1. The studios and film-makers have to front a lot of money to develop the works that the do…without really knowing, I would guess that it’s substantially more than that of a music production (like a CD)…and involves a lot more parts than just a band of artists…so why wouldn’t the industry want as much up front money as possible from their content efforts…without out it will the ‘high budget’ blockbuster movies cease to exist and only low-budget indy-type films be affordable to be made?

2. Are movies and movie distribution as disrupted by new technology as music and print has been? Again without knowing anything it doesn’t seem like people are going to less movies at theaters…until the bread-and-butter starts to clearly dry up, won’t it be hard to change ‘business as usual’ for the studios? Maybe if you can spin it as an additional source of revenue (at no extra cost for the studios) it will be easier?

3. Assuming that studios sign on and do offer up all their content to be chunked and played with…what sort of applications do you envision the general public will want to pay for utilizing that content? Don’t get me wrong, the idea of being able to pull up random clips of interest for a given moment seems like fun, but I just don’t see anything that would motivate me to actually pay for it (and hence the fears of the studios become re-enforced)…I think you’ll have to really lay out a killer concept to consumers that will make them want clips so badly that they’re voice will force the studios to eventually cave…

Anyway – all those negative questions aside (I’m probably just not grasping the whole idea or don’t have enough industry knowledge to ‘get’ it), it is interesting to hear about the idea and the early stages of what you guys are working on…I do hope you achieve it all!

We’re struggling with the same issues in distributing our films of course. Our partners at B-Side recently launched a pay what you want site for our film “Rip! A Remix Manifesto” (www.ripremix.com). So far about 70% are paying essentially nothing, but the 30% who are paying are paying enough that if we crank up the volume of traffic, we’ll actually do quite well.

Plus anyone can remix and post the film, or portions of it, at http://www.opensourcecinema.org, so here’s a film that truly is open.