John Lagomarsino
Video · Photography · Music · Motion Graphics

Last week, Netflix announced that it would be spinning off its physical disc rental business and rebranding it as “Qwikster.” A lot of pundits seem to think this is totally crazy, and anti-consumer. Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO, has said multiple times that this move is forward-thinking, and will position the company better in the future. My suspicion (and I’m surprised I haven’t heard this elsewhere) is that this will indeed purposely kill their disc rental business, but it will also bolster their streaming offering pretty drastically.

Netflix has become a behemoth of a service. Blockbuster, their closest competitor in the disc rental space, was driven to Chapter 11, and Redbox isn’t really competing much at all with their kiosks. Other than those two, can anyone even name another disc rental chain? Netflix completely dominates physical rentals, which means that the majority of rental licenses paid to film studios comes from Netflix. In a nutshell, the rental business belongs to Netflix.

I suspect many of Quikster’s subscribers will wind up there just because they were Netflix subscribers. If that service fails, I doubt many will go out and seek a new disc rental option. They’ll learn to embrace streaming instead. This leaves the lion’s share of rental customers leaving physical discs behind altogether.

Then, what do content owners do? If the whole disc rental market tanks completely, there are vast swaths of content that no one can rent. Studios will have to make more of their catalogues available through steaming in order to make any money on those properties at all.

I think Qwikster is a calculated move not just to kill Netflix’s disc rental business, but to kill disc rentals entirely. Reed Hastings is making the bet that without the old-time distraction of physical disc rentals, the studios will be forced to focus on new streaming licenses, and Netflix will be ready and waiting to negotiate them. And that’s great news for consumers.

Family vacations can be mundane, but today was a little different. We took a little drive over to the Ostrich Farm!

The ostriches start out in the incubator, and when they’re about two weeks old, they wind up outside in the nursery.

Once they’re old enough, they’re moved to their permanent pens, where they pose for pictures. This one says “hey.”

Most of them are paired up. These two wouldn’t leave each other’s sides.

And of course, they love it when vistors come with gifts of food!

A side-effect of my years-long home video project is that I’m sifting through all the old media that’s lying around my hard drives. I found a few recently that are especially funny considering what I do for a living now. Let’s take a stroll through memory lane.

A little history. While all the other kids were outside learning how to play sports, or even play video games, I was too busy messing around with cameras and computers trying to make what the Big Kids did on TV. Around my ninth birthday (judging from file dates), my parents got me this thing called a QuickCam. It hooked up to your computer via serial port, had an apparent resolution of 320×240, and was black & white.

If you were recording live-action video with it, the frame rate was limited to something like 15fps, which is really noticeable to the eye. It had pretty poor optics, too, so the shutter had to be open a really long time. The result was choppy, streaky video that looked nothing like TV. Unacceptable to nine-year-old me.

But wait! It also shot frame-by-frame stop motion, and those movies would come out at 30fps. Big win. According to the files I found, I started doing this the morning after my birthday. Here’s the first attempt:

Not bad. Short, sweet, to the point. A couple months later, things got a little more complicated.

It’s got a plot, it’s whimsical, and it attempts some Looney Tunes-esque gags. Plus, everyone loves a panda wearing a T-shirt, right? Let’s move on.

The obligatory Gumby movie. Now we’re cooking. It’s got action, a plot, multiple shots, and a twist ending. I must have felt pretty good about this, because to my knowledge this was the end of the stop-motion QuickCam videos. Or maybe I just thought black & white was too limiting.

My showreel from the past few years. Portions of this video were created while working at Art Meets Commerce and Serino/Coyne.

Suzanne and Vin, at their NYC wedding.

My grandfather and cousin at a family wedding.

The creators of STOMP hold open auditions in NYC. I shot and edited this piece at Serino/Coyne.

The opening night festivities at Broadway’s “How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” starring Daniel Radcliffe and John Larroquette. I shot and edited this piece. Produced at Serino/Coyne.