Beware Sony Crackle ‘Fame’: Video Talent on the Cheap
When you look in the mirror do you see a filmaker? Sony is wagering $15,000 in prize money that you do!
What is hotter than YouTube snack-sized friends and family clip culture? Professionally produced video content developed on behalf of mega brands and entertainment companies, at user-generated-content sticker prices!
“Get famous,” is the new Sony motto!
Sony acquired user generated video sharing site Grouper last year for a cool $65 million and has since done an about face with the property: Grouper is now called Crackle, independent videographers are being courted instead of your friends or family AND video contests rule.
The Crackle tag line: “innovative platform to achieve fame.” What is the real Sony corporate end-game? Developing an “open studio model.” In other words, grabbing video talent on the cheap.
Sony aims to lure orignal, high-quality, independently produced videos via competitions dangling visions of “world-renowned fame partnerships”:
Crackle catapults top creators to fame with on-going access and exposure to leaders in the entertainment industry.
Sound too good to be true? State lotteries only require a “dollar and a dream” for a chance at hitting the jackpot. A shot at the Sony jackpot, however, not only comes at a price, winners are not even guaranteed the lauded fame.
“Win a pitch meeting with Columbia Pictures,” proclaims Crackle. What’s the real deal? The Grand Prize for the submit your own original short contest is a $15,000 not so necessarily grand, qualified ”development deal”:
- Development Deal includes $15,000 from Crackle Studios.
- Crackle Studios will own treatment, materials and all elements (collectively, “Material”).
- Crackle Studios is under no obligation to produce Material.
- All aspects of the Development Deal are subject to Crackle Studios’ standard Terms and Conditions.
What are some of those “Terms and Conditions?”
While Sony asserts ”you retain all of your ownership rights to your Submissions” it also disclaims:
When you provide Crackle with a Submission, you grant to Crackle and its affiliates, representatives, and assigns a non-exclusive, fully-paid, world-wide, transferable, royalty-free license, with the right to grant sublicenses through multiple tiers of sublicensees, to display, publicly perform, distribute (including, without limitation, through third-party Web sites), store, transcode, broadcast, transmit, reproduce, edit, modify, create derivative works, and otherwise use and reuse your Submissions (or any portions or derivative works thereof) in any manner, in any medium now known or hereinafter created, for any purpose.
You acknowledge and agree that: (a) you have no expectation of compensation or confidentiality of any nature with respect to any Submission and (b) Crackle and/or its affiliates may already have projects under consideration that are similar to a Submission or may independently develop projects that are unintentionally similar to a Submission.
Enter at your own risk, in other words; Fame can be very fickle.
In making its PR pitches for the Crackle debut, Sony execs are touting a development budget in the “mid-seven figures.” At Crackle, however, Sony proposes an eventual one grand prize winner of its short video contest a “five-figure” payout on a non-guaranteed development deal.
The Crackle vision of fame for independent video creators appears as fleeting as fame itself.
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