Hacker Cinema
Last Breath
2019 · Film · documentary · 85 min
Directed by Alex Parkinson, Richard Da Costa
A commercial diver is stranded on the seabed with only five minutes of oxygen supply, but with no chance of rescue for more than 30 minutes. With access to amazing archival footage, this is the true story of one man’s impossible fight for survival.
2 positive2 neutralfrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
Reminds of Chris Lemons, who survived for 30+ minutes without oxygen at the bottom of the North Sea. Cold water (and experience, like staying calm) probably played a large part. He went back to diving a few weeks after!
They made a movie about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Breath_(2019_film)
Reminds me of the documentary film Last Breath, telling the story of deep sea diver Chris Lemons.
The issue here is that no matter how "engaging" discovery is, it's not a viable business model on its own.
I'm working on the topic day to day in an adjacent field (movie & TV show discovery) and I'm currently not aware of any startup that has managed making money with the discovery experience itself.
It takes a lot of effort, data and persistence to get reasonable algorithms churning out something sensible and then, nobody wants to pay for it. If anything, it's usually an upsell to monetizing the content itself, which is why the only serious contenders to me here are basically Youtube and Spotify.
Even Netflix "had it all" with the million dollar recommender prize they set out in 2014, and I know their data science team is top notch. But if I scroll through their experience with my personal account in 2021, I basically still get "what all others are currently watching in {your_country} now" and I'm less than thrilled.
And that's exactly because once you've got the perfect algo together that would be able to recommend you that niche movie Netflix features you've never seen in the interface that you're _really_ interested in (I can recommend "Last Breath" in that regard), the VP Content comes in and tells everyone something like "hey folks, whatever you do, make sure you're only promoting our originals, because they cost us far less in licensing... oh and let's give an extra in-your-face boost to King's Gambler to give it that extra buzz that lands us in Variety"
Discovery is hard, and once you made a name there, it's rather easy to screw it up by monetizing it.
There is a great documentary about the Finnish cave divers. "Diving into the unknown": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_into_the_Unknown
"Last breath" is also a really good documentary about rescue under water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Breath_(2019_film)
Both of these I rate 5/5