It's hard for me to be sympathetic for some media just because they have higher costs. As the interminable stream of kitten free videos demonstrates, entertainment does not need to be expensive.

So maybe we are talking about "art" in some sense? Even art doesn't need to be expensive now. Cameras are cheap. Simple video editing software is relatively cheap (or free even). You could remake classics like "Twelve Angry Men" and film a relatively minimalist production of "Hamlet" for less than the cost of a new economy car (assuming your small cast and crew work for shares of revenue). I think critically successful movies like "Primer" and "El Mariachi" demonstrate that rather well.

> ...while having very little appreciation of how the majority of films get made...

I get how they're made. But I honestly don't care. Cheap media are just new forms of disruption, if you ask me.

I like me some kittens as much as the next guy, but it's a different sort of product. When I want to watch a movie, 2 hours of kittens aren't a good substitute, the same way that I sometimes prefer to curl up with a good book rather than spend more time reading comments on HN or tweets on Twitter.

It's not that you should be sympathetic to those media with higher costs, as that such art forms couldn't come to be absent some system of copyright in the first place, and the fact of consistent demand over the last century shows that those kinds of entertainment have huge economic utility for consumers. Again, I'm not arguing for the Disney perpetual copyright approach here, but especially in this era of virtually cost- and effort-free digital copying, you can't realistically plan to recoup your production investment without some sort of way to assert authorship.

film a relatively minimalist production of "Hamlet" for less than the cost of a new economy car (assuming your small cast and crew work for shares of revenue)

You can, indeed. But this is itself a problem: actors and crew need to work to gain experience and exposure, but more and more often they're asked to work for free. It's very very hard to get those shares of revenue to turn into anything resembling cash, especially if you don't have a budget for marketing, and so people, especially crew, are constantly being asked to work long days without even getting paid minimum wage, because returns are so uncertain. Without some sort of reasonably robust copyright system, the incentives to do that get even worse.

I think critically successful movies like "Primer" and "El Mariachi" demonstrate that rather well.

Not as well as you imagine; bear in mind that the tiny #s you hear about associated with films like this are part of the marketing in just the same way as big budgets on blockbuster movies. Primer is a very good idea in a pretty bad film - a fair bit of its apparent complexity comes from obscurity, eg the scenes at the party later in the film are hard to figure out because you can't see what's going on on the screen very well. I like reading the script more than watching it. And I think it's kind of significant that despite the success of Primer Carruth has only made one other film, Upstream Color, which most people outside the experimental film community find incoherent at best.

El Mariachi got nearly $1m of additional post-production work (paid for by the distributor) to fix the soundtrack - originally the scenes were recorded without sound and Rodriguez had the actors repeat their lines into a tape recorder afterwards - and to do a proper film transfer, vs the videotaped version shown at Sundance. But nobody outside of the filmmaker community talks about that (although it's no secret, Rodriguez detailed it at length in a book he wrote and is great about sharing his knowledge in general). Plus, even the figure for production costs are a bit deceptive; Rodriguez got loaned a lot of equipment for free, and shot in a town in Mexico where he was able to borrow guns from the local police through a personal connection, among various other freebies.

It's somewhat the same problem with distributed patronage. It does work much better for episodic stuff as well as issue-driven documentaries and so on. But if you're limited to that approach then you're looking at no long-form stories, no historical fiction/fantasy/sci-fi and so forth, because of the up-front costs involved. Cameras and media storage are much cheaper than they used to be, but you still need things like lighting, props, locations, costumes and so on. The best prospect on teh horizon is Title III (equity) crowdfunding, where you are actually able to sell ownership units in the film rather than having to do a separate campaign of rewards/swag in return for donations. The Kickstarter/IndieGogog model has a lot going for it, but it strongly favors established rather than new properties.

The model for films today seems to be mostly driven by critic reviews, 2 minute trailers, and whatever all your friends are seeing at the cinema that weekend, which doesn't seem like a particularly good model either.

It's not so bad - people within the industry know how it works and there are established strategies for how to launch films of different budget levels. Bear in mind that the theatrical release is (except for the very largest films) basically just a marketing campaign for the DVD/streaming release. The fact of a film having played in theaters is an economic signal to consumers that it will provide a certain minimum level of technical quality.