Anyone heard from ODEMAX lately?

[Mark L. Pederson]

I don't see a lot of VCs leaping in to spend millions on a distribution network competing against Netflix, HBO, Amazon and Hulu.

http://allthingsd.com/20130829/vhx-raises-3-million-more-for-its-sell-it-yourself-video-service/

https://angel.co/reelhouse ($1.1M seed)

 

[Marc Wielage]

Backwards I would argue. ODEMAX is useless without REDRAY and from what I heard last year about REDRAY, ODEMAX would by extension be in an untenable position. I don't see a lot of VCs leaping in to spend millions on a distribution network competing against Netflix, HBO, Amazon and Hulu.

I believe the Digital Cinema Distribution Coalition has already taken over 85% of all theatrical distribution in North America as of last year:

http://variety.com/t/digital-cinema-distribution-coalition/

This is a consortium controlled by the five major Hollywood studios. I believe many "mini-majors" like Weinstein are also participating in it through whichever distributor handles their releases.

I agree, it's going to be very hard to compete against Netflix and Amazon. It's already been said that between Netflix and YouTube, they're siphoning off half of all online traffic just between their two sites:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57611722-93/netflix-youtube-gobble-up-half-of-internet-traffic/

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

http://allthingsd.com/20130829/vhx-raises-3-million-more-for-its-sell-it-yourself-video-service/

https://angel.co/reelhouse ($1.1M seed)

Arguably neither of those are competing against Netflix or Amazon they're selling short films and indie flicks. ODEMAX was about distinguishing itself on quality of image and while they were going to sell indies they also if I remember correctly said they were going to be putting 4k studio films up as well. Selling YouTube videos is one thing, getting the license agreements is quite another since so many studios now are pushing exclusive licenses pretty hard.

In order to compete against Netflix or HBOGo you have to be able to win the Exclusives. In order to go up against iTunes and Xbox Videos you need the device and app ecosystem.

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

Arguably neither of those are competing against Netflix or Amazon they're selling short films and indie flicks. ODEMAX was about distinguishing itself on quality of image and while they were going to sell indies they also if I remember correctly said they were going to be putting 4k studio films up as well. Selling YouTube videos is one thing, getting the license agreements is quite another since so many studios now are pushing exclusive licenses pretty hard.

In order to compete against Netflix or HBOGo you have to be able to win the Exclusives. In order to go up against iTunes and Xbox Videos you need the device and app ecosystem.

I disagree with respect to "exclusives". How much content on Netflix is "exclusive"? Almost nothing. A couple new episodic shows. Which is all you need to hold eyeballs paying $8-$10 a month - lord knows it drives me nuts I can't drop Showtime & HBO from my FIOS because of "a few good shows" I want. The only reason I still pay for Netflix is that I have two kids and there is quantity of content for kids on there. But as far as an overall content platform ... "exclusive" is not the answer. It's what almost everyone is thinking ... but it's not the answer.

http://blog.vhx.tv/post/73620223733/offer-your-movie-everywhere-watch-your-sales-grow

I don't know if ODEMAX even exists anymore - all I know is the KEY person with vision behind it when RED announced it and I looked at it - is no longer there. And you can have the most bad ass software on the planet - but if you don't have someone with passion and vision driving it forward into a disrupting marketplace ... well ... you just have some bad ass software. And you will fail.

Netflix and Amazon are not open distribution platforms. You can put content on REELHOUSE and VHX now, today. You can sell 4K VP9 downloads or REDRAY downloads on either platform today. I think it's VERY telling that WB put their content on the REELHOUSE platform.

 

[Marc Wielage]

In order to compete against Netflix or HBOGo you have to be able to win the Exclusives. In order to go up against iTunes and Xbox Videos you need the device and app ecosystem.

I don't think anybody wants their film to be exclusive to one system or the other. Everything I see is available pretty much simultaneously on Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, and everything else. The idea is to get as many eyes on your film as possible, and the only way to do that is to launch it on every available platform.

Otherwise, it'd be like saying, "we only want our film showing in New Jersey and Florida." Why not make it available in all 50 states, plus foreign markets? It's a big world out there, with a lot of people using different operating systems and many, many different screen sizes. If somebody wants to pay me $2 to watch my film on an iPhone, please, go right ahead. I ain't gonna complain that they're not seeing it in 4K.

 

[Maik Müller]

That silence around REDRAY and ODEMAX makes me sad. I fear it means game over. And lets be honest, in it's current form, the chances for a success are getting smaller every day- So, i hope we will see a new approach soon and REDRAY doesn't die completely.

 

[Jeremy Torrie]

That silence around REDRAY and ODEMAX makes me sad. I fear it means game over. And lets be honest, in it's current form, the chances for a success are getting smaller every day- So, i hope we will see a new approach soon and REDRAY doesn't die completely.

If you think about it Red could have outsourced RedRay to a better equipped hardware manufacturer and then licensed .RED or RRENCODE to those 4K units for a much smaller price point and become the de facto standard for 4K delivery by being so far ahead of everyone as far as compression. Nobody wants or needs a format war again but it might have been great to see 4K players for a few hundred bucks with .RED as the engine.

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

4K delivery factors

4K delivery factors

Any UHD/4K distribution scenario has to consider price point, bandwidth, perceived quality and competitive landscape.

Here's what I think I know:

1) to have enough total customers for a UHD/4K service to make serious dough the price point needs to be affordable for a decent percentage of the marketplace; better to have a million people paying an extra $20/mo than 10,000 people paying an extra $200/mo ($20M vs $2M)

2) due to bandwidth bottlenecks, terrestrial delivery of a "credible" UHD/4K image will likely require fiber to the home. Sat-casters can fly new birds or aggregate existing transponders so they have a potential advantage as a UHD/4K programming source.

3) based on current behavior, I expect the UHD/4K "rollout" to be characterized by levels of compression that thoroughly compromise the image quality. This will lead to a lot of "the Emperor has no clothes on" articles and potentially a serious blow to catalyzing a UHD/4K groundswell. Of course the folks in marketing rarely worry too much about factual issues, unless they can get sued, so perhaps in a few years folks will be watching UHD-TVs fed roughly one bit per pixel (8mb/s) and thinking its "awesome". HD @5mb/s in MPEG-2 is sufficient to get people to write checks now...

4) the CE vendors have obvious incentive to promote new technologies like UHD/4K

5) established distributors like networks/cable/satellite who are threatened by IP (OTT) competition seem poised to use live sports content as their trump card. I expect them to leverage that content by offering it in UHD/4K. I also expect pay per view (on demand) options for feature films shown in UHD/4K to be offered by these same entities. An STB that can de-multiplex 4 HD channels into one UHD/4K channel might help bridge the bandwidth gap if the switching hardware can support it

Cheers - #19

 

[Terry VerHaar]

2) due to bandwidth bottlenecks, terrestrial delivery of a "credible" UHD/4K image will likely require fiber to the home. Sat-casters can fly new birds or aggregate existing transponders so they have a potential advantage as a UHD/4K programming source.

Blair - wasn't REDRay to delivery high visual quality streams at around 15 mbps?

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Sizzle

Sizzle

AFAIK the .RED codec that RedRay and ODEMAX were based on offered 9, 18 or 36mb/s options. The 18mb/s option would presumably be the workhorse for home distro. Based on average broadband download speeds of around 7mb/s in the US that would presumably allow one to download a 2 hour feature in 5-6 hours. Typical satellite/cable channels are around 5mb/s, so theoretically if they could aggregate 4 channels they'd have the 20mb/s capacity to support real time viewing.

To me, the core value proposition of the RedRay/ODEMAX deal was a UHD/4K distribution scheme that offered credible UHD/4K imagery within 2014 bandwidth constraints.

If you step back for a moment and look at the bigger picture, so much of it comes back to bandwidth. IMO, Jim, even with his considerable financial clout, had no viable way to get the average residential bandwidth up to 100mb/s any faster - that's more like a tectonic plates scenario. So what other levers could he, or any of us, push to make quality UHD/4K distro happen sooner than later? The engineering of H.265, MPEG-2, HEVC (H.265) and similar codecs is predicated on the assumption that the decoding hardware needs to be low power/low cost so it can be deployed widely. This means that the encoding can be somewhat compute intensive, but since the decode has to be relatively trivial, the codec itself has to cut a few corners on IQ.

OTOH, if you were designing a codec, and you knew it would have powerful client side decoding in hardware, you could use more sophisticated schemes to stuff more IQ into each megabit. As a side benefit you could even lower the DRM overhead since the hardware key would stifle hacking. Distro based on RedRay has the potential to deliver credible UHD/4K quality within realistic data rates and that's a big deal.

What is far more likely to happen, is that the CE companies will push UHD/4K devices that in the near term will mostly be fed with either upscaled 1080 or very compressed UHD. I think that strategy is ill advised as the over compression of the UHD/4K source signal will rob it of what makes it noticeably better than HD. They seem to think that buyers can be "glamoured" into believing what they are seeing is basted with "awesome sauce" rather than artifacts (feature vs bug). They managed to sell HD using 5mb/s MPEG-2 sources so what do I know...

Cheers - #19

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

AFAIK the .RED codec that RedRay and ODEMAX were based on offered 9, 18 or 36mb/s options. The 18mb/s option would presumably be the workhorse for home distro. Based on average broadband download speeds of around 7mb/s in the US that would presumably allow one to download a 2 hour feature in 5-6 hours. Typical satellite/cable channels are around 5mb/s, so theoretically if they could aggregate 4 channels they'd have the 20mb/s capacity to support real time viewing.

To me, the core value proposition of the RedRay/ODEMAX deal was a UHD/4K distribution scheme that offered credible UHD/4K imagery within 2014 bandwidth constraints.

If you step back for a moment and look at the bigger picture, so much of it comes back to bandwidth. IMO, Jim, even with his considerable financial clout, had no viable way to get the average residential bandwidth up to 100mb/s any faster - that's more like a tectonic plates scenario. So what other levers could he, or any of us, push to make quality UHD/4K distro happen sooner than later? The engineering of H.265, MPEG-2, HEVC (H.265) and similar codecs is predicated on the assumption that the decoding hardware needs to be low power/low cost so it can be deployed widely. This means that the encoding can be somewhat compute intensive, but since the decode has to be relatively trivial, the codec itself has to cut a few corners on IQ.

OTOH, if you were designing a codec, and you knew it would have powerful client side decoding in hardware, you could use more sophisticated schemes to stuff more IQ into each megabit. As a side benefit you could even lower the DRM overhead since the hardware key would stifle hacking. Distro based on RedRay has the potential to deliver credible UHD/4K quality within realistic data rates and that's a big deal.

What is far more likely to happen, is that the CE companies will push UHD/4K devices that in the near term will mostly be fed with either upscaled 1080 or very compressed UHD. I think that strategy is ill advised as the over compression of the UHD/4K source signal will rob it of what makes it noticeably better than HD. They seem to think that buyers can be "glamoured" into believing what they are seeing is basted with "awesome sauce" rather than artifacts (feature vs bug). They managed to sell HD using 5mb/s MPEG-2 sources so what do I know...

Cheers - #19

Streaming should not be confused with downloads. H264 HD downloads from iTunes look WAY better than most HD broadcasts - and Netflix.

Blair, you are 100% correct in that 4K in the home is gonna be a MESS because people will push it like a gimmick and compress the hell out of it.

I'm praying RED pulls a rabbit out of the hat with the .RED compression - as it is amazing tech. Even if a download took 20 minutes or more - I'd rather see prestine 4k. We use to wait a day or so to get our Netflix DVDs - if you had an iPhone app you could order your movie download while you were on your way home or at the offiice and it would be there waiting.

Remember laser discs?

I know ... everyone wants streaming ... except me

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Blair - wasn't REDRay to delivery high visual quality streams at around 15 mbps?

REDRAY, in its current form, allows us to encode and playback 4K at 9, 18 or 36 Mbps. 9Mbps has a visible compromise in quality, no compression artifacts to speak of, but the image is softer and lacks detail where we would like to see it -- tree leaves, etc.. 18Mbps looks amazing and 36Mbps is pristine, archival master quality. Most people, even with well trained eyes, are not going to be able to tell 18Mbps from 36Mbps unless they start pixel-peeping still frames and doing direct comparisons.

18Mbps REDRAY stream occupies less bandwidth than the 1080p MP4 stream used by most satellite and cable providers to deliver crappy, over-compressed, heavily macro-blocked HD. Of course, they tend to use a dynamic bit rate and can vary between just under 5Mbps and peak around 19Mbps. OTA HD broadcasts are allocated 20Mbps (19.2Mbps, technically I guess) per channel. So I think it's interesting that REDRAY fits in this paradigm. Also to consider, REDRAY 4K is 28% smaller as a data stream than 25Mbps standard definition DV video. This is only double the data rate used by most DVD releases and exactly 1/3 (yes, that's right, 33%) of the 54Mbps bit rate ceiling for Blu-Ray profile 2.0 or REDRAY fits right in at 36Mbps, which is the maximum data rate for Blu-Ray type 1 and it seems most Blu-Ray releases target 25~30Mbps.


Now when it comes to watching things on TV, I can only speak for my own family's activity. When it comes to streaming, we like the convenience… So far though, there is too much disparity in terms of availability, quality of the content, variety of the content and the infrastructure to support it. Owning a Blu-Ray is fine, but I never race out to buy it at new release price, but will pre-order from the usual Amazon, Wal-Mart, etc.. if they offer good pre-order pricing and they often do. I don't purchase the quantity of movies I once did. I suppose it's because after owning hundreds of VHS tapes and the same again with DVDs, I'm just tired of replacing media collections. …Which leads me to the next point.

I would like to not buy and re-buy again my favorite films every time a new delivery medium comes along. I would really like to buy a license or the right to view my favorite content on any device I choose and in the best quality available at that time. If I upgrade my TV and associated media player from HD to 4K, I'd love to just start watching in 4K. I know I'm not alone in this. And subscribing to one or more streaming services like Netflix, Hulu+, Vudu, etc.. is not what people want for this. Find a way to make this happen and everyone will buy in. To me, this means downloadable content, like iTunes. But it also means that when I buy, I own that title and new releases of it moving forward. If I download it in HD, then when it comes out in 4K, I can automatically download the new version and move on with my life. This has been a thorn in the side of Blu-Ray adoption since the beginning. Sure the quality of Blu-Ray surpasses DVD (most of the time, anyway), but how many people have made it a point to upgrade their DVD collections? Maybe one or two special films that they just really want in better quality, maybe. For me, I'll do it here and there if it's a movie I haven't watched in some time and my DVD is an older crappy release and I see the Blu-Ray in the Wal-Mart bargain bin for $5.

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/netflix-stock-soars-16-percent-673688

 

[Maik Müller]

Jeff, i totally agree to the buy and re-buy-thing, this is annoying and i lost lots of interest in the bluray-era, i'm not buying that much titles anymore. I guess after VHS, LD, DVD and not to speak of HD-DVD (LOL) i've learned a bit about collecting that stuff, finally.

Streaming and downloads aren't really there yet for me. It's interesting to own a title at itunes or google movies, it's also nice to have those subscriptions on streaming-services, but quality-wise it's still not on par with Blu-Rays, not to speak of extras, audio-formats and the one big problem with the lack of original audio in foreign countries. It's unbelievable to see google selling only german dubbed movies in germany, for a higher price than what the Blu-Ray costs at amazon.

Whatever, this buying a license thing and owning a movie forever will never happen, at least not this way. Hollywood will not give away free upgrades. So, realistically speaking it would be nice to have a upgradeable license, so at least we wouldn't be forced to buy the complete title again and again. It would be so easy to sell different packages, with or without extras and so on.

The market isn't there yet, the customer is bound to one provider when he buys a title. I want to see stores selling licenses, like it is with steam keys these days. But that would be just the first step, there needs to be a way to use such licenses on any content-provider i choose. If i have bought a movie, i want to be able to use it on itunes or google, or whatever, and i want to have the freedom to move anytime.

Anyway....

REDRAY needs a refresh and lower price-tag to survive and has to be promoted as luxury player for all coming 4k-content. It could be the HD/Muse-LD of the download/streaming-era, but with more success. That also means the player has to be opened up for apps from content-providers, netflix, google, amazon, sony... Yes, they will not switch all their content to .RED, but they'll probably start to sell optional extra-hq-downloads in .RED.

And there needs to be work done on the encoding side. Mass encoding tools, playback on workstations, encoding plugins for Adobe an so on.

I think it's not too late, but time is running up.

 

[Kyle Wright]

I would like to not buy and re-buy again my favorite films every time a new delivery medium comes along. I would really like to buy a license or the right to view my favorite content on any device I choose and in the best quality available at that time. If I upgrade my TV and associated media player from HD to 4K, I'd love to just start watching in 4K. I know I'm not alone in this. And subscribing to one or more streaming services like Netflix, Hulu+, Vudu, etc.. is not what people want for this. Find a way to make this happen and everyone will buy in. To me, this means downloadable content, like iTunes. But it also means that when I buy, I own that title and new releases of it moving forward. If I download it in HD, then when it comes out in 4K, I can automatically download the new version and move on with my life. This has been a thorn in the side of Blu-Ray adoption since the beginning. Sure the quality of Blu-Ray surpasses DVD (most of the time, anyway), but how many people have made it a point to upgrade their DVD collections? Maybe one or two special films that they just really want in better quality, maybe. For me, I'll do it here and there if it's a movie I haven't watched in some time and my DVD is an older crappy release and I see the Blu-Ray in the Wal-Mart bargain bin for $5.

I would also like to not have to buy and re-buy a movie every time it's re-released. It irks me when I buy a movie and a couple months later they release a better version. That said, buying once and getting all the future upgrades may not be a good thing either. One reason that studios go to all the work to scan films at higher resolutions, remaster films, and provide extensive restoration work on older titles is the financial incentive. Studios know that people will pay to buy the superior versions, which helps the studio recoup the costs of their mastering/restoration efforts. Take away the studios' financial incentive to update/upgrade their titles, and I doubt they'd make much of an effort to bring us better and better masters or special features.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I would also like to not have to buy and re-buy a movie every time it's re-released. It irks me when I buy a movie and a couple months later they release a better version. That said, buying once and getting all the future upgrades may not be a good thing either. One reason that studios go to all the work to scan films at higher resolutions, remaster films, and provide extensive restoration work on older titles is the financial incentive. Studios know that people will pay to buy the superior versions, which helps the studio recoup the costs of their mastering/restoration efforts. Take away the studios' financial incentive to update/upgrade their titles, and I doubt they'd make much of an effort to bring us better and better masters or special features.

While this is happening now with the push into 4K, we are at the limit of what can be squeezed from existing media. Is there a point to further scanning and re-mastering of a 35mm film print beyond 4K? 4K is already enough to preserve the grain structure. An 8K scan or 12K scan could be done now as the technology is available. At 12K, we have crossed into the realm of actually scanning to preserve nuances in a particular film print.

So at what point does Hollywood move on from milking the cash-cow of re-releasing higher quality versions of an existing film? Content originally shot and mastered in 2K/HD is already under the current threshold and must be up-converted -- something that can actually be done on the fly at the playback end, and quite well too with the nicer players and display hardware. When the 8K push comes, what then? Are studios going to be in the game of selling pre-upconverted releases of their movies in an 8K format? Hoping the consumer is uneducated enough to think they're getting something newer and better?

What about the music industry as an example? They're now facing a new problem. A problem they initially feared with the move to downloadable content and portable libraries. Now that people have adequately good copies of the music they love, which they can play on any device and move around indefinitely, why would those people ever buy those songs ever again? Oh, the horror! And yet, the price of music rarely goes up, other than to combat inflation. While downloadable music sales have slowed this past year, so have the purchase of personal music players and we are facing a plateau in the market or a saturation point. Keep producing content, people will keep buying. Continuously rehashing existing content with hopes of huge profits? Those days are coming to an end I think. In the end, that approach is not good for the consumer or the business side of the equation.

 

[Maik Müller]

Interesting thought, i haven't seen it from this perspective yet, but you are probably right, we are close to a point where old content can't be squeezed anymore.

 

[Ces Peynetti]

Buying content is something that has me torned as of late. I used to have a big DVD collection, which has now turned into a large Blu Ray collection. It's been a long time since I've watched a DVD as I always tend to hunt for the HD alternative that may look and sound slightly better. I've been a Home Theater geek for a long time now (way before I got into film and cinematography), though I live in an apartment at the moment, instead of having a living room I have a 130 inch projection screen with theater seating and somewhat insulated walls to avoid getting the neighbors against me. This hobby is what probably got me into cinematography, which has only turned me into a bigger pixel peeper and sound critic.

I am tired however of physical media that I know I'll end up selling for a couple of bucks to my friends once the new and improved format is here. I wish we were at the point where digital could hold the quality of physical, but we are not quite there yet (so i keep buying blu rays of movies I really like). Compression is noticeable for a geek like me ( I call it a bittersweet curse ). That's one of the reasons RED Ray really appealed to me along with the RED projector. I can't say it seemed like the answer to my prayers, but the right direction to push things. To push boundaries of content quality so we can get to the point in time where digital will be at a spot we know it can get to, but it's not convenient just yet.

My fear is that companies know that 98% of their consumers don't really care that much about this. Just like it happened with music and sound, getting a high end image reproduction is going to be found only at NAB for professionals, or at the Venetian suites at CES instead of the main floor consumer market. We fall into a very small group of people who actually give a damn about quality because we are the ones creating it, and know how hard it is to get it out there looking the way we set ourselves to make it look. RED Ray and something like Odemax gave me a bit of hope in what seems like a lost cause. I just hope we don't end up settling in mediocrity.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

I don't think anybody wants their film to be exclusive to one system or the other. Everything I see is available pretty much simultaneously on Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, and everything else. The idea is to get as many eyes on your film as possible, and the only way to do that is to launch it on every available platform.

I'm sure Netflix wants their exclusive content exclusively on Netflix. I refered to two separate business models. Netflix and Hulu and HBO are all going to keep subscribers by maintaining exclusives that force you to remain subscribed. iTunes, Xbox movies etc are all only going to succeed if you can take an entire film collection to every single device from tablets to consoles to PCs.

ODEMAX didn't seem to have an app strategy and was exclusively focused on high-end distribution which is a tiny niche to attract big investors to deploy a huge CDN.

If you think about it Red could have outsourced RedRay to a better equipped hardware manufacturer.

That's what happened. And that's why you can't buy REDRay anymore.

As to Satellite delivery, there is also time-delayed options. With such large DVRs Dish or DirectTV could set aside 200-300GB for PayPerView pre streamed. If it takes a few days to cache that's fine. They could even pre-cache it before availability and then just unlock it on the release date.

 

[Maik Müller]

ODEMAX didn't seem to have an app strategy and was exclusively focused on high-end distribution which is a tiny niche to attract big investors to deploy a huge CDN.

I think they have made a few mistakes on marketing and communication here too. Everyone thought REDRAY and ODEMAX are exclusive to each other, but later Jarred stated that REDRAY is open for every other distributor too. No more details where given and we never saw someone else jumping in. I just think this message didn't came through to everyone and maybe the plattform wasn't ready for apps/plugins, maybe too complicated or too restricted... Who knows? We just never heard from anyone other than ODEMAX. And about speaking about ODEMAX, while i love the concept and all, i think it was never really clear who the target audience is or to put it simple, if it ever is going to support big blockbuster mainstream cinema and that stuff.

RED should have, at least, worked together with one of the big players (Netflix?) before the (soft-)launch...

Technically speaking, it would have been easier if REDRAY had been something like a android-based box, with support for all modern codecs and existing apps, but then a additional api to support Super-HQ-.RED-file downloads.