Geeked out today in the Patent and Trademark Office. Along with the exciting new iPhone developments (which did not tell me whether my new mobile device will have the black plastic or aluminum back, anticlimactically), I fooled around looking at new concepts for media delivery on various platforms and DRM solutions for their “protection.” One patent of interest was awarded on 5/6/06 for “method and apparatus for delivery of targeted video programming” to track audience viewing habits and deliver media based on individual patterns and preferences.

There is more and more content available and people seem to be at least somewhat interested in it. Still what most people are interested in is content that not only fits their basic interest profile but is also mnemonic. It seems like there may be some people who will want a lot of control over the media they see and be willing to spend time filtering it themselves, but most people will prefer to make some basic choices of customization and then have a quality selection service to give them their optimal feed. This could be a successful way to sell media, but it will also mean media may be saleable only when it’s easy to categorize.

You might be lingering in the past, thinking that while the major blockbusters are scanned, ripped and up on every free download/streaming/torrent site you could imagine, just by virtue of demand (or lack thereof), smaller independent or foreign titles are still somewhat protected from the phenomena. I recently got schooled by a young pirate who explained that, to mix a few metaphors, the long tail has snaked deep into the booty troves of “stolen media” traders. Even fairly obscure films are to be found on the file sharing servers and P2P networks trolled by the technically savvy film consumer. For free.

There is no limit to quality, my young pirate assures me, HD files being in plentiful supply. And once one person has a file then it is only a matter of time before the file is trading hands and multiplying. This copyright meltdown might have had some upsides for musicians, who lost traction in their industry but could potentially parlay their marketing successes into revenue at live events or for merchandise (given that they were alive and able to perform). There seems to be little parallel to films that cost several million dollars to make at minimum, and (with the exception of blockbuster hits or children’s films) do not have external revenue sources beyond sales of the film at the cinema and home media.

Still, there may be a little time left for filmmakers and distributors to figure out what to do. In the independent market, filmgoers tend to be older than the average indie rock fan. The bandwidth and technology to support true high-quality downloadable film media is just emerging. But the many competitors- and especially the many struggling competitors and competitors who are trying to respect the copyright limitations within the works themselves- may make the high seas of pirated media look very attractive.

Much as with music, what seems likely to me at this moment to happen is that filmmakers themselves will find grassroots ways to make money. And some corporate interests will find a way to make money. But the “film industry”? Those are rough seas ahead.

At the Media that Matters film festival this evening, I was chatting with some of the filmmakers about the way they approached their distribution plans early in the production process. I was interested to learn from one of the filmmakers, Ben Herson of African Underground: Hip Hop in Senegal, that though the short is part of a larger project and a feature is almost complete, the original plan was really to create these bite-sized clips, produced and edited in a matter of days, and post them to every available online media outlet possible. Speculatively, one might imagine that this viral approach would be challenging- sure, it’s good to get your work out there, but won’t it just sink into the sea of YouTube, Google Video, and other outlets’ overwhelming volume of content?

The lesson seems to be: no. The good stuff will float. Just as you could go to 30 film festivals in a year and then wonder, “are there amazing films that weren’t submitted/accepted that I am missing?” and as long as you were covering a good range of regions in your fest-going, there probably were not too many undiscovered gems that you didn’t have a chance to see. So a development strategy for filmmakers, especially in documentary, may simply be to blanket the world early on in the project and see if they get noticed. Certainly audience response is not the only reason to make a film, but it is usually an advantage when you are looking for money.