Ken and Stefan are part of the development team here at Wiredrive. They like to test stuff. They poke, prod, tinker and tweak the application trying to break things and uncover weaknesses. Recently, they put our new uploader through its paces by throwing some pretty big files at it to see what would happen. We’re glad they did!

Wiredrive users can now upload files up to 20GB!

The maximum file size that can be uploaded successfully varies with each browser. Here are the results of our tests:

*The Java uploader (used with any web browser) can handle a maximum file size of 2GB

A few notes:

Although large video files can be uploaded to Wiredrive, they are not ideal for streaming purposes. If you or your clients intend to view video within the Wiredrive application, please refer to the Video Encoding Guide for our recommended settings.

Additionally, users that upload very large files may quickly exceed their storage capacity. To avoid overage charges, please check your Library and Projects storage report to ensure your Wiredrive system has enough allocated space to handle uploading files of significant size.

Happy uploading!

Feature highlights:

• Launches immediately in HTML5 – No more waiting for Java
• Uploads begin instantly
• Multi-threaded uploading processes more than one file at a time
• Choose between Drag-and-drop or Browse mode
• Improved progress bar accuracy
• Upload to multiple locations with one consolidated window
• Jump directly to a file from the uploader window

System requirements:

If you’d like more detailed instructions on uploading files to Wiredrive, please visit the support section of our website.

Meet Lauren Merritt, the newest member of our East Coast sales team.  Born and raised in New Jersey, Lauren now resides in Manhattan where she revels in the energy and chaos of The Big Apple. “My favorite thing about living in New York is the endless opportunity at my fingertips.  You never know what serendipitous situation is waiting just around the corner.”

Prior to Wiredrive, Lauren was a TV marketing producer, and honed her sales chops as an account executive for GDS International, a business-to-business events company.

In her free time, Lauren volunteers with the local ASPCA.  She loves hiking, traveling to new places, and generally soaking up all New York has to offer.

Lauren brings to Wiredrive a passion for technology, customer service and Jon Bon Jovi.  We think she’s a perfect fit!

At Wiredrive, we’ve always tried to address our customers’ needs by putting ourselves in their shoes. This year we went a step further and actually hired one of our customers!

As a producer at Wojahn Bros Music, Paul Horn was an ardent Wiredrive user. He became such a champion of the application that we brought him on board to help us create an even better experience for our users. As Wiredrive’s new Customer Advocate, Paul will be making sure all of our customers are truly thrilled with the Wiredrive service and are getting the maximum return on their investment.

As Paul put it, “Customers are great, but I want more diehard Wiredrive fans. My goal is to dole out at least one Wiredrive tattoo by the end of my first year … I hope they’ll let me expense the ink!”

Frank joins West Coast account manager Farah Fima to assist Wiredrive customers in any way that they can. Customers can contact Frank or Farah to schedule trainings, discuss their storage plans or solve any other issue related to Wiredrive.

Ryan Kavanaugh, CEO, Relative Media

Hollywood has always been the epitome of creative financing. Movies may gross hundreds of millions of dollars but no one sees any money. A panel at the recent Variety Film Summit helped shed some light on movie funding.

The box office is not a horse race

Nothing says success better than being number one at the box office, right? In America, there is a strong desire to identify winners and losers, and box office rankings are the perfect vehicle for labeling movies as such. In reality, we miss a core business principle by hyper-focusing on box office numbers: it doesn’t matter how much money you make, it matters how much money you keep.

Box office numbers only represent a quarter of a movie’s overall revenue and provide no information about a movie’s expenses, a figure studios don’t accurately disclose. After the opening weekend, a blockbuster may be number one, but nowhere close to recouping its full investment. An indie, on the other hand, may be making investors very happy coming in seventh. Unfortunately, only industry insiders know this. Here’s a chart comparing top grossing movies vs top profitable movies.

Paranormal Activity, which has only been out for two years, was 702 times more profitable than Avatar, which doesn’t even rank in the top twenty.

Doubles versus grand slams

Blockbuster financing resembles the venture capital model in which 50 movies lose money, 10 break even, 10 do OK and 1 or 2 do well enough to pay for all the others. The mini-majors are changing the whole financial risk/reward ratio. Their strategy is to aim for singles and doubles instead of grand slams where the likelihood of striking out is high.

Relativity Media manages compensation packages to keep upfront costs down and backend incentives high. Steven Soderberg took scale and profit participation for Haywire instead of his typical upfront fee, which made him a de facto head of production. With his potential profits on the line, he was forced to decide if that extra crane at $20,000 per day was truly necessary. Soderberg delivered the movie on time and on budget, and if the movie is successful, it will make far more money than if he’d been paid upfront.

This approach worked great for Cameron Diaz, who took a huge paycut for Bad Teacher in exchange for profit participation and won in the end. The entire movie, which grossed $200 million worldwide, was made for less than her $20 million salary on Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. Her profit participation not only let the movie move forward, it made her an undisclosed, but tidy, sum of money.

Film financing goes from major studios to friends and family

Film funds are changing quickly. Money was easier to come by in 2005. The result was terrible films that had no business being made. That all changed in 2008 when the credit crisis wiped out most movie financing and consolidated funding activity to ten banks. Now there are 35 banks providing film financing, along with sophisticated independent financing partners and even crowd-sourced financing operations.

Kickstarter is an online marketplace that crowd-sources funding for music, film and other creative projects. Kickstarter has raised $20,000,000 for film projects, which accounts for roughly 20 percent of its overall funding activity. Typical campaigns have between 30 and 45 days to meet its goal or else all of the money is returned to financiers. Friends and family kick account for 80 percent of the investment money with strangers picking up the remaining 20 percent. Kickstarted espouses three mantras for a successful campaign:

1. Don’t be shy: Teams that cannot ask for support will not succeed
2. Ask for a realistic funding goal: Do your research and figure out exactly what you need
3. Connect with your fans: Most funding comes in the first and last days of the campaign, but involvement increases as you build momentum

After hearing presentations from Mark Suster and Robert Tercek, 2012 sounds like the year that TV finally succumbs to the digital revolution. Always the master of setting expectations, Mark cautioned that these sort of predictions are dubious at best. Forecasts about technology usually overestimate its impact for the next three years, underestimate its effect in 10, and have been plain wrong for 20 years. Being too early (or too late) is the same as being wrong, but Suster and Tercek discussed why things will be different this year.

TV is changing shape . . . literally

Viewership is up, but for the first time TV set sales have declined. Televisions are now just a large video display devices competing with billions of glowing little rectangles. Tablets, smartphones and smart TVs are redefining what, where and when people watch content, enabling more people to cut the cord from cable TV. These devices, especially when used with video on demand (VOD) services, compete with DVRs. This is because if people miss the television broadcast of their show, they can catch it on their iPads or laptops.

As an interesting side note, movie theaters are looking to TV for ideas as they shift to digital delivery and projection. From their perspective, digital screens are just large TV sets waiting for you and your closest 100 friends to watch the big game together.

Channels are losing identity

Channels are hollowing out their programming and ultimately losing their identity. Local news viewership is declining in all time slots and scripted programming is being replaced by reality TV or reruns. Remember when MTV used to play music? They’d be better off changing the brand to RTV (for realty). See if you can identify which networks air which shows:

I agree. I don’t care which network runs them, either.

Internet is becoming the only necessary service

Cable TV’s emerging business challenge is how to earn money as customers unbundle their TV, Internet and land-line (remember those?) services. The cold reality is that most people watch only a handful of channels. When customers can find TV content on the Internet, many will discard the $100 per month bundled service plan. This paradigm is unkind to those who don’t adapt. The music industry, for example, had to collapse before they started making proper deals. The big question is, will TV avoid the same mistake? At least one tech writer covering Sony doesn’t think so. Of course, the cable industry feels otherwise.

So, what’s next? One theory is that channels that have migrated to an online environment will become product marketplaces, content distributers, or information services (e.g. eBay, iTunes and Google, respectively). This shift will result in a new fight for “digital shelf space” because even though content is now limitless, people’s attention and mindshare are not.

Content is democratizing

Companies like Maker Studios are reaching 200 million viewers with content that costs between $100 to $400 per minute to make. Compare that to reality content at $6,000 to $8,000 per minute or traditional network content at $50-100,000 per minute and you have a whole new level of scale. Networks trot out a few new shows every season to see which ones will run their 22-episode course. Maker Studios is rolling out entire genre or demographic-specific channels (i.e. comedy, moms, Hispanic), testing them and iterating the ones that work . . . then rolling out more.

I hope that all these changes will ultimately benefit the consumer as industries struggle and evolve. Ten years ago, we would complain that it was impossible to find anything good to watch on TV. I no longer say that because we are awash in excellent content and just don’t have enough time to see everything. There are few new offerings this fall season, so I may have time to finally start Lost. Barriers to content are falling. HBO GO has saved me from my Tivo glitches, and if you miss an episode or even a season, you can easily catch up. Easy access to great content is, well, great!

More training

If etiquette were a sport, the young agency producer’s team would be in last place. It’s not their fault, though. In the good ole days, agency producers in training would shadow full producers on multiple shoots and start running their own job three to five years later. Now, agencies are leaner, departments are stretched too thin, and producers are thrown into the fire quickly with less training. They have less time with mentors (senior creatives who understand the art of the budget) and learn bad habits because they don’t know what they don’t know.

Production companies are reluctant to tattle to the agency despite knowing better. So what’s an agency to do? Set clear policy so producers can absorb the institutional knowledge and understand expectations early on. Explain the value of the triple bid (not six plus) and define and monitor proper communication etiquette. If communication starts off poorly, assume the job will go poorly.

Don’t read to us

Apparently, reading the script over the phone is just as exciting as reading a script on a conference panel (Pytka, I’m looking at you). Deliver the passion and explain how you arrived at that big idea.

Good and bad phone habits

It’s 5:00 p.m. on Friday. The agency producer calls and says they need the treatment by Monday morning. You work all weekend, pull together an amazing presentation and deliver it on time, then . . . nothing. No call on Monday, no call on Tuesday. Finally you call on Wednesday and the producer hasn’t had a chance to look at it.

Yes, everyone is super busy. There are not enough hours in the day to complete every task. Unfortunately, being too busy doesn’t mean it’s OK not to return calls. If you ask someone to put in work for you, respect their time with a call. As Dan Blaney, senior producer from Wieden + Kennedy NY eloquently said, “It’s bullshit to not call people back.”

Additionally, agency producers need to build new relationships over the phone or in person. Good working relationships are a critical part of awarding, producing and completing work. Do all bidding over the phone rather than by email because you need open communication to work together when a bid is too high . . . which is often.

Good and bad email habits

Email is excellent for project details and logistics, which need to be clearly communicated. Strong working relationships can run just fine through email, but only when you both are already in sync.

Email is a terrible medium, on the other hand, for resolving emotionally charged issues. If something is going wrong, pick up the phone and deal with it.

Break up correctly

You narrowed the bidding process down to the three best production companies and finally awarded the job, which means two companies are out. No one enjoys “the breakup” call, but unless you only take single bids, it’s a necessary part of the job.

Second calls can be awkward, especially if the agency is planning to go another direction. Production companies can tell that they are not getting the job depending on which agency folk are on the call. Conversations can come across forced, even though everyone is trying to be nice. Be honest and explain which way you are leaning. The production company craves constructive feedback about why the director was not right for the project. The sales team needs to manage the director’s ego and the director needs to trust that the sales team is doing their best to land the right projects.

Simplify treatments

Remember the good ole days of big budgets, good calendars and great perks; when jobs were won on a great reel and a handshake? Yeah, me neither. Expectations for treatments have grown out of control as production companies create 20 pages with full visual references in 72 hours. Wouldn’t it be great if we could cap treatments at three to five pages and let the written word work its magic?

Production companies appreciate when the agency reads the treatment and comes prepared with thoughtful questions. 90% of the treatment may be great, so the group can focus on tuning the last 10% before the bidding begins. Once completed, the treatment becomes the bible for the client about how to do the job. Pytka’s not going to be able to do away with them any time soon.

Price fairly upfront

In an ideal world, the producer and production company trust each other and define a fair budget for a great job. But the reality is that producers hate giving a budget range because they expect bids to magically come back at the high end. The assumption is that you can’t know the true cost of the project if the information is released up front. Young producers often ignore the numbers, however, hoping to boost the value of the project through the killer big idea. Furthermore, if the job cannot be done and has no money, please explain that before bidding. Don’t ask four production companies to bid on a job that never existed.

Procurement experts P&G have taken cost discovery to an extreme. They push aggressively on budgets, get a yes and push even harder the next time. Their theory is that until they hit bottom, there’s always more fat to cut out.

Production companies also worry about honest budget discussions with the producer. They worry that they are the only vendor who is honest about the project details upfront and gets dropped early from the bid. Lack of trust on both sides results in unnecessary and expensive guessing games.