Last year, in Nov 2007 headlines were made when a report came out saying by 2010 we’ll hit Internet gridlock, which means our Net access will slow down as there’s just too much data out there. Hey .. perhaps Telstra is preparing for this by still offering a 256kbps broadband plan (capped at 200MB with overruns charged no less) .. SMART because at least their customers won’t complain.

Unless significant spending is made to upgrade global networks (US $137bn), the report said we’ve got 2 years. Now AT&T have just come out saying the same thing. YouTube and the whole video-sharing craze it spawned is primarily the problem.

Hmmm .. that’s going to give VOD pundits pause for concern!

A big congratulations to the gang over the road at New North for the opening on Thursday night of the current exhibition incorporating three collections; Atmposphere, Campaign and Italian Visions. Atmosphere is a collection of photographs depicting aspects of the Australian Climate by Milchael Silver and David Johns. Campaign is a photographic odyssey throughout Australian Political campaigns by Andrew Chapman and Italian Visions is an exhibition of intimate portraits from the Italian way of life.

This was also the launch of the rebranding of David Johns Gallery and amalagamation with Silver Print to form New North. After a successful first year exhibiting some of Australia’s best photographers with a very diverse range of styles David Johns Gallery is embarking on a new and exciting stage in its development by merging with Silverprint Fine Art Photographic Printing to form newNorth editions. The new entity will incorporate the gallery, in the form of newNorth gallery, with the finest and most personalised fine art printing service and a new online artwork sales site newnortheditions.com.au They can turn your shots into something very special, for those of you who have seen our store, they printed Audrey onto Canvas the size of our door, the possibilities are endless!

The food was great, the drinks cold and Brian Dawe’s intro to Andrew Chapman’s exhibition very amusing and suitably political. These three photographers are great talents and I encourage you all to see the exhibition…. and no DJ didn’t use filters for those sky shots. He always tells me Northcote skies are amazing, they are but his photographs show a sky I have never seen around here!

Once again, Railway Place put on a good opening! If you haven’t made it to any of our previous events make sure you keep tuned for the next one.

What a fantastic introduction to film making. Baz Lurhmann has hooked up with Fox and Apple to launch a series of Podcasts called Set to Screen. These podcasts will be coming out every month and take you through all the different areas of filmmaking. I am looking forward to seeing a bit of what I missed out on in next month’s Podcast on Production Design. For anyone interested in the behind the scenes aspect of filmmaking I recommend you subscribe. It’s free!

A shame that Australian students can’t enter the competition designed to foster new filmmaking talent but I would suggest Bazmark were overruled on that one. Makes me wistful… but how could I not be loving being on the APPLEBOX train… and all that dust and heat and would have been far less romantic than the podcasts make it look! Ducking off to pick up that piece of moulding you need for the set wouldn’t be a joy out in the Kimberley either!!

I digress. Worth subscribing, movie looks pretty amazing too.

There you go Sare, photographic evidence that I do my cleaning! And those pigeon holes are a real pain. At least we don’t have 50 metres of shelving to keep dust free :-).

I don’t know how long they’ve been doing it, but in Singapore Video Ezy have a subscription/mail-order business that sits across their 29 local store operations. Blockbuster does the same in the States as they try and crack Netflix’s stranglehold on the mail-order market. Interesting! I’d love to know how it’s going, although I’d bet my left arm they’ve no intention to introduce it here in Australia. Quickflix and BigpondMovies are just too established, and in any case, I’m not entirely sure of their sustainability.

Quickflix shares are in steady decline (but hey, so is the market), and their ASX released “Progression to Sustainability Milestone” leads with Simon Hodge saying “The time has arrived for Quickflix to move it’s marketing focus and spend away from brand awareness towards low-cost subscriber acquisition by removing all non-essential expenditure”. Hmm .. if I put my Babel Fish in, that sounds like “We’re bleeding and we can’t keep up our marketing budget”. Quickflix need to hit break even soon to prove they’re tracking Netflix (whose success underpins both Telstra’s and Quickflix’s models). By my reckoning Netflix hit breakeven after 4 years, which is where Quickflix is now .. but I’d be surprised if Netflix throttled their spending to get there.

And no, I don’t really have an obsession with Video Ezy and Quickflix Just keeping an eye on the market leaders!

Paul Uniacke is tenacious to say the least! He’s had a set top box strategy in place since at least 2005. It faltered with a failed partnership with Mobilesoft last year (Mobilesoft went into receivership), but has since been resurrected with a new partner in the form of Digisoft. The idea is that true Video on Demand is still a decent way off, so why not bridge the gap with a local store download service that circumvents poor broadband performance. The process:

1. Local store places a download kiosk on their floor. The kiosk is filled with latest release movies in digital format (licenced and with DRM in place)
2. Customer buys a USB key or iPod, and download movies to device
3. Customer buys a set top box for home, and uploads movies to device
4. Customer watches movies at leisure, only gets billed for those watched, DRM deletes the movie once done.

Video Ezy’s GM, Andrew Gardiner, says “You could go to the shop once a month and download 20 movies and only pay when you watch them.”

I love the idea of downloading 20 movies, then pick and choose what I want to watch from home. Even if I have to wait 20 minutes for 20 movies (at a slowish 1min/gig, 20 mins for 20 gig), that doesn’t seem too bad. Even better if I only pick 1 or 2 movies. High Def, Blu-ray style will of course push those times out.

But I’ve also got problems with this:

1. If I’m going to fork out $600 for extra AV kit, it ain’t going to be Video Ezy’s stuff. To put that amount of money down and be locked into movies from my local Video Ezy? Think I’d rather get a Blu-ray player, or Apple TV, put my money toward a high def TV or a kick-ass DVR like Beyonwiz or TiVo (should TiVo ever come to Oz).
2. Kiosks just don’t scale! They beauty of Video Ezy’s current model is they can absorb 100 people all at once browsing shelves on a Saturday night. I’m not going to wait 15 mins for someone browsing a kiosk.
3. Content is King. Video Ezy better have a great catalogue in the kiosks. Good luck, because BigpondMovies download is hardly impressive, even with the might of Telstra behind it.
4. Why can’t I do it online? Then I don’t have to even go to the local store .. but wait .. that’s straight up VOD.

I sorta like the idea, I like it that Video Ezy are trying to inject new life into their operation. But I just can’t see it working. The $$ outlay for their gear is just too much (can I rent it?). Kiosks don’t scale well. By the time Jo Public gets the idea, Apple TV will eat the stb model’s lunch. Kiosks of course don’t have to sit in franchisee stores .. they can sit in an IGA or Coles just as easily. Perhaps this is a plan for Video Ezy to expand beyond their franchise boundaries?

With all it’s problems, I think there’s a better model out there

Inside Retailing reports that Australian retailers are losing out on e-tail sales. It’s mentioned this isn’t an issue of broadband adoption, rather the lack of vision traditional bricks and mortar retailers have in tackling the online space.

Yes! Couldn’t agree more. There’s very few bricks and mortar retailers that mix it in the online space, even though it’s an area of future growth. Think of good ‘ol Video Ezy, with it’s 500 odd stores in Australia .. with a buying group servicing a few million customers, why not go online and add retail to their operation? Why can’t I search the Borders catalogue over the web and work out which store has the book I want (I’m happy to pickup)? Why is it only Domino’s that lets me order a pizza online?

Granted, developing an online strategy isn’t cheap. And whilst I know people that love Coles online, their site is incredibly ugly. So if Coles with their budget can’t create something engaging, what hope do the rest of us have?

Well .. APPLEBOX shows what CAN be done with minimal resources and a compelling vision. So here’s to innovation. Look in the nooks and crannies and it’s to be found. Small is the new Big as Seth would say.

What a surprise! Turns out one of our members is Nigel Karikari. Funky looking dude with English accent who the other day drops a DVD in for Sarah to check out. I happen to be on and learn that Nigel is a writer/director and his 15 minute short ‘The Deal’ won him Best Director at the 2006 “In The Bin” Short film festival and premiered in the Opening Night slot at Melbourne’s St Kilda Film Festival in 2006.

Wow! Nigel has donated a copy of The Deal for us at APPLEBOX. You can see it in the system (just search for ‘The Deal’) and I highly recommend it. Starring some familiar faces: Glenn Robbins, Tim Draxl (Swimming Upstream) and Jane Allsop (Blue Heelers), it’s a nicely paced thriller that reminded me a bit of Noise in the way it built tension slowly without loosing the viewer.

Nigel is a founder of THIRDROW Films along with Olivia Peniston-Bird. Rebecca Peniston-Bird produced the film. THIRDROW have a few other award winning shorts that we’ll try and get hold of.

This is great because I’ve always seen APPLEBOX supporting independent and short film makers. We can offer a way of displaying their work beyond youtube clips and online streaming. We say full resolution and great sound is how all movies (shorts or otherwise) should be viewed (and David Lynch thinks so as well).

So welcome Nigel and THIRDROW Films! We are proud to begin our short film collection with The Deal.

Last seen at Fairfield train station, Wednesday night, funky chick all in black handing out APPLEBOX flyers like a demon. I thought I did ok that morning, hitting the early commuter traffic and handing out 100. I was so chuffed I retired at 8:45am for a great breakfast at the Bean Counter. But that night Kel comes along and does an easy 700. Pull up yer socks Simon, 100 just don’t cut it!

Product quality suffers. I know that inside out .. yet I just got caught myself. I’ve just updated our front page with some lovely pics of our shop. If you click them they spring to life in a lightbox (I’m using lightview). With a minor update to layout and some testimonials thrown in, it’s no biggy, just an incremental improvement.

So, as always I get it working in Firefox. Easy! I develop on a G5 Power Mac, so to test on IE I’m caught between the VPC days of G4s and the Parallels world of MacIntel. So I have a crappy windows box that sits under my stairs and is networked in. I use it remotely via Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection, which is great, but the RDC/windows combination still freezes way too much and I find myself getting up and rebooting the windows box more often than I’d like. Then of course we hit the beauty of IE and no multiple installs. With Firefox, I have 3 live installs: 1.5, 2.0 and the latest 3.0 nightly. Easy! With IE I should also have 3 live installs: IE6, IE7 and IE8 beta. Not Easy. In fact not possible! MS offer a free VPC image so I can run natively with IE7 and use VPC to test IE6 and IE8. But it expires regularly and on my box runs like a dog. So with an expired VPC image at this point, I’m removing and installing each version of IE to test against. Great.

So I got lazy. Tested in Firefox. Fine. Tested in IE6. Fine. Great! IE6 is normally the problem child so IE7 should be fine. Bugger it, I’ll just deploy. 2 days later I find the layout in IE7 is completely screwed and people have been seeing this weird Mondrian take on the APPLEBOX front page. Don’t worry, I’ve kicked myself enough times already. Turns out IE7 doesn’t like floats attached to unordered lists like Firefox and IE6 does. There’s another variation in the IE world to remember.

All sorted now though, and everybody can see what a lovely shop we have