Streaming Completely Disrupted Entertainment. AI Could Be Even Worse.

Plus: Using AI to Restore a Lost Film

Author

Steve
November 14, 2023

Good day Hollywood tech nerds!

In this week’s post:

💰️ Streaming Completely Disrupted Entertainment. AI Could Be Even Worse.

🖥️ Using AI to Restore a Lost Film

🍿 Kernels: 3 links worth making popcorn for

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Streaming Completely Disrupted Entertainment. AI Could Be Even Worse.

The SAG strike appears to be at an end! SAG has published details of the tentative agreement for a full vote today (ed note: publishing deadlines for the newsletter mean this vote may have already occurred by the time you read this). There’s much in the way of specifics to dig into, and obviously for this newsletter the streaming and AI sections are of particular interest.

However, I think it’s a good moment to zoom out and acknowledge the foreboding sense of doom that the agreement portends, that AI has burrowed its way into the business and there will be no extricating it. As Justine Bateman said in an interview:

The train track is split. One train track is going, ‘OK, we’re going to participate in this sort of negotiation with the cannibals and we’re going to talk about just how you’re going to be cutting my foot off, and are you going to grill it or boil it, and what kind of sauce are you going to put on it?’ That track is the one that includes generative AI.

Setting aside the disturbing image of Bob Iger munching on Stellan Skarsgård’s well-seasoned leg, the threat felt by artists across the entertainment industry is real. On its own, generative AI is not going to break the business. But it won’t be on its own, it will be wielded by some of entertainment’s most destructive figures: the bosses.

Bosses like: Jeffrey Katzenberg, David Zaslav, Bob Iger, and so many others whose sole motivation is line go up, resulting in “The Rot Economy,” as coined by Ed Zitron: “these companies are never, ever punished for failing to operate their businesses in a sustainable way, or even with a view for the future.”

As Justine Bateman put it, they’re “…choosing to no longer be in the film and series business. I think they sort of like to think of themselves as being tech barons themselves or something. But this, doing projects that don’t involve humans … you’re not in the film business anymore.”

In a recent interview with Variety, Christopher Nolan described his frustrations with how Hollywood has been operating:

Part of the craziness with the labor negotiations this summer has been the studios sitting there and going, ‘Well, we can’t pay you because we don’t have enough money,’ To which the answer is ‘Well, you don’t have enough money because you’re not managing your business correctly. You’re not getting the same amount of money for your product that you were before.’ The shift to streaming has disrupted the entire industry and created problems for everybody.

The geniuses who took the dream of being able to watch whatever we want, whenever we wanted it and mutated it into the nightmare of our current streaming landscape might do even worse damage to human artists and art itself with the power of generative AI at their fingertips. Can it be contained? I’m crossing my fingers!

Using AI to Restore a Lost Film

That’s enough doom and gloom and Luddism for now, here’s a shift of focus to a fascinating instance where technology and AI was used to help restore a partially-lost 1929 film from Yasujiro Ozu titled Tokkan Kozo (A Straightforward Boy).

According to the pair of articles from the University of Rochester, “the whole project was especially complicated because the film was on an unusual 9.5mm format used for home entertainment in the late 1920s through the 1930s.”

The DSL created subtitles for the film’s Japanese intertitles, improved image stability and sharpness, and authored the Digital Cinema Package (DCP). The DCP was created from a standard definition scan by Imagica West of a 9.5mm print held by the Toy Film Museum. Initially, the DSL used a deep-learning application to double the resolution of each individual frame of the standard definition transfer to increase resolution for the high definition (2K) DCP.

Now that is a use for AI that makes my heart warm! At last I can have my dad’s home movies of me throwing a tantrum at my 5th birthday party projected in glorious IMAX!

You can check out the restored clip over at Criterion.

Here’s a round-up of cool links about Hollywood and technology:

Is the dying DVD business headed for a resurrection? (link)

Give me back my buttons! (link)

The business of standup comedy is booming. (link)