more money.

From the Steal This Film site:

THERE HAVE BEEN A FEW DOCUMENTARIES BY 'OLD MEDIA' CREWS WHO DON'T UNDERSTAND THE NET AND SEE PEER-TO-PEER ORGANISATION AS A THREAT TO THEIR LIVELIHOODS. THEY HAVE NO REASON TO REPRESENT THE FILESHARING MOVEMENT POSITIVELY, AND NO CAPACITY TO REPRESENT IT LUCIDLY.

Blog BoingBoing, which is where I found it, did check it out and says:

I was really interested to hear how deep a chord the MPAA-ordered police raid on The Pirate Bay's Swedish servers struck in the heart of Swedes, who quite rightly view threats of trade sanctions and US corporate intervention in their national laws as a serious incursion on their national self-determination.

This roundup of recent quotes on high def DVD from various studio execs’ murky crystal ball just goes to show it all depends on who you ask....

“Sales of the two formats will be faster than DVD, which has been up to this point the most successful consumer electronics product launch.”
Warner Home Video senior VP of marketing management Steve Nickerson
VB, Aug. 8

“It’s still early in the life of next-generation DVD to predict. In all likelihood, adoption of next-gen DVD will be slower to market than standard-definition DVD, which was rather dramatic.”
Disney chief Bob Iger
VB, Aug. 9

“Quite frankly, I don’t believe there is a format war. The HD DVD camp hasn’t brought in enough consoles to form a beachhead. I don’t believe they intend to do so. We’ll see Blu-ray start to take hold this year.”
Fox Home Entertainment Pres. Mike Dunn
VB, July 31

I get a lot of questions from friends and family on download stuff and DVD (sadly I’m like Rain Man when it comes to release dates.) I opened up my inbox this morning to a question from my usually tech-savvy friend that I think shows some of the download confusion out there (or does it just show the obsession with Anthony Bourdain?)….

From: ????
Subject: Possibly stupid question
Date: August 21, 2006 9:47:14 AM PDT
So if I buy the first season of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations to watch on iTunes, am I doomed to 14 hours of a hottie on a postage stamp-sized screen? Just curious...

Like I told her, the TV shows run full screen, but you can download free episodes to see if you like how they run on your computer before committing money. I downloaded a few episodes of The Office and sometimes the audio lagged behind the video or video lagged behind the audio so I went back to TiVo and gave up on The O.C., which seemed like the same thing the show's writer's did last season.

Warner Home Video and video sharing site Revver announced winners Monday from a contest held for modern day noir Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, wherein anyone with a video camera could re-enact the scene and upload it to Revver in for a chance to win a casting call in Hollywood.
Entries for Kiss Kiss, which has some great Raymond Chandleresque quips and plotlines, were voted on by 70,000 other users. Kiss Kiss director Shane Black chose the top three. Black is nice enough to warn aspiring filmmakers that the Apology scene is a door-slamming scene so watch your fingers. Not sure if that advice is meant only for the scene or for Hollywood in general.
The winner and second runner up
Good attempts, sure, but here’s my still-favored original with Downey and Michelle Monaghan