I have never seen a seller make a more convincing argument against buying his product. I think that comment ought to be circulated to every academic library in the country and shared with any faculty member who takes an interest in acquiring California Newsreel’s distributed films. I know I’m convinced after reading it: no more ever for us. If they’re that determined to soak the customers and prevent us from making good use of films on their list in contemporary classroom, fine by me. That leaves them one major market that I can see, namely, film festivals. If that’s enough for them, fine.

Laura, I knew a bit about the pricing, but that’s still amazing. So here what we have again is a crazy old-media monopoly that got used to ridiculous payoffs from institutions that were careless with their money and is freaking out both because new technologies are undercutting the monopoly and because the customers are suddenly fishing around in an empty purse for their last few bits of spare change. And so what do they do? Adapt to the new technology and acknowledge the new economic realities? No. They lawyer up and try to compel the world to go back to the way it used to be. It’s the Blanche DuBois approach to life.

The way that Film Studies gets around the scheduling problem in most places is to include a lab section, basically an extra three hour session where the week?? film(s) are shown. You can?? make the lab, you can?? take the class. I suppose that a streaming-video option would solve the sorts of scheduling problems this sometimes creates for students.

My objection there has nothing to do with copyright, though. Rather, all the streaming video I’ve seen is of such low quality that it’s impossible to think of it as viable for a Film Studies context. And the African Film Library is a real good example there; none of the stuff I have watched on that site is anywhere near good enough in terms of image quality to use in a classroom setting or as asssigned viewing. Sembene?? CEDDO, a film I cherish and would really like to introduce students to, looks horrible on that site; I’d much rather force students to watch the French-subtitled DVD than something so grainy and washed out. So video streaming may seem like a major technical innovation, but from where I’ve been sitting it doesn’t improve my classroom environment at all. Streaming video has made students accustomed to watching films that, basically, look like crap, and are thus denuded of most of their formal properties. This may be no big deal for a National Geographic video, but if you really want to teach students about cinema it’s becoming a real problem. Streaming video has led to less visual sensitivity, not more.

Just before I left BMC, this was precisely what I was working on–a way to purchase, store and distribute video for faculty to use, even faculty-created clips. The cost of the products and systems are exorbitant. There are systems/products out there that will digitize and stream in film you give them, but you have to get permission, which is costly beyond measure and then you still pay a huge amount for the digitization.

By far the most expensive products to get streaming rights for were the educational video companies. You could get streaming rights for District 9 for a reasonable cost, but for a National Geographic video–ten to 100 times that much. One digitization/streaming company whose clients include Yale and Harvard, quoted us something like $20,000 per year to digitize and host 50 videos. We laughed.

And then we went back to the drawing board. We had discussed plans to bring most of it in house, which had high costs, but was at least better than the costs being quoted to use from other places. And we thought we’d provide streams for reasonably priced videos but not for the truly costly ones and then allow faculty to upload their own clips for their classes. All the technology exists for that, but then the economy went to hell and having a “streaming video solution” was not a priority anymore. And the legal concerns raised by the article made a few of the IT and some of the library people nervous.

I think your proposal is a good one–whether it work, who knows. Faculty tend not to be so good at boycotting stuff. 🙂