PopCorn Time

Curious to see whether PopCorn Time is as easy to use as Netflix and consequently potentially ridiculously disruptive for the movie industry, I gave it a trial run. At no point did I view more than 5 seconds of any film: I just wanted to know whether it works well. I deleted the programme immediately on completion of the trial. I pay for my content.

Here is my entire experience.

I read about the programme at Music Industry Blog [HT: Duncan, who reports a satisfactory OSX experience]. I then searched around for the install files, and found only the stories from a few days ago of the programmer having pulled the programme. As it's open source and was up at GitHub, a pile of alternatives remain available. Had I simply followed the link from Music Industry Blog to the writeup at TechCrunch, I'd have found it more easily. Downloading and installing from there was simple: extract the .zips to a folder, run the .exe.

The programme has a very slick interface. I decided to run a few 5-second samples from the middle of a few films to check:

• Does the film work?
• Is the viewing quality reasonable, or is it some shaky camera from inside a movie theatre?
• Sound quality, including language.

Here is my entire experience.

I started Popcorn Time. Browsed through some content. Hit the following:

• Princess Mononoke: Was in Japanese, no English subtitles, not advertised as being the Japanese version, though non-English subtitles were advertised.
• A set of films then failed to load: they went from the buffering notice to only a spinning circle of failure. I then restarted the programme. On second go-round, I retried some of those films. And:
• Frozen: Buffering took twice as long as typical Netflix start. But excellent quality. Choice of 720P or 1080P.
• Wolf of Wall Street: Buffering took four times as long as typical Netflix start. But decent quality. Worse resolution than typical Netflix, playback stopped briefly during play.

Then, I tried the search bar instead of just hitting things in the browse window. 

• My Neighbour Totoro: no results
• Strange Brew: no results
• Goodbye, Pork Pie: no results
• Rambo: the search window started hanging, had to restart the programme. Restarting it took a rather long time; was about to force-close when it came up. It came up with First Blood, which worked in 720P. 
• Amelie: Worked fine. All in French (as it should be, but not advertised as such), no subtitles. 480p.
• Transformers: pulled up the three new movies, didn't find the old 80s cartoon. I didn't hit the links.

I've now deleted the programme, as I pay for content and was only interested in seeing how well this works. It does seem a reasonable alternative to paid content. Compared to Netflix, it has much more new content, but also more surprises - as you'd expect from a torrent server. There are reasonable odds you'll come up with foreign-language versions of foreign-language films, you're likely to have to restart the programme a few times as you go, but I didn't catch any Russian-dubbed versions of English movies (though I didn't sample many movies at all). 

It isn't good enough, in my view, to dominate a paid version where folks wouldn't get these minor surprises and necessary re-starts, but I have a fairly high willingness to pay. The glitches were irritating rather than experience-destroying. It's dead-simple to install and run. In the absence of a paid version offering similar functionality, a lot of folks will find Popcorn Time awfully tempting.

I do not encourage you to install and run Popcorn Time. It is still stealing content. Netflix with geounblocking - at least I'm still paying for it. If you do decide to install and run it, play careful: I suspect the programme could well attract folks who wouldn't think to mask their torrenting appropriately. You'll have to do your own searches to find out how to do that.

Film imports

New Zealand is considering reducing the duration of the ban on the parallel import of DVDs. It should reduce it to zero. Why? The ban could have made sense in a world of physical film distribution; we are rapidly moving away from that world.

Background: films have traditionally taken a while to arrive in New Zealand. Film distributors used international release windows to ration a good in scarce supply: the physical copies of films that, after a first run in the US, made their long slow journey to New Zealand (complete with scratches and other assorted wear and tear). Movies could show up on planes before hitting theatres here. If everybody had been able to import VHS tapes or DVDs of films from the US when they hit the US market, film producers would have had to have printed more copies of films at the outset. This would have increased costs for everybody. One source says it costs the studios $1500 to produce and ship a film reel within the US. Maybe the benefits to consumers from earlier releases would have outweighed the increased ticket prices and the reduced producer surplus, but the movie industry's producer surplus is what lets new films be made too. Also, the US provided a testing ground letting film distributors get a handle on which films were likely to be able to make it on the international stage. If they had to produce enough copies of everything to satisfy a worldwide simultaneous release for all films that had a decent chance of making it internationally, costs could have been pretty substantial.

In general, New Zealand allows parallel imports. If some big brand wants to strike an exclusivity arrangement with some NZ retailer, the government rightly figures it's not the government's job to enforce that arrangement by banning wholesalers or retailers from other countries from shipping the same product to NZ retailers. But NZ has maintained a ban on parallel imports of DVDs until the theatres have had a kick at the can.

Now the marginal cost of another copy of a film is near zero with digital distribution. Theatres are flipping to digital projection. Worldwide simultaneous release is no more expensive to run than a staggered release, though you do forgo the benefits to local cinemas of being able to wait and see what works in the States so they can pick the winners, and you miss the chance to jet the stars around the world for the various premieres. The benefits to consumers of being able to see what's on in the States at the same time as it's there airing are also much higher now than they were two decades ago. If a pile of your Twitter and Facebook friends are all chattering about a movie you can't yet see, that really really sucks. You never say "Boy, am I glad that film didn't come here (or took 4 months to get here) because all my friends in the States saw it and said it stunk!" If you want movies to be pre-vetted that way, you do the same thing Americans do: wait for credible reviewers to see it and do what they tell you to do.

So, the benefits of staggered international windowing are much smaller than they used to be. Parallel importing of DVDs pushes distributors away from their ideal, but also circumvents the obvious alternative strategy of just downloading things, so the losses may be less than the naive model might suggest. If New Zealand abolishes the windowed ban on parallel DVD imports, it will have negligible effects on the film industry as a whole and will encourage that more films open here at the same time as the US. I'm not sure that it's in New Zealand's interest to help facilitate this particular international price discrimination scheme, or at least it would take reasonable evidence to convince me that it is.

Social Choice and the Oscars

Colby Cosh reports that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is switching from a first past the post ballot for best picture to single transferable vote. I like this, mostly because I go over that system in my public choice class and sometimes get asked if anybody in the real world uses the system. Now I'll be able to say "Well, the Oscars". That's more fun than saying "Well, the Australians".

Voters will rank order the ten nominated films. If any film has a majority of voters picking it as top choice, it's elected. If not, the film with the fewest first place votes is eliminated and that film's supporters are counted as voting for their second choice. Repeat until some film has majority support. Writes Cosh:

Even in the old five-nominee Oscar races, a winner in the single round of voting could conceivably win even though 25 or 30 per cent of the voters loved it and everybody else hated it. (This may have enabled some Best Picture wins later considered controversial, like that of Crash in 2005 or Shakespeare in Love in 1998.) In a 10-nominee field, a mere 15 per cent might be more than enough. The board of governors, mindful that preferential voting was used in 10-nominee Best Picture races from 1936 to 1943, decided to re-adopt the old prophylactic measure against unpopular winners.

It's possible that the old system was more manipulable: if you could get about a fifth of voters to agree on a common first choice, you could potentially get it through despite a majority hating the film. That doesn't worry me too much: I liked both Crash and Shakespeare in Love. What worries me more in the old system is a plurality of uncoordinated voters with mediocre tastes coordinating around some unimaginative Schelling point (Avatar!). So I'll expect fewer oddball good picks like Crash but also fewer lukewarm picks.

I am rather curious about Colby noting the change in voting system at 1943. It would be really neat to compare current evaluations of Oscar winners for the period before and after the change as a measure of which system did better in picking the films later viewed as being very good. Let's give it a shot. Wikipedia lists all the winners and nominees; IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes score the films. A quick flip through doesn't show a clear winner across the two systems, mostly because both fare horribly. I apologize for the table formatting below.

Year	Winner	Bested by (IMDB)	Bested by (Rotten Tomatoes)
1936	The Great Ziegfeld	Dodsworth, Libeled Lady, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, San Francisco, The Story of Louis Pasteur, A Tale of Two Cities (6 of 9 other nominees)	Dodsworth, Libeled Lady, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Romeo and Juliet, San Francisco, A Tale of Two Cities (all rated nominees)
1937	The Life of Emile Zola	The Awful Truth, Captains Courageous, Dead End, The Good Earth, Lost Horizon, Stage Door, A Star is Born (7/9 other nominees)	As IMDB, 7/7 rated nominees
1938	You Can't Take It With You	The Adventures of Robin Hood (1/9 other nominees)	The Adventures of Robin Hood, Boys Town, Four Daughters, Grand Illusion, Jezebel (5/6 rated nominees)
1939	Gone With The Wind	Mr. Smith goes to Washington, The Wizard of Oz (2/9)	Ninotchka, Of Mice and Men, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights (5/9)
1940	Rebecca	none	none, though many tie
1941	How Green Was My Valley	Citizen Kane, The Little Foxes, The Maltese Falcon, Sergeant York (4/9)	Citizen Kane, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, The Little Foxes, The Maltese Falcon, Suspicion (5/6 rated)
1942	Mrs. Miniver	Kings Row, The Magnificent Ambersons, Random Harvest, The Talk of the Town, Yankee Doodle Dandy (5/9)	As IMDB, and also 49th Parallel, The Pied Piper, The Pride of the Yankees, Wake Island (9/9: Every other film rates higher on Rotten Tomatoes)
1943	Casablanca	none	The More the Merrier (1/6 rated)
1944	Going My Way	Double Indemnity, Gaslight, Since You Went Away (3/4)	Double Indemnity, Gaslight (2/3 rated)
1945	The Lost Weekend	none	none
1946	The Best Years Of Our Lives	It's a Wonderful Life (1/4)	Henry V, The Yearling (2/4)
1947	Gentleman's Agreement	The Bishop's Wife, Crossfire, Great Expectations, Miracle on 34th Street (4/4)	Great Expectations, Miracle on 34th Street (2/4)
1948	Hamlet	The Red Shoes, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre(2/4)	As IMDB, 2/3 rated
1949	All the King's Men	The Heiress, Twelve O'Clock High (2/4)	Battleground, The Heiress, A Letter to Three Wives, Twelve O'Clock High (4/4)
1950	All About Eve	Sunset Boulevard (1/4)	none
1951	An American in Paris	Decision Before Dawn, A Place in the Sun, A Streetcar Named Desire (3/4)	None, though Streetcar ties

In the era of single transferable vote, the Academy picked the later-ranked best film once or twice depending on whether you take IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes ranking; it picked the worst ranked film three times according to Rotten Tomatoes. In the plurality era, it picked the best film once or thrice depending on the ranking and picked the worst film once according to Rotten Tomatoes. Under STV (using IMDB), 35% of nominees score higher than the winning film; that rises to 50% under plurality but the number of nominees drops considerably, and presumably the best nominees are kept. If we use IMDB to place the winning film in the top five nominated films, the winning film's position averages half way between third and fourth place under STV and slightly worse than third place under plurality. Both systems pick a film ranked better than the median of the top four other nominees three times in eight.

So it looks like the Academy picked about as many winners and dogs under both systems last time they ran the experiment and tend towards middling-ranked films. I was kinda hoping that there'd be interesting differences in results to report. There could have been a paper in it had there been. File it under dead ends, and post it so that anybody else that takes an interest can save himself the couple hours. Perhaps there's something in just how bad the Academy's choices are in later retrospect... "The invariance of bad Oscar picks to choice of voting system"...