the new movie business

The well-established movie business has high movie production costs, high movie promotion costs, and close relationships between movie studios and movie theaters. Online services such as Amazon Studios suggest possibilities for much lower movie production costs.  The growth of social media and online advertising, as well as services such as Amazon’s Withoutabox, creates powerful means for low-cost movie promotion.  Digital movie distribution can enable much more dynamic, data-driven placement of movies in theaters (“releases”). Movie theater revenue in the U.S. in 2008 was $11.4 billion. New possibilities for movie production, promotion, and distribution point to changes in the movie business and in the supply of long-form video content.

Related post: movie negative cost increased 60x since 1929

visits to public libraries trending upwards

The number of public library visits per person in public library service areas rose 30% in the U.S. from 1995 to 2008. Circulation per person increased 20% across this period.[1]  The share of persons and households that use public libraries increased only slightly if at all.[2] These figures suggest that libraries are adapting well to changes in the information economy.

Libraries have long offered more than books.  Early in the twentieth century, public libraries lent prints, magic lantern slides, and piano rolls.  Some included rooms for playing piano.  In 2009, 45% of persons in the U.S. ages 14 and older who used a public library in the past year used a public library’s Internet access. [3]

Cloud services are currently a hot tech trend.  Like Centrex, libraries are a cloud service architecture.

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Notes:

[1] National Center for Educational Statistics library use data.

[2] According to National Center for Educational Statistics, the share of households containing a person who used public libraries within the past year fell from 65%  in 1996 to 48% in 2002.  See Use of Public Library Services by Households in the United States: 1996 and Households’ Use of Public and Other Types of Libraries: 2002.  Such a large decline seems rather implausible. The 1996 study includes references to surveys in 1991 and 1995 that found the share of adults using a public library in the past year to be 63% and 67% respectively. Based on its U.S. nationally representative survey in 2009, Becker et. al (2010), p. 26, reports 69% of persons ages 14 and older used a public library in the past year.

[3] Becker et al. (2010) pp. 26, 32.

Reference:

Becker, Samantha, Michael D. Crandall, Karen E. Fisher, Bo Kinney, Carol Landry, and Anita Rocha. (2010). Opportunity for All: How the American Public Benefits from Internet Access at U.S. Libraries. (IMLS-2010-RES-01). Institute of Museum and Library Services. Washington, D.C.

overturning regulatory calls

The National Basketball Association (NBA) is the premier professional basketball league in the U.S.  Officiating in the NBA is roughly equivalent to working in a federal regulatory agency, with NBA officials get getting somewhat more public appreciation and a lot less heckling.

In the 2008-09 NBA season, the number of calls that officials chose to reconsider on video (at least 1033 calls) was not much less than the number of games played (1230). Hence motions for video reconsideration were common.

NBA officials determine whether a shot attempt was a two-point shot or a three-point shot.  Requests for video reconsideration of such calls led to the overturning of 27% of those reviewed (140 out of 519 calls).  The calls for which officials request a review are close calls.  If in these circumstances officials calls were no better than random and the video review always determined the correct call, then 50% of the reviewed calls would be overturned.  With a overturn share of 27%, officials are overturning half as many reviewed calls as the random benchmark. Officials’ calls stood up better in reconsideration of clock decisions: 6% of those decisions (31 out of 514) were overturned.

Deciding correctly all regulatory decisions is difficult even for highly experienced, highly professional officials.  Unfortunately, watching video is of no help in many areas of regulation.

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These statistics are from the magazine Referee, December 2010, p. 61.

John Lydus on a revolution in formal authority

bronze pot and ceremonial halberd, China, Erlitou culture (ca. 1800-1600 BCE) or early Shang dynasty (ca. 1600-1400 BCE), in Freer Gallery

Systematic decision-making requires supporting information technology.  In sixth-century Byzantium, the judicial bureaucrat John Lydus complained that the new, leading financial bureaucrat:

did not give the business that was being transacted to the proper overseers of the regions, called tractatores, namely, “regional governors,” or to accountants, to be filled in conformably to the established custom in order that nothing might be done contrary to the law, but he ordered the documents to be filled in through the agency of his own men, gaining himself authority over the expenditure-records which were wont to be handed over to their proper document-completers. [1]

Filling in forms typically is a job for low-ranking bureaucrats. In a civilized society, an army of document-completers enables authority in practice.

whenever very great difficulties arose for the taxpayers as a result of the fact that the issuance of documents was not undertaken conformably to proper procedure, he himself became vexed and inflicted sentences of death upon those who did not understand the power of the documents that had been carelessly and haphazardly issued. And a custom prevailed since his time whereby all haphazardly write, fill in, and issue documents that are totally not understood by them, whereas formerly they had been safeguarded in countless ways

Not filling in forms in accordance with established procedure creates opportunities for new, ad hoc judgments.  If the new span of judgment is wide enough, the result is effectively an authoritative coup.

John Lydus seemed to have an “absolute conviction that the fate of the Roman empire hinged upon the scrupulous observance of seemingly mundane and trivial bureaucratic practices.”[2] Lydus may well have been right.

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Read more:

Notes:

[1] John Lydus, On powers or The magistracies of the Roman state 3.68, from Greek trans. Bandy (1983), p. 241.

[2] Pazdernik (2009) p. 205. Even if Lydus over-estimated the importance of bureaucratic details, a well-functioning bureaucracy is essential to a well-functioning state. The Byzantine Empire had well-developed bureaucratese, among other indicators of bureaucratic excellence.

References:

Bandy, Anastasius C., trans. 1983. Joannes Lydus. On powers or The magistracies of the Roman state. Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, 149.

Pazdernik, Charles F. 2009. “Fortune’s Laughter and a Bureaucrat’s Tears: Sorrow, Supplication and Sovereignty in Justinianic Constantinpole.” Pp. 397-418 in Thorsten Fögen, ed. Tears in the Graeco-Roman world (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter).