Interview with K CEO at CEDIA 2022

[steelman1991]

Haven't seen this posted here, but an interview with the CEO of Kaleidescape with "Youthman". Reckon there's a bit of poetic licence in the title mind you.

 

[Oldred]

Wasn't sure this was a great interview by Youthman TBH. I have watched his home cinema reviews etc and they are an enjoyable 'watch' but this interview feels like it needed a bit more prep and lot of editing. I can imagine that he was doing a bunch of this stuff at Cedia.

 

[cinelife]

I think part of it is the more spontaneous nature of interviewing at CEDIA. Most of these folks just walk the floor looking for interviews, so I don't think there's much prep, if any.

Jim

 

[HTRaleigh]

I thought Tayloe represented Kaleidescape well. Overall I thought Michael’s interview was fine. Not polished but he got Tayloe to answer more than the typical elevator sales pitch.

 

[thrillcat]

Having also spent a great deal of time gathering interviews at CEDIA last week, it's not easy. Even the scheduled interviews that you've fully prepared for end up being rushed, trying to find a spot to film without being disturbed, making sure the audio is clean and clear, and knowing there's a line of folks waiting to talk to your interviewee. Even the most professional folks can be easily frazzled.

I did 16 interviews throughout the show, plus having to manage everything else the goes with them. It's not easy.

 

[alexbeans]

Maybe 2023 we will get better software updates.

 

[Oldred]

Having also spent a great deal of time gathering interviews at CEDIA last week, it's not easy. Even the scheduled interviews that you've fully prepared for end up being rushed, trying to find a spot to film without being disturbed, making sure the audio is clean and clear, and knowing there's a line of folks waiting to talk to your interviewee. Even the most professional folks can be easily frazzled.

I did 16 interviews throughout the show, plus having to manage everything else the goes with them. It's not easy.

Absolutely, that’s what I was alluding to with with the last comment. Tough gig as they say.

 

[TrackZ]

The interview was a little stunted, yeah, and as mentioned this is not the easiest thing to do. Good things have happened under Tayloe, and I'm friends with Youthman, so respect to both of them.

The actual issue to me is "HUGE news". There wasn't any. I'm pretty down on K overall for CEDIA this year. I have a video of my own coming on the subject and my take. There is credit where credit is due in that K really seemed to own the show, the women in tech event, and other good things are worth applauding. On the other hand though, we received virtually nothing in terms of news, surprises, announcements, or anything. Josh.ai is another marketing partnership and larger drives in the same Terra for more $$$$$ isn't news.

 

[steelman1991]

The actual issue to me is "HUGE news". There wasn't any. I'm pretty down on K overall for CEDIA this year. I have a video of my own coming on the subject and my take. There is credit where credit is due in that K really seemed to own the show, the women in tech event, and other good things are worth applauding. On the other hand though, we received virtually nothing in terms of news, surprises, announcements, or anything. Josh.ai is another marketing partnership and larger drives in the same Terra for more $$$$$ isn't news.

Precisely, hence my comment on the "poetic licence" lol

 

[David23]

Tayloe says K doesn't make any money on the sale of content. Is that true? How are other ESTs, such as Vudu, making profits if they don't have hardware to sell? And Ks prices are higher than everyone else. Are the studios just ruthless with K and taking a higher percentage?

 

[Oldred]

Tayloe says K doesn't make any money on the sale of content. Is that true? How are other ESTs, such as Vudu, making profits if they don't have hardware to sell? And Ks prices are higher than everyone else. Are the studios just ruthless with K and taking a higher percentage?

He also said the studios pretty much set the price. I haven’t played it back to get the exact quote but it was certainly that message.

 

[AlienW]

K has to make a percentage off of store sales. Why would a company go through all the effort to run a store, make their own encoding of each new movie's mezzanine files, 'review every frame', 'fix problems' etc... just to make nothing from the deal?

Not that long ago it was implied that we should be supporting the store with full price purchases instead of using D2D discounts and UV rights (when that was still a thing) to increase the size of our libraries. Leveraging the latter too much was considered to be something approaching dishonest usage of K's resources.

Supporting the Kaleidescape Store

While I'm not looking to upset anyone here with these comments, I feel it's important enough a subject to voice it in the Forum. This is not a one-way blog, your comments matter as well, and being among other things a lawyer, I recognize that reasonable minds may differ. I'll say it plainly...

www.kscapeowners.com

 

[Oldred]

K has to make a percentage off of store sales. Why would a company go through all the effort to run a store, make their own encoding of each new movie's mezzanine files, 'review every frame', 'fix problems' etc... just to make nothing from the deal?

Not that long ago it was implied that we should be supporting the store with full price purchases instead of using D2D discounts and UV rights (when that was still a thing) to increase the size of our libraries. Leveraging the latter too much was considered to be something approaching dishonest usage of K's resources.

Supporting the Kaleidescape Store

While I'm not looking to upset anyone here with these comments, I feel it's important enough a subject to voice it in the Forum. This is not a one-way blog, your comments matter as well, and being among other things a lawyer, I recognize that reasonable minds may differ. I'll say it plainly...

www.kscapeowners.com

The CEO didn’t say they didn’t earn anything at all.

 

[alexbeans]

Yes. K has to make a percentage off of the store sales. If they are relying only on hardware, they will surely go out of business and close shop because they are surely not moving units if the price to enter the ecosystem is a minimum of $9k.

Why do K need to 'review every frame'? If it's just so that they can generate 'time stamps' for special scenes in the movie or decide which scenes to lower the shades, turn on the lights, etc. Do we really need all that jazz? I much rather pay the same price that I would pay for a Bluray or a 4k Bluray equivalent. Yes, I know that digital movies should cost less, but that's not how studios see this.

When a 4k Bluray becomes a catalog movie and is no longer a new release, we usually see a drop in price. If we see the same for K's catalog of movies, maybe we won't see so many people complaining about the movie prices as much.

I own over 2000 physical disks (and still buying) and would benefit from the D2D program if I had an Alto player. I'm just waiting for K to come out with a Disc Reader. But if abandoning the D2D program will help the K movie store to help reduce movie prices, I'm all for it.

 

[AlienW]

I believe the 'review every frame' comment is more of a figure of speech to summarize the effort that goes into K creating their own encoding of the movie from the studio mezzanine file masters. This process was described somewhere and the TLDR version is that they don't just press a 'go' button and automatically upload the results. There is a level of effort that goes into optimizing the compression settings and verifying the resultant movie 'file' for quality.

This does not apply to all movies in the store as many movies of Blu-ray quality and DVD quality are the same content as what was put on a physical disc.

 

[Oldred]

I went back and hopefully have captured what he actually said. ‘We don’t actually make any money on content, so the pricing is largely set by the studios.’

By this I suspect he means they don’t make a profit on content with the K element of content prices being consumed by the cost of prep/staging etc etc etc. I would believe this, because for the CEO to say it out loud on the record if it wasn’t the case would compromise their relationships with studios and that is the last thing he can afford to do. If it wasn’t true then I am sure every studio will be responding.

Scale isn’t K’s friend here (or ours). Their overhead costs for content management are spread across a relatively small base compared to the huge streaming companies and so per movie that must be significantly larger. Like it or not K owners are a niche market rather than mainstream and realistically I don’t see that we can look to Kaleidescape to subsidise studios pricing or supply it without covering costs. It’s not as if they can fund this temporarily while they grow to the size of Netflix because that will never happen. The variance in pricing between and even within studios is weird but excluding errors sounds largely if not entirely studio driven. I.e. I doubt it’s literally a flat incremental cost. The volumes here for studios are likely insignificant and I doubt it attracts much of their attention.

 

[SimonSays]

I own over 2000 physical disks (and still buying) and would benefit from the D2D program if I had an Alto player. I'm just waiting for K to come out with a Disc Reader. But if abandoning the D2D program will help the K movie store to help reduce movie prices, I'm all for it.

I talked to a long-term K Support person the other day, and brought it up with him. He said the current model for D2D is to go through your dealer to request an Alto for cataloguing your collection, as those are supported directly through K. They want to move to a full digital download model, so the chance they'll add a disc reader for 4K BD is close to 0.

Frankly, I would prefer an integration with MoviesAnywhere, where MA is used solely to establish ownership of any movie, and not (necessarily) where K-bought movies are then made available on MA platforms too, or where MA movies are made available for free on K. Happy to pay a nominal fee ($3-5) to upgrade to a K download. Pretty sure that would help a lot of people make the jump to the K platform.

 

[alexbeans]

I talked to a long-term K Support person the other day, and brought it up with him. He said the current model for D2D is to go through your dealer to request an Alto for cataloguing your collection, as those are supported directly through K. They want to move to a full digital download model, so the chance they'll add a disc reader for 4K BD is close to 0.

Frankly, I would prefer an integration with MoviesAnywhere, where MA is used solely to establish ownership of any movie, and not (necessarily) where K-bought movies are then made available on MA platforms too, or where MA movies are made available for free on K. Happy to pay a nominal fee ($3-5) to upgrade to a K download. Pretty sure that would help a lot of people make the jump to the K platform.

Thanks Simon. Since I bought my system at Best Buy and financed it for 2-years, I don't have a dealer.
I too would be happy in converting movies from my VUDU catalog into K for a nominal fee. I have a huge catalog because I made sure to redeem all the movie codes even though I have never watch a single movie in my VUDU app. But I do share my account for family members outside my household.
But that's all wishful thinking. D2D or any alternative means of converting your movies will not benefit K financially. And I don't really want K to go out of business as I'm too invested already.

 

[cinelife]

Thanks Simon. Since I bought my system at Best Buy and financed it for 2-years, I don't have a dealer.
I too would be happy in converting movies from my VUDU catalog into K for a nominal fee. I have a huge catalog because I made sure to redeem all the movie codes even though I have never watch a single movie in my VUDU app. But I do share my account for family members outside my household.
But that's all wishful thinking. D2D or any alternative means of converting your movies will not benefit K financially. And I don't really want K to go out of business as I'm too invested already.

Reach out to me by PM and I'll work to loan you an Alto for Cataloging.

Jim

 

[SeriousSloth]

I don't care about two way MA integration, but I'd pay a few $/title if I could get MA access to titles I've bought on K. The lack of portability is a real long term issue for k purchases.