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by David Averbach, Liz Manashil, and Orly Ravid

Next week, The Film Collaborative is holding a free virtual distribution conference, Distribution Days, which will offer concrete takeaways on the state of indie distribution and how filmmakers can navigate it. Attendees will hear from exhibitors, distributors, consultants, and filmmakers, some with case studies, as they describe and reflect on the landscape.

This conference hopes to help filmmakers develop critical thinking skills around distribution by looking at what is and what is not viable within a traditional distribution framework. It will also offer some alternative approaches. Willful blindness or a doomsday mindset are equally unproductive.

So, we are offering this pre-conference primer to set the tone, take stock of what myths are out there, and talk about what thought leaders in this space are coming up with as ways to deal with the current landscape.

Here we go!

Remember the days when creators and distributors were lying back in their easy chairs, proclaiming their satisfaction with how independent cinema has been evaluated by the marketplace? Yeah, we don’t either…and we’ve been in the industry (in the U.S.) for more than two decades. Nevertheless, there is a pervading sense that the state of independent film has never been worse—and that we’ve been going downhill from this mythic “better place” ever since Sundance was founded in 1978.

Why do we insist on bemoaning a Paradise Lost when the truth is that being a filmmaker has never been a paradise? Filmmakers have always been confronted with predatory distributors, dense and confusing contract language, onerous term lengths, noncollaborative partners, lack of transparency, and anemic support, if any (just to name a few). For an industry that prides itself on creating and shaping stories that speak to diverse audiences, we should be better at articulating truer narratives about our field.

It doesn’t help that, at Sundance this past year, all one could talk about was how streamers were “less interested in independent film than a few years ago, preferring [instead] to fund movie production internally or lean on movies that they’ve licensed” and how Sundance itself was “financially struggling, presenting fewer films than in previous years and using fewer venues.” (https://www.thewrap.com/sundance-indie-film-struggles-working-business-model) Still others like Megan Gilbride and Rebecca Green in their Dear Producer blog have put forth ideas how Sundance should be reinvented completely.

But we all know that independent film isn’t just about Sundance. We have heard a lot of discussion recently about the need to reshape the narratives we tell ourselves regarding the state of the independent film industry.

Distribution Advocates, which is also doing great work chasing the myths vs. the realities of the field, also believes that we must all question “some of our deepest-held beliefs about how independent films get made and released, and who profits from them.”

In their podcast episode about Exhibition, economist Matt Stoller remarked how “weird” it is that even with all the technology we possess connect audiences, we’re still so “atomized” that all that rises to the top is whatever appears in the algorithm Netflix chooses for us in the first few lines of key art when we log in (and we will note that even the version of the key art you see is itself based on an algorithm).

But is it really all that strange? One of the main reasons that myths exist is that someone is profiting from perpetuating them. The same with networks and platforms and algorithms. And the more layers of middlemen and gatekeepers there are, the harder it is for us to see the forest for the trees. Keeping us in our algorithmically determined silos numbs us into not minding (actually preferring) that we are watching things—or bingeing things—from the safety and comfort of our living rooms. The ability to discover on our own content that aligns with our true interests or consuming content in a communal space has disappeared the same way that the act of handwriting has…we used to be able to do it but haven’t done it in so long that it feels unnatural and too time-consuming to deal with.

Brian Newman / Sub-Genre Media acknowledges that the problems remain real, but that what everyone is calling crisis levels seems to him merely a return to norms that were in place before the bubble burst. No one, he says, is coming to rescue “independent film”—certainly not the streaming platforms, which merely used it as necessary to build a consumer base.

Many have posited myriad ideas about how to bypass the gatekeepers. Newman echoed what TFC has been recently discussion internally: that instead of many competing ideas, we need them to be merged into one bigger idea/solution. Like, for example, an overarching solution layer run by a nonprofit on top of each public exhibition avenue that will aggregate data and help filmmakers connect audiences to their content. A similar idea was also discussed at the last meeting of the Filmmaker Distribution Collective in the context of getting audiences into theaters.

By exclaiming that “No one is coming to the rescue,” Brian really means that we are all in this together, and that it’s going to take a village.

We agree, but a finer point needs to be made.

Every choice we make moving forward—whether you are a filmmaker, distributor, theater owner, or festival programmer, what have you—could possibly be distilled into either a decision for the independent filmmaking public good…or for one’s own professional interest. Saying that a non-profit should come in and offer a solution layer to aggregate data is all well and good until it threatens to put out of business someone whose livelihood is based on acquiring and trafficking in that data. How refreshing was it to be reminded at Getting Real by Mads K. Mikkelsen of CPH:DOX that his festival has no World Premiere requirements? It reminds us of the horrible posturing and gatekeeping film festivals do in the name of remaining relevant and innovative. For us to truly grow out of the predicament we are in, some of us are going to have to voluntarily release some of the controls to which we are so tightly clutching.

Keri Putnam & Barbara Twist have an excellent presentation on the progress of a dataset they are putting together of who is watching documentaries from 2017 – 2022. They provide some other data that was very sobering:

Film festivals: comparing 2019 numbers to 2023 – there was a 40% drop in attendance;
Theatrical: most docs are not released in theaters and attendance is down even for those that are released.

But they also note that there is really great work being done in the non-theatrical space— community centers, museums, libraries – that is not tracked by data. TFC’s Distribution Days offers two sessions on event theatrical and impact distribution, so we’ll be able to see a tiny bit of that data during the conference.

We also know that the educational market is still healthy, and that so many have remarked of the importance of getting young people interested in film…so we have three sessions where we hear from the Acquisitions Directors of 11 different educational distributors.

We also have a panel from folks in the EU who will provide advice on the landscape and how best to exploit films internationally and carve our rights and territories per partner. And we’ll speak to all-rights distributors about what kinds of films they see doing well, what they are doing to support filmmakers—and what their value proposition is in this marketplace.

We have a great panel on accessibility, and two others that relate to festivals and legal agreements.

Starting off with a keynote from noted distribution consultant and impact strategist Mia Bruno, the 2-day conference aims to summarize the state of the industry while providing thought provoking conversations to inspire disruption, facilitate effective collaboration, and to aid broken hearts.

Regardless of whether current days are better or worse than the heydays of Sundance and the independent film of yesteryear, Distribution Days will identify the current obstacles of the independent film distribution landscape, and what we can hold on to—as a commonality—to evolve the landscape together in the future.

If you look a little deeper, you will see that, despite all the challenges, filmmakers have and can still achieve “success” when they understand the terrain, (sometimes) work with multiple partners with a bifurcated strategy, protect themselves contractually, and maintain and grow their own personal audience.

We hope you will join us. And for those of you that cannot make all of the sessions we are offering live on May 2 & 3, you’ll be able to catch up on what you missed via The Film Collaborative website after the conference is over.

We look forward to seeing you next week! And if you have not registered yet, you can do so for free at this link.

David Averbach April 25th, 2024

Posted In: case studies, Digital Distribution, Distribution, Distribution Platforms, DIY, Documentaries, education, Film Festivals, International Sales, Legal, Marketing, Theatrical

by Orly Ravid

After participating in the Film Bazaar market in India (connected to the International Film Festival of India, now in Goa), I decided to investigate the distribution potential in India, specifically VOD and Blockchain and the distribution potential for independent cinema.

A 2018 report in Business Today noted that the OTT market in India is worth ½ billion and will grow to be 5 billion by 2023 with Fox’s Hotstar leading with 75 million subscribers with American companies such as Netflix and Amazon in hot pursuit. The reason for the growth is rising affluence and adoption across demographics including in rural areas. Today, the VOD market is AVOD-dominated but Business Today anticipates a flip with AVOD going down and SVOD and TVOD doubling from their present estimated 18% of the market.

This is fun—search “Film distribution in India” on Google and you get a nice scroll of logos with links to a bunch of companies. And you can find a list on Wikipedia.

At Film Bazaar I interviewed a couple of top players in the VOD distribution space, and also MinersINC, a new Blockchain distribution platform/service.

First, I spoke to Ajay Chacko is Co-founder & CEO of Arré, one of the country’s foremost original digital content brands. Arré was founded in 2015 by B. Saikumar, Ajay Chacko & Sanjay Ray Chaudhuri. Arré offers multimedia content across genres & formats and has won many international & domestic awards & accolades for its work in digital fiction & non-fiction. Arré Studio is also working on large-format original shows in collaboration with domestic and international OTT platforms as well as broadcast television networks. Ajay has over 2 decades of experience in media & financial services. He spent over a decade with Network18 and was Group COO and also President A+E – TV18 JV in his last held roles with the Group. He has also worked with IL&FS, Sharekhan and the Indian Express Group prior to his stint with Network18. The company’s website can be found here.

Q [to Ajay Chacko of Arré]: What are key trends today in India with respect to audiences/consumers getting content (please comment on both type of content and means of consumption/viewing (technology and price model))?:

A: The Indian digital media market has seen renewed traction ever since data prices crashed with the advent of JIO & the subsequent competitive intensity in the telecom market; the digital media audience is approaching the 400 million mark. More than (>)85% of content consumed is on the mobilewith the structure of consumption now pretty much getting aligned to what it was in the case of TV but with a different idiom i.e. audiences are watching long form shows and movies, albeit on-demand and of the kind they’d like to watch. This has also created a boom in original content commissioned by OTT platformssince TV content in India has isn’t really working when it comes to individual level consumption (remember India is a single TV household where most programming was catering to semi-urban and rural housewives since they formed the primary ratings driven chunk of viewership). The granularity of the Indian market is reflected by its languages and consumption driven by regional and national languages – these trend in the long run to be 50/50 or thereabouts (Hindi: Regional Indian languages like Bengali, Tamil, Telegu, Marathi etc.). The current roughly 800 million TV audiences which is fairly penetrated has reflected this trend and this is also showing up in digital with YouTube India reporting that almost half of its 200 million+ audience is coming from regional markets/ watching regional language content. Video market for English content is at the ‘uppermost socio-economic’ strata but it has never exceeded 4-5% of the overall pie. In fact, English TV entertainment did not cross 2% market share despite it being present in India for over two decades.

India has also been a predominantly ad-funded marketwhen it comes to even fiction/ entertainment. Currently the OTT space is 95%+ AVOD (audience numbers) and some players like Netflix, Amazon, Alt Balaji, Eros Now etc. are trying to push a subscription- based model with some degree of success. Even after 2.5 decades of the existence of cable TV with over 500 channels, India still remains a 70%+ advertising driven market and cable/ pay TV subscription packs are available for 300+ channels at less than 2.5 dollars a month.The consumption trend when it comes to the ‘pay for content’ aspect is still pretty much in the Indian idiom of being ad-driven (various models have emerged here – for example brand integrations into stories has also emerged as an important line of revenue for Independent content players as well as some AVOD platforms).

Q: What about piracy concerns and copyright infringement / protection in India?

A: Piracy has always been an issue in India though I would not put it to be the number one problem as most content in India is freely available since its ad driven/ AVOD. There are many steps being taken by industry associations to help tackle piracy when it comes to music and movies with some degree of success. Digitization has also helped in freeing the movie business from the distribution related leakages.

Q: To what extent is there an appetite / market for American independent cinema in India?

A: Like I mentioned in my earlier point, American Indie cinema has limited appeal, maybe restricted to the top tier of film-buffs etc. in terms of percentage share of the market. However, in terms numbers due to the sheer size of the market there maybe opportunities to have a couple of hundred thousand folks access these thru digital platforms/ OTT services.

Q: I hear documentaries are more popular in India than they used to be in large part due to services such as Netflix—what can you say about that?

A: Much as one would love for this to be true, it isn’t. Docs haven’t really taken off in any meaningful way and one can spend an entire day analyzing why 🙂

A couple of stray examples really don’t break this trend.

Q: Please comment about Amazon, Netflix, and Blockchain with respect to your market (India).

A: The entry of international players like Netflix, Amazon etc. has hastened the process of creation of quality original programming made for digital. This is an important breakthrough in the Indian market and a lot of the OTT platforms (who were banking on catchup tv content) now have realized that they need to up their game and come up with quality original programming in Indian and regional languages. This has thrown up a lot of opportunity for creators, film-makers who were earlier left out of the TV boom as that idiom of programming was considered regressive by most. So, I am hoping that one would see a deluge of quality original programming targeted at various demographics and geographies coming out of India in the near term. As for Arré, we are already working on over 140 hours of high-quality original shows (some for our own platform and a few in partnership with some of the domestic and international OTT players).

On Blockchain, I believe it’s a tad early, but it helps really disintermediate efficiently and this may be a boon for independent film makers and creators.

Then, I spoke to Suri Gopalanis, the Founder of Vista India Digital Media Inc., which distributes to the largest Indian studios and broadcasters with a focus on featuring films prominently on its partner platforms. Vista’s client list includes Red Chillies, Sun Network, Viacom18, Balaji Motion Pictures, Disney UTV, among others. Vista claims to be a pioneer in taking regional films on OTT platforms and having successfully delivered content in Indian languages like Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Kannada, Punjabi, Oriya, Assamese and Gujarati across all our digital platforms. The company’s website can be found here.

[Suru Gopalanis of Vista India Digital Media Inc.]: With a remarkably young population and low cost of bandwidth, the Indian market has seen explosive growth in online video. While YouTube continues to dominate AVOD, we have a hyper-competitive OTT space (both domestic and International players) operating at all the different segments. As of now, we have over 32 platformswith financial muscle fighting for a pie of the Indian market which is expected to touch $ 5 billion by 2023. While primary consumption is still on mobile devices it is expected to gravitate towards TV with dongles and apps built into TV sets.

India is a price sensitive market. With average cable bundling at less than $2.00 per month, the ability for Indian consumers to pay in comparison to International markets still remains to be proven. Having said that, there are a number of price tiers at work domestically with a mixture of AD (AVOD) and SVOD to provide maximum economic value to consumers.

India is a very diverse country with many different regional languages and audiences. The segmentation of this online is relatively easier compared to standard broadcast TV. This, in turn, is leading to a number of niche regional platforms emerging in the pay markets that are targeted via language and tastes.

Sports continues to the biggest driver both offline and online with Cricket dominating minutes watched. There has been a lot of inflows into content development as audience tastes are changing and continue to beinfluenced by what’s happening in the West.

Indian audiences have been habituated to YouTube which has grown very aggressively in India and continues to attract advertising dollars. Given the diversity of content consumption, it is little wonder that DIY content in a host of niches has found audiences on YouTube.

With so much of competition, there is a need to create differentiated content and almost all the platforms including YouTube are investing in new original shows to attract and retain eyeballs. We have seen a number of new shows which have been localized to multiple regional languages which is a new feature that OTT platforms have the advantage to experiment in.

In terms of independent features, there is not much good news. The consumption at this point appears to be to the big budget highly promoted features. Our hope is that a new generation of Indians will be more receptive to both foreign and Indian original films.

When at Film Bazaar I mentioned the launch of the Blockchain company to filmmakers and industry professionals the reaction was always extremely enthusiastic—It seems the right model for the market.…So I interviewed Nitin Narkhede, Founder & CEO of MinersINC, a new Blockchain platform/service that provides a unique opportunity to watch critically acclaimed films in India:

[Nitin Narkhede of MinersINC]: 2018 saw a progressive step forward for Indian independent cinema when Rima Das’ Village Rockstars became the country’s entry to the Oscars Best Foreign Language Film category.A passion project where Das and her school going cousins got together with a bunch of village kids to write, shoot, edit and direct this film entirely on hand held camera—Village Rockstars embodies the untapped, underutilized potential of self-trained, inspired and independent filmmakers in the country. That there is an audience for such cinema is evident to a logical mind, yet often left un-catered to by the country’s established filmmaking, distribution and exhibition segments. Das’ lilting, surreally beautiful film released in over 30 theatres in Assam and West Bengal and stayed on for over a month in very limited multiplex screens in Delhi and Bangalore, cities with sizeable and concentrated diaspora from the state. Village Rockstars had been screened at 88 film festivals, won 44 awards including four Swarna Kamals, the highest honors offered by the National Film Awards (India), to finally claim a restricted space in movie theatres.

This film elucidates aptly the absolute lack of a distribution mechanism for small, substantial and freethinking cinema or entertainment content within India. Another prime example is Mukti Bhawan, an introspective and moving film about death, old age and detachment. This film won critical acclaim in ten of the most respected film festivals, found theatrical releases in Japan and Germany, territories where familiarity with Hindi as a language is sparse.

Yet, in India, it barely found sufficient screen space- ultimately nesting on an OTT platform for viewers. Films that don’t boast of stars, celebrity filmmakers or the wizardry associated with mainstream movie making do not have a mechanism for their exhibition and distribution. Notwithstanding recognition globally, international independent films also never make it to an Indian audience’s viewing menu. With OTT platforms emerging in the country, some expected the restrictions that independent films, faced from a traditional, profit oriented distribution-exhibition system to change. Unfortunately, change for the small film, which rides on passion for a good, relevant story, is barely visible.

OTT platforms from international giants offer varied content but stay firmly focused on star-driven films and shows. English language content is also preferred by these platforms. Small, substantial films find room in a space where glitzier behemoths dominate.

Over the years, what we’ve come to firmly believe is that there is a definite audience keen on watching quality films, engaging stories from across the world here in India. With the country’s aspirational youth, levels of interest in cinema beyond typical Hollywood and Bollywood are evident. Given the challenges of access for such content, piracy often becomes a habit. Increasingly, world cinema that is shown at the film festivals, Cinefan by Osian and MAMI, based in Mumbai, runs to packed auditoriums. These films travel from across the globe, ranging from Iran, to South American nations, to East Asia and Europe. Watching them is top priority for the keen Indian cinephile today.

myNK, the OTT platform from MinersINC firmly focuses on filling this gap between demand and distribution of quality world cinema. Utilizing Blockchain technology, it ensures a safe, assured distribution platform for filmmakers to access a whole new audience that has only just begun consuming content on smart phonesand hand held devices. Currently, approximately 299 million people use smartphones in India. Over time, this number is expected to grow to 499 million as Reliance Jio expands access to high-speed data at very low prices. This is a market for movie consumption that simply has no match in terms of reach and numbers. The Hollywood Reporter has argued in a well-researched column that OTT giants like Netflix and Amazon PrimeVideo are battling it out to grow their share of the Indian video on demand market; simply because the numbers of video in India are mind boggling. In a scenario when mobile phones will often become access point for one’s personalized entertainment choices, myNK’s offering of critically acclaimed and quality world cinema offers a never before opportunity to access content for cinephiles.

Rapidly evolving digital technologies and declining costs of filmmaking equipment has led to a growth in the number of filmmakers worldwide. Rima Das, as explained, provides the perfect example. Finding an audience for these films though holds a real challenge. Additional problems that emerge are, firstly, a shortage of screens. India has just 10 screens per million people. When films don’t get released, they run the risks of getting pirated.Combined with high costs of acquiring distribution for a film often leave the film producer with no profits. Aside from this oligopolistic distribution model controlling content that makes it to a film theatre, marketing, sales and publicity for films are huge additional costs. Adding to the woes of the creator, there is a huge market of illegal downloads. Lopsides royalties and revenue distributions further reduce a creator’s earnings.

Conventional distribution mechanisms work in silos, somewhere incapacitating filmmakers and producers financially. Blockchain technology, as used by MinersINC, can help in resolving this opaque situation making a radical positive change by empowering creators in the long run. Blockchain technology naturally extends to the fundamental framework of how digital media gets distributed. It is a peer-to-peer decentralized network that brings the filmmakers in direct contact with their consumers without passing through the archaic distribution system. It gives leeway to filmmakers to bypass the costly distribution mediums and distribute their films directly to consumers. It has the potential to liberate the filmmakers by putting them back in control of their work and gives them complete autonomy on how their content gets distributed and priced. Parellely, consumers are empowered as they get the freedom to chose from a global library of films.

myNK, a product created by MinersINC envisages creating an entertainment ecosystem that will liberalize the industry from oligopolistic distribution practices, revenue dilution across middlemen, piracy, revenue leakages, copyright issues, breach of contracts, lost monetization, non-transparent earnings and unjust right attributions. Apart from addressing the current set of challenges, myNK aims at achieving greater goals by weaving the entities and components together in a fabric of trust and transparency, work on business models that make value sets more direct, less intricate and more rewarding.

In the long term, myNK aims to use blockchain technology to build an autonomous marketplace for creators to discover the real worth of their creations based on market governed dynamic pricing principals and community-driven curation. Consumers would have a significant role to play as they would act as a prudent community who will be collectively responsible for reviewing, rating, distributing, recommending and doing intelligent curation of content.

myNK empowers the creator and the consumer in Indian entertainment. Focused on bringing independent, recognized quality films from across the world, it will encourage interactions within the community, creating social media that has a definitive purpose. For those who love and live cinema, this platform is a valuable new opportunity to access worthy content while adding to a democratic, fair and collective voice for quality over hype in entertainment.

The Film Collaborative has had little or no success with its American or European indies in India but is now trying again with a curated selection to be distributed via MinersINC. Here’s hoping! And we will write again to update about changes in the India VOD market and with respect to Blockchain distribution.

Orly Ravid February 4th, 2019

Posted In: blockchain, Blockchain, Digital Distribution, Distribution, Documentaries, International Sales

A recent online web series featured our founder, Orly Ravid, as well as some powerhouse guests in indie film producing and distribution, hosted by WestDocOnline. Here is what we learned from the 1 hour+ panel, primarily focused on documentaries.

Music clearance is important. Surprisingly, many new filmmakers do not realize that any music used in a film must be licensed, both the publishing (the person who wrote the song) and the master (the entity that recorded the song) rights must be secured. Distribution contracts cannot be signed if music clearance has not been secured on your film. This is especially crucial for anyone looking to make a music documentary. For a good primer on this, visit this article: A Filmmaker’s Guide to Music Licensing .
A devoted core fanbase can make a film successful. Richard Abramowitz named several documentaries that his company has theatrically distributed that had an excited and motivated fanbase that could be tapped into with less marketing money than a wide audience film.
There is value in having a global marketing campaign, rather than one territory at a time. Cristine Dewey of ro*co films champions the idea that if your domestic distributor is already launching a marketing campaign, much of which will be found by audiences outside of the U.S. because of online marketing, it makes sense to time theatrical releases in other countries to coincide.
Revenues from documentary sales. Netflix will pay anywhere from low 5 figures to high 6 or even 7 figures for documentaries. It depends on the film’s pedigree. Also, Amazon Festival Stars program was offering $200,000 to filmmakers at the Toronto International Film Festival in exchange for making Amazon Video Direct the exclusive SVOD home for the film. Filmmakers can wait up to 18 months to upload to the platform, allowing for further festival and theatrical revenue.
Distribution is a business. While it is all great and good to produce a film using credit cards, an iPhone and the good will of your friends, distribution is an integral part of the process and needs a budget. “In what world would someone say I have a great idea for a pencil. I’m going to raise $100,000 to make pencils. Then you have a warehouse filled with pencils, and then think about how you will get these into Staples? That’s not a business plan, that’s lunacy. But every day, people do that because this is art. Hope is not a strategy. You have to have a plan and you have to have a budget,” says Richard Abramowitz. “What’s the point of making the film if no one sees it?Marketing and distribution budgeting is the only way to assure the film will get seen and make an impact, short of an excellent marketing commitment by an honest distributor, something so relatively few documentary films enjoy,” said Orly Ravid.

To watch the full panel, find it below.

Sheri Candler January 10th, 2018

Posted In: Digital Distribution, Distribution, Distribution Platforms, Documentaries, International Sales, Marketing

Tags: Cristine Dewey, film distribution, Jonathan Dana, Orly Ravid, Richard Abramowitz, roco films, The Film Collaborative

CEO & Cofounder, FilmDoo by Orly Ravid.

I was introduced to indie film platform FilmDoo.com and decided to share it with you all here by asking FilmDoo some questions. I spoke to Weerada Sucharitkul, CEO & Co-Founder and most of what is below are Weerada’s own words in response to my questions.

What is FilmDoo’s Mission?

We help people to discover and watch great films from around the world, including documentaries and shorts. Essentially, we help people discover non-Hollywood films, which include independent films from the US and UK, as well as mainstream blockbuster films from China and Japan, for example. We not only help people to discover films but languages and regions, and are very much a ‘TripAdvisor for Films.’ On FilmDoo, you can discover films from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe, many of which we are the first to show internationally outside of film festivals. Furthermore, we also have a very engaged global film community (users can have an active social profile and leave reviews, comments as well as engage with other community members) and are an extensive international film database source, which is increasingly becoming an alternative to IMDB for foreign language films. As such, we are not only a VOD platform, we are more than that—a global database of foreign films as well as rapidly growing international community of film fans.

How does the platform work? What is FilmDoo’s Business Model?

FilmDoo’s current model is TVOD (pay-per-view) for feature films on the main FilmDoo site. We are a global online streaming platform and have the ability to sell and show films anywhere in the world. We are at over 500,000 visitors a month, with users from 194 countries. As we are increasingly getting a lot of traffic from emerging countries (e.g. Indonesia is now our second biggest traffic country, and countries like Turkey, India, Malaysia and Philippines make our Top 10 list), we are now looking at more ways to further monetize from these parts of the world and could be looking to do an AVOD model in these countries in the near future. We are able to geo-block for any country combination, and only require one month notice from filmmakers or content owners if they would like to change the geo-block country combination. We are able to accept transactions in UK Pound, US Dollar, Australian Dollar and Euro, as well as Paypal and AliPay (for Chinese-based users).

Which types of films do best on your platform?

Search ’gay movies’ and ’lesbian movies,’ and you will see we rank very high on Google from a SEO perspective. At the moment, their best selling category is LGBT films. FilmDoo claims to already have one of the biggest LGBT online film collections in the world. In terms of typical demographics, the audience base is a lot younger than typical ‘world cinema’ audience. They tend to be globally mobile, active on social media, speak many languages and/or learning languages, and come from an international or expatriate background (such as second generation French or Italian). Human rights documentaries have also tended to do well. As such, we see strong appeal for films that fit our current demographics: average age 22-39, young, learning languages, loves travelling and enjoys watching coming-of-age movies, first love movies, thriller movies, road movies, LGBT movies and human rights and social issues.

Where do most of your consumers live? Explain which countries.

Our current Top 10 countries by traffic, in order, include: 1. US, 2. Indonesia, 3. Turkey, 4. UK, 5. Turkey, 6. Malaysia, 7. Philippines, 8. Egypt, 9. Germany, and 10. Saudi Arabia. However, in terms of sales, our top selling countries include: US, UK, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Ireland, Norway, Netherlands and India. As you can appreciate, given the global nature of our traffic, for many in emerging countries in Asia and Africa, for example, the current TVOD price point is either too high for them, they do not have credit card or they are more used to an AVOD or free viewing model and not used to making transactions online. Hence why we are now exploring AVOD as an option to do more in the rest of the world.

What is the revenue split? Are there any costs recouped?

Revenue share is 70/30, same as iTunes. There are no costs to put the films on the FilmDoo platform, no further additional transcoding or ingestion costs. There are no marketing costs recouped either. The mission is to make it as easily and as flexible as possible for film makers to be able to put their films online at no additional costs and with maximum ease to be able to maximize their full global potential.

Some of their top selling content partners are LGBT content partners who have a collection of films with us and are able to make a decent sum month (I was asked not to share the exact sum publicly).” They note doing increasingly better for other film genres and collections. Launched in 2015, FilmDoo claims to be growing rapidly and expects to grow its catalog and audience.

Please speak to the simplicity, ease, and flexibility of the platform as far as geo-blocking, limiting territories, and the simple delivery, non-exclusivity…

Simplicity, ease and flexibility are absolutely at the heart of what we do at FilmDoo. Our goal is to reduce current barriers to international distribution in the film industry and most of all, to help films, especially films that have had their festival runs and may have already sold in a few territories, to continue to be able to monetize and reach their full global potential. That’s why we want to make it as easy as possible for them.

This includes:

Ability to geo-block to any country combination requirement, with only one month notice required if you need to make changes to this. We will be able to sell your film in any country.
We will try our best to work with your material—we can take both HD and SD files (where HD is not available), AppleProRes and H.264. We can accept the digital files via our FTP, WeTransfer, Aspera as well as any other way.
We can also accept film files sent to us in hard drives by post.
Where the films are not available digitally, we will also accept DVD/ Blurays and will digitize these at no additional costs to the film makers.
We do require that all films have English subtitles. If available, it would also help to have native language caption files as separate files (e.g. English captions for English language films, French caption for French language films, etc), although this is not required.
Our preference is for clean film files with separate subtitle files in .SRT or .WebDTT format.
However, if separate subtitles are not available, we can also accept film files with burnt in English subtitles.

What is FilmDoo’s Term?

Our terms are 2 years non-exclusive.

As you will see, we are much more flexible and easier to work with than most other global platforms, because our number one goal is to make it as easy as possible for film makers and content owners to put their films online and reach their global audience.

Are filmmakers able to see the data of where their audiences live (country) and how many transactions per each country? Is there a dashboard?

Yes, we have an online reporting dashboard. Film makers or content owners will be able to log in any time to see their total sales in real time. They will be able to see where the sales are coming from, the countries their films are getting the most interest in, and where available, the demographics breakdown of people interested in their films such as gender and age.

Can filmmakers contract with you directly?

Absolutely, please feel free to email me directly at wps@filmdoo.com. In addition, we can also be contacted at our general email: info@filmdoo.com. Please also feel free to follow our news, film releases and reach out to us on our social media: Facebook • Twitter • YouTube.

What is FilmDoo doing to increase its consumer/audience reach?

Through our proprietary marketing technology, we are doing very well on SEO, where we are able to reach global audience interested in Lesbian and Gay movies as well as films by language collection. Furthermore, our proprietary technology include our personalized film recommendation engine.

At the same time, we also have a very strong Editorial and Curation team, where we continuously help to promote our films via our Blog, YouTube channel, social media and newsletters. We are also able to interview directors and film makers at no additional costs to help create promotional and editorial content. We also have community user-generated content, such as film playlists and film reviews, which are growing rapidly.

Most importantly, what is unique about FilmDoo, is our “DooVOTE” concept, whereby we are empowering users to discover films not yet available in their country and to express a demand in seeing that film. Consequently, we are using this data to try to go after the films we know there is interest from our community:

filmdoo.com/doovote. To increase our audience reach, we often do a lot of on the ground marketing, including partnerships with film festivals and giving presentations and talks at film workshops and events.

Please share anything else you think is relevant — including that you may turn into an SVOD or AVOD

I think it’s important to note that unlike other players in this space, we are not going after the already hardcore indie or world cinema film fans. We are identifying and converting new film audiences, many of which are traditional mainstream audiences, who may be increasingly interested in exploring new and refreshing content, whether from a cultural and language perspective or from an awareness of gender or human rights topics. Effectively, our audience is an increasingly growing group of people who are becoming more interested in travel, studying or traveling abroad, as well as forming multi-cultural families. FilmDoo is all about providing a truly global platform to traditionally underrepresented voice, such as emerging film makers and female and LGBT film makers from around the world. Their films deserve to be discovered and seen legally and FilmDoo is building a community and global platform to help them achieve that.

Sydney Levine has written an article on FilmDoo as well. Please read it here.

Please note: I did not publish information about revenue per FilmDoo’s request as that is proprietary information, but I am told I can discuss it privately/confidentially with filmmakers.

Orly Ravid October 18th, 2017

Posted In: Digital Distribution, Distribution, DIY, International Sales

Tags: Digital Distribution, FilmDoo, independent film, Orly Ravid, VOD

By Smriti Mundhra

Smriti Mundhra is a Los Angeles-based director, producer and journalist. Her film A Suitable Girl premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2017 and is currently playing at festivals around the world, including Sheffield Doc/Fest and AFI DOCS. Along with her filmmaking partner Sarita Khurana, Smriti won the Albert Maysles Best New Documentary Director Award at the Tribeca Film Festival.

asuitablegirl

I recently attended a panel discussion at a major film festival featuring funders from the documentary world. The question being passed around the stage was, “What are some of the biggest mistakes filmmakers make when producing their films?” The answers were fairly standard—from submitting cuts too early to waiting till the last minute to seek institutional support—until the mic was passed to one member of the panel, who said, rather condescendingly, “Filmmakers need to be aware of what their films are worth to the marketplace. Is there a wide audience for it? Is it going to premiere at Sundance? Don’t spend $5 million on your niche indie documentary, you know?”

Immediately, my eyebrow shot up, followed by my hand. I told the panelist that I agreed with him that documentaries—really, all independent films—should be budgeted responsibly, but asked if he could step outside his hyperbolic example of spending $5 million on an indie documentary (side note: if you know someone who did that, I have a bridge to sell them) and provide any tools or insight for the rest of us who genuinely strive to keep the marketplace in mind when planning our films. After all, documentaries in particular take five years on average to make, during which time the “marketplace” can change drastically. For example, when I started making my feature-length documentary A Suitable Girl, which had its world premiere in the Documentary Competition section of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, Netflix was still a mail-order DVD service and Amazon was where you went to buy toilet paper. What’s more, film festival admissions—a key deciding factor in the fate of your sales, I’ve learned—are a crapshoot, and there is frustratingly little transparency from distributors and other filmmakers when it comes to figuring out “what your film is worth to the marketplace.”

Sadly, I did not get a suitable answer to my questions from the panelist. Instead, I was told glibly to “make the best film I could and it will find a home.”

Not acceptable. The lack of transparency and insight into sales and distribution could be the single most important reason most filmmakers don’t go on to make second or third films. While the landscape does, indeed, shift dramatically year to year, any insight would make a big difference to other filmmakers who can emulate successes and avoid mistakes. In that spirit, here’s what I learned about sales and distribution that I wish I knew a year ago.

As any filmmaker who has experienced the dizzying high of getting accepted to a world-class film festival, followed by the sobering reality of watching the hours, days, weeks and months pass with nary a distribution deal in sight can tell you, bringing your film to market is an emotional experience. This is where your dreams come to die. A Suitable Girl went to the Tribeca Film Festival represented by one of the best agent/lawyers in the business: The Film Collaborative’s own Orly Ravid (who is also an attorney at MSK). Orly was both supportive and brutally honest when she assessed our film’s worth before we headed into our world premiere. She also helped us read between the lines in trade announcements to understand what was really going on with the deals that were being made – because, let’s face it, who among us hasn’t gone down the rabbit hole of Deadline.com or Variety looking for news of the great deals other films in our “class” are getting? Orly kept reminding us that perception is not reality, and that many of these envy-inducing deals, upon closer examination, are not as lucrative or glamorous as they may seem. Sometimes filmmakers take bad deals because they just don’t want to deal with distribution, have no other options, and can’t pursue DIY, and by taking the deal they get that sense of validation that comes with being able to say their film was picked up. Peek under the hood of some of these trade announcements, and you’ll often find that the money offered to filmmakers was shockingly low, or the deal was comprised of mostly soft money, or—even worse—filmmakers are paying the distributors for a service deal to get their film into theaters. There is nothing wrong with any of those scenarios, of course, if that’s what’s right for you and your film. But, there is often an incorrect perception that other filmmakers are somehow realizing their dreams while you’re sitting by the phone waiting for your agent to call.

Depressed yet? Don’t be, because here’s the good news: there are options, and once you figure out what yours are, making decisions becomes that much easier and more empowering.

Start by asking yourself the hard questions. Here are 12+ things Orly says she considers before crafting a distribution strategy for the films she represents, and why each one is important.

At which festival did you have your premiere? “Your film will find a home” is a beautiful sentiment and true in many ways, but distributors care about one thing above all others: Sundance. If your film didn’t beat the odds to land a slot at the festival, you can already start lowering your expectations. That’s not to say great deals don’t come out of SXSW, Tribeca, Los Angeles Film Festival and others, but the hard truth is that Sundance still means a lot to buyers. Orly also noted that not all films are even right for festivals or will have a life that way, but they can still do great broadcast sales or great direct distribution business – but that’s a specific and separate analysis, often related to niche, genre, and/or cast.
What is your film’s budget? How much of that is soft money that does not have to be paid back, or even equity where investors are okay with not being paid back? In other words, what do you need to net to consider the deal a success? Orly, of course, shot for the stars when working on sales for our film, but it was helpful for her to know what was the most modest version of success we could define, so that if we didn’t get a huge worldwide rights offer from a single buyer she could think creatively about how to make us “whole.”
What kind of press and reviews did you receive? We hired a publicist for the Tribeca Film Festival (the incomparable Falco Ink), and it was the best money we could have spent. Falco was able to raise a ton of awareness around the film, making it as “review-proof” as possible (buyers pay attention if they see that press is inclined to write about your film, which in many cases is more important to them than how a trade publication reviews it). We got coverage in New York Magazine, Jezebel, the Washington Post and dozens of other sites, blogs, and magazines. Thankfully, we also got great reviews in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, and even won the Albert Maysles Prize for Best New Documentary Director at Tribeca. Regardless of how this affected our distribution offers, we know for sure we can use all this press to reignite excitement for our film even if we self-distribute. On the other hand, if you’re struggling to get attention outside of the trades and your reviews are less than stellar, that’s another reason to lower expectations.
What are your goals, in order of priority? Are you more concerned with recouping your budget? Raising awareness about the issues in your film (impact)? Or gaining exposure for your next project/ongoing career? And don’t say “all three”—or, if you do, list these in priority order and start to think about which one you’re willing to let go.
How long can you spend on this film? If your film is designed for social impact, do you intend to run an impact/grassroots campaign? And can you hire someone to handle that, if you cannot? Do you see your impact campaign working hand in hand with your profit objectives, or separately from them? The longer you can dedicate to staying with your film following its premiere, the more revenue you can squeeze out of it through the educational circuit, transactional sales, and more. But that time comes at a personal cost and you need to ask yourself if it’s worth it to you. Side note: touring with your film and self-distributing are also great ways to stay visible between projects, and could lead to opportunities for future work.
Does your film have sufficient international appeal to attract a worldwide deal or significant territory sales outside of the United States? If you think yes, what’s your evidence for that? Are you being realistic? By the way, feeling strongly that your film has a global appeal (as I do for my film) doesn’t guarantee sales. I believe my film will have strong appeal in the countries where there is a large South Asian diaspora—but many of those territories command pretty small sales. Ask your agent which territories around the world you think your film might do well in, and what kinds of licensing deals those territories tend to offer. It’s a sobering conversation.
Does your film fit into key niches that work well for film festival monetization and robust educational distribution? For example, TFC has great success with LGBTQ, social justice, environmental, Latin American, African American, Women’s issues, mental health. Sports, music, and food-related can work well too.
Does your film, either because of subjects or issues or both, have the ability to command a significant social media following? A “significant” social media following is ideally in the hundreds of thousands or millions of followers, but is at least in the high five figures. We know the last thing you want to think about when you’re trying to lock picture, run a crowdfunding campaign, deal with festival logistics, and all the other stress of preparing for your big debut is social media. But don’t sleep on it. Social media is important not only to show buyers that there is interest in your film, but also ideas on how to position your film and which audiences are engaging with it already. Truth be told, unless you’re in the hundreds of thousands or millions of followers range, social media probably won’t make or break your distribution options, but it can’t hurt. And, in our case, it actually helped us get a lot of interest from educational distributors, who were inspired by the dialogue they saw brewing on our Facebook page.
How likely is your film to get great critic reviews, and thus get a good Rotten Tomatoes score? Yeah, not much you can do to predict this one. However, a good publicist will have relationships with critics who can give you some insight into what the critical reaction to your film might be, before you have to read it in print. They also reach out to press who they think will like your film, keep tabs on reactions during your press and industry screenings, and monitor any press who attend your public screenings. This data is super useful for your sales representatives.
How likely is your film to perform theatrically (knowing that very few do), sell to broadcasters (some do but it’s very competitive), sell to SVOD platforms (as competitive as TV), and sell transactionally on iTunes and other similar services (since so many docs do not demand to be purchased)? While these questions are easy to pose and hard to answer, start by doing realistic comparisons to other films based on the subject, name recognition of filmmakers, subject, budget, festival premiere status, and other factors indicating popularity or lack thereof. Also adjust for industry changes and changes to the market if the film you are comparing to was distributed years before. Furthermore, adjust for changes to platform and broadcaster’s buying habits. Get real data about performance of like-films and adjust for and analyze how much money and what else it took to get there.
Can your film be monetized via merchandise? Not all docs can do this, but it can help generate revenue. So, go for the bulk orders of t-shirts, mugs, and tote bags during your crowdfunding campaign and sell that merch! Even if it just adds up to a few hundred extra dollars, for most people it’s pretty easy to put a few products up on their website.
Does your film lend itself to getting outreach/distribution grants, or corporate sponsorship/underwriting? With the traditional models of both film distribution and advertising breaking down, a new possibility emerges: finding a brand with a similar value set or mission as your film to underwrite some portion of your distribution campaign. I recently spoke to a documentary filmmaker who sold licenses to his film about veterans to a small regional banking chain, who then screened the film in local communities as part of their outreach effort. The bank paid the filmmakers $1000 per license for ten separate licenses without asking them to give up any rights or conflict with any of their other deals—that’s $10,000 with virtually no strings attached. Not bad!

Sadly, Netflix is no longer the blank check it once was (or that I imagined it to be) and the streaming giant is taking fewer and fewer risks on independent films. Thankfully, Amazon is sweeping in to fill the gap, and their most aggressive play has been their Festival Stars program. If you’re lucky enough to premiere in competition at one of the top-tier festivals (Sundance, SXSW, and Tribeca for now, but presumably more to come), then you already have a distribution deal on the table: Amazon will give you a $100,000 non-recoupable licensing fee ($75,000 for documentaries) and a more generous (double) revenue share than usual per hour your film is streamed on their platform for a term of two years. For many independent films, this could already mean recouping a big chunk of your budget. It also provides an important clue as to “what your film is worth to the marketplace”—$100,000 seems to be the benchmark for films that can cross that first hurdle of landing a competition slot at an A-list festival.

I’ll admit, I was a snob about the Amazon deal when I first heard about it. I couldn’t make myself get excited about a deal that was being offered to at least dozen other films, sight unseen, with no guarantee of publicity or marketing. A Facebook post by a fellow filmmaker (who had recent sold her film to a “legit” distributor) blasting the deal as “just a steep and quick path to devalue the film” left me shaken. But again, appearances proved to be deceiving.

I discussed my concerns with Orly, and she helped me see that with so few broadcast and financially meaningful SVOD options for docs, having a guaranteed significant platform deal with a financial commitment and additional revenue share is actually a great thing. Plus, one can build in lots of other distribution around the Amazon deal and end up with as robust a release as ever there could be. Orly says one should treat Amazon as a platform (online store) but as a distributor and that can provide for all the distribution potential. If one does manage to secure an all-rights deal from a “legit” distributor (we won’t name names, but it’s the companies you might see your friends selling their films to), oftentimes that distributor is just taking the Amazon deal on your behalf anyway, and shaving off up to 30% of it for themselves. So the analysis needs to be what is that distributor doing, if anything, to create additional value that merits taking a piece of a deal you can get on your own? Is it that much more money? Is it a commitment to do a significant impactful release? Are the terms sensible in light of the added value and your recoupment needs? Can you accomplish the same via DIY? Perhaps you can, but don’t want to bother. That’s your choice. But know what you are choosing and why.

Independent filmmakers are, yet again, in uncharted territory when it comes to distribution. Small distributors are closing up shop at a rapid pace. Netflix and Hulu are buying less content out of festivals, and creating more of it in house. Amazon’s Festival Stars program was just announced at Sundance this year (2017) and doesn’t launch until next Spring, so the jury is out as to whether it will really be the wonderful opportunity for filmmakers that it claims to be. By this time next year, several dozen films will have inaugurated the program and will be in a position to share their experiences with others. I hope my fellow filmmakers will be willing to do so. Given the sheer variety of films slated to debut on the platform, this data can be our first real chance to answer the question that the funder on the panel I attended refused to: “What is my film worth to the marketplace?”

Orly adds that the lack of transparency is, of course, in great part attributable to the distributors and buyers, who maintain a stranglehold on their data, but it’s also due to filmmakers’ willful blindness and simple unwillingness to share details about their deals in an effort to keep up appearances. That’s totally understandable, but if we can break the cycle of competing with each other and open up our books, we will not only have more leverage in our negotiations with buyers, but will be equipped to make better decisions for our investors and our careers. Knowledge is power, and if we all get real and share, we’ll all be informed to make the best choices we can.

admin July 5th, 2017

Posted In: Amazon VOD & CreateSpace, Digital Distribution, Distribution, Distribution Platforms, DIY, education, Film Festivals, Hulu, International Sales, iTunes, Marketing, Netflix, Publicity, Theatrical

Guest blog post by Wendy Bernfeld

Logo TV Festival 2011 BLANC

The Cannes Film Festival starts today, and any Cannes season would not be complete without an update from our dear friend and colleague Wendy Bernfeld, Founder and Managing Director of Rights Stuff and co-author of our second case study book in 2014 Selling Your Film Outside the U.S. (free on Amazon Kindle and Apple iBooks. Wendy specializes in Library and Original Content acquisition/distribution, international strategy / deal advice, for traditional media (film, TV, pay TV), digital media (Internet/IPTV, VOD, mobile, OTT/devices), and web/cross-platform/transmedia programming, and also active on various film festival / advisory boards, such as IDFA, Binger Film Institute, Seize the Night, Outdoor FilmFest, and others, including TFC! Follow her on Twitter: @wbernfeld.

Selling Your Film Outside the U.S.

What’s happened out there in the two years since TFC first published Selling Your Film Outside the U.S. (“The Book”)?

My introductory chapter to the book, entitle, “Digital Distribution in Europe” provided a snapshot of the evolving sector at that point in time. However, by now, the sector, particularly in the area of SVOD and AdVOD, has leaped even more forward, and includes more mature services as well as new niche and thematic services out there— as well as some services with an increased appetite for foreign language, art house and documentary films/series (finally).

A. Blurred Lines — Traditional vs. Digital — Hybrid Platforms

More recent trends 2015-16 include increasingly blurred dividing lines between so-called traditional vs digital players .

Traditionals: Many traditional players, internationally, (like telecoms, cable and free tv) have now become more digital, by either 1) bysetting up their own competing, or complementary, multi-window VOD offerings such as SVOD services (e.g. Channel 9’s STAN in Australia or Liberty Global’s MyPrime in both Switzerland and Netherlands); or 2) electing to instead “sleep with the enemy” by just hosting digital channels like Netflix, Spotify, etc. on their set-top box (e.g. Orange, ComHem Sweden, Virgin UK). Some traditionals opt to distinguish the brand identity of the VOD service from the main service, (different names); while others unite both services under one brand, such as CanalPlay (C+) or Viasat’s VIAPLAY. Recent developments include BBC announcing it will start SVOD internationally, after also migrating its Channel 3 to digital-only online offering; and ITV starting CURIO, a nonfiction SVOD in the UK.
Digitals: Correspondingly, the so-called formerly digital-only players like Netflix, Amazon (previously more complementary or second window) are now acting a great deal like the traditional players. Think: old-fashioned commissioning broadcasters who increasingly require first-window status and exclusivity, and who are funding “originals”, getting involved competitively commissioning films from development stage etc. and fashioning game-changing windows.

Despite the complexity, this is overall great news for creators/rights-holders since it allows even more opportunity to maximize revenues and audiences per successive window, platform and region, if one takes the time to do it right.

B. VODs Per Window:

Lets look at various platforms in each window today, from TVOD, DTO, through to SVOD, AdVOD, etc. Note that many deliberately offer MULTI-model consumer services – such as Orange, Canal Plus and BSKYB (TVOD/DTO, SVOD), Amazon (Instant and Prime, for TVOD/DTO and SVOD, respectively) and Wuaki – while others (Netflix and Curio) operate under just one consumer business model.

TVOD/DTO:
1. For the Big5 (Google, Amazon, iTunes, Xbox, PS), one still generally goes through a digital aggregator, like Juice, Cinedigm, Kinonation, and Syndicado in N.America. Outside N.America, EMEA counterparts in include one of Rights Stuff clients MOMEDIA (attractive multi-platform new biz model, lower cost for more platforms and combined with social media/marketing) – and others like DoCo/ODMedia (NL), MoviePartnership, and Under the MilkyWay.
  Shop around…these aggregators they have different models and price alone shouldn’t be the only indicator. Also look at their marketing/positioning: some take your IP, others (like Rights Stuff, TFC) do not.
2. Going direct to the others in TVOD/DTO:
  Don’t stop at one or even all of the Big5. The play is to have multiple deals , non exclusive, staggered, in all the windows, in each region. Virtually every country has an active telecom and cable or DTH competitor in the region, as well as mobile and online /consumer electronics players who offer VOD, so licensing non-exclusive TVOD to them on top of others is a good first step in the chain.
  
  Beyond the utility companies, some other examples in TVOD/DTO include premium pay tv services or platforms like CanalPlus (France and other regions) and BSkyB, (UK, Germany, Italy, New Zealand). Also theatrical chains in some countries, such as Cineplex in Canada or Pathé in Holland, have VOD arms and thus can offer complementary marketing of films in theatrical window with the subsequent TVOD/DTO window. Also check out online VOD indie film specialist FilmDoo (well-curated indie/art house focused, now in UK/EIRE and soon expanding), and as earlier written, Curzon offers day-and-date theatrical combined with VOD in UK. Wuaki announced moves into 15 countries internationally by end of 2016, most are now TVOD/DTO but the Spain HQ is an SVOD OTT platform. The NFB in Canada started TVOD/DTO in N.America and recently in 2016 an SVOD service, and they now buy docs/films from other sources and regions, too.
3. Deals: TVOD/DTO continues to be typically a rev share model and sometimes only a loss leader, but can help drive critical awareness, especially when accompanied by social media marketing and audience engagement strategies. Sometimes, film dependent (for eg if a very niche film) it saves money to skip the big5 (who require costly specs) and license direct to the other international tvod/dto platforms, as then at least one participates from day one in revenues, vs having to recoup expensive deliverables.
SVOD/PAY – whether first and second windows:
As predicted, this window has so far overall been most remunerative since it’s usually structured by a flat fee license fee (although smaller or niche thematic platforms in the larger USA market (such as Fandor or Indieflix) are still offering just a revenue share formula, which can make the returns lackluster). We generally favor licensing to platforms that pay even a modest flat fee, upfront. Or in some cases in the ‘’back end’’ i.e. rev share to start, then if the revenues at the end of a year (or the window) don’t reach, say, $1000, the platform pays the difference. That sort of model can be attractive for startup platforms who truly believe in the power of their SVOD service but are cash-strapped at the start. So one can license to a less remunerative platform, which does a great job of curation, editorial, placement, and also license other SVOD platforms who may be more remunerative for you.
1. In the USA, you’ve finally seen growth since 2015 in the SVOD sector for documentaries, including the Curiosity Stream SVOD OTT platform (by former Discovery founder, John Hendricks), whose programs tend towards educational and traditional. They are usually on a rev-share only model, whereas competitor xive.tv (SVOD OTT) also buys docs features/series, but over a wider range of topics including more populist/reality content- and xive.com works on a flat fee and/or combo deal model. And a deal with well-curated xive.tv delivers an extra ‘lift’’ in reach by providing carriage on other platforms (Hulu, Roku, Amazon, etc.).
2. In EMEA/beyond, some other SVOD OTT platforms for docs and arthouse have arisen such as CURIO in UK (via ITV), Filmin (Spain, Portugal, Mexico). Mobil has now transformed its model to a curated daily film+library, a lower price and is complete with hefty investment by Chinese backers/reach into China. They also started paying some flat fees, or MGs, for select higher-end indies, as opposed to the pure rev share SVOD model of earlier days.
ADVOD:
Although TubiTV/AdRise in USA and Hulu (multi-model in AdVOD and SVOD) are strong platforms offering solid returns to producers in the AdVOD sector, there aren’t many doing the same in EMEA. Here, again, it’s worthwhile to have your films spread on other free AdVOD platforms (vs pirate sites) so the returns are cumulative and there’s cross-promotion. Sometimes a film sampled on AdVOD can help to yield revenues from DTO (e.g. if a consumer discovers a lesser known film on an AdVOD platform and decides then to buy it on iTunes, while they’d not have bought it unknown before).

Some updates on the AdVOD sector in EU: Viewster.com (27 countries in EMEA) has shifted focus (since our last reference in the book) from buying arthouse/festival films, to millennial content, including edgier, fast-paced docs, some originals and anime. In 2015 they had added an SVOD anime service, but in March 2016 shut it down, as others have become more aggressive in that space. DailyMotion, EU competitor to Youtube, were sometimes paying flat fees and sometimes commissioning series, but a recent sale by Orange to Vivendi may bring changes. Channel4 (UK) recently launched WalterPresents, an AdVOD site focused specifically on dramatic series and some films strictly from outside the UK.
HOW TO REACH THE PLATFORMS:
As before, one goes via aggregators for Big5, but your agent/representative, or distributor/sales agent, OR YOU YOURSELF can hit up the others direct.

REPS: I highly recommend interviewing your potential sales agent/distributor, with new questions such as asking 1) if they’ve been active in digital lately vs just their traditional buyers; and 2) if so, then with which types of platforms—Big5-7 or also beyond to International? If not, it doesn’t have to be a barrier, if they’re willing to allow nonexclusivity in digital, and/or to allow you or digital agents to assist and collaborate alongside.
FUNDING (including by SVODs):
Although beyond the scope of this article, note In 2015-16 there’s been increased activity in 5-6 figure prebuying/funding of originals or premieres (film, series)—not just from English regions and not only via Netflix and Amazon, but also other international and EMEA services like OneNet Poland, IcFlix, Telenet, KPNPlay, Vimeo, Vivendi/Canal+, etc.

On the Amazon front, aside from bigbudget originals via Ted Hope’s division such as ChiRaq at Berlinale and Woody Allen this Cannes, they also fund weboriginals, digital series, via prototyping schemes and audience involvement/feedback. Netflix has been intensely active in funding originals, including docs and nonfiction (while a few years ago that was a rarity); more deals in arthouse, docs and foreign will be announced at or after Cannes.

In Canada there is a funding for coproduction in digital programs; And in France/EU, Vivendi (owner of Canal+ and DailyMotion) just in April 2016 launched its “Studio+” initiative &,dash; funding short-form original series for mobile and telecom operators.
TAKEAWAYS
As before in the 2014 Book, the following have intensified:
- Act quickly and work collaboratively (filmmakers + agents/distributors) to seize timing opportunities, particularly around certain countries where (s)VOD activities and platforms or hotly competing.
- Balance traditional and digital platforms, buyers and funders carefully in order to capture the cumulative and incremental revs in the nonexclusive deal sector, while also developing a longer term platform pipeline for future.
- Don’t stop at just one deal, unless exclusivity or funding elements are in play and worth it.
- Don’t be blocked per se by rights issues. Pragmatic business deals where others are “cut in” can help make those melt away
- Hybrid distribution: We as consultants/agents, aside from working direct for producers and platforms, now increasingly are retained by sales agents, distributors and even aggregators – as although they have the IP, they don’t always know all the others to sell to after going beyond the Big 5-7; this type of collaboration with producers and other reps on distribution yields good results (although time consuming at first) with each stakeholder getting a smaller piece but of a bigger pie. At the end of the day, 100% of zero is still zero.
- If not using a middleman at all, consider teaming up (especially if only selling a single film) with other producers to co-curate a mini-package of films around specific themes (e.g. eco, female, etc). This is particularly useful where the platforms don’t know you or your films, and it also helps program the service for their platform.
- Don’t abdicate distribution entirely to third parties, as in traditional past; now it is increasingly key to be aware of (if not participating more in) distribution and marketing (e.g. via social media). Help audiences know where to find your film!

Looking forward to seeing your films over here in EMEA!

Orly Ravid May 11th, 2016

Posted In: Amazon VOD & CreateSpace, book, case studies, Digital Distribution, Distribution, education, International Sales, iTunes, Netflix

By Orly Ravid and Sheri Candler

In the past 3 posts, we have covered knowing the market BEFORE making your film, how to incorporate the festival circuit into your marketing and distribution efforts and understanding terms, the foreign market and release patterns. In this post, we will discuss the items that will be required by sales agents, distributors (primarily digital distributors) and even digital platforms (if you are thinking of selling directly to your audience with less middlemen) before a deal can be signed and the film can be distributed.

photo credit Vancouver Film School

Know your deliverables

Distribution is an expensive and complicated process and all distribution contracts contain a list of required delivery items (often attached at the end of the document as an exhibit) in order to complete the agreement. Without the proper items, sales agents and distributors will not be interested in making a deal. Your film must have all proper paperwork, music licenses, and technical specifications in order and these delivery items will incur additional costs to your production. Make sure to include a separate budget for deliverables within the cost of your production.

US sales agents and distributors will require insurance covering errors and omissions (E&O) at minimum levels of $1,000,000 per occurrence, $3,000,000 in the aggregate with a deductible of $10,000, in force for three years. E&O insurance protects the producer and distributor (usually for the distributor’s catalog of films) against the impact of lawsuits arising from accusations of libel, slander, invasion of privacy, infringement of copyright etc and can cost the producer in the range of $3,000 to $5,000. E&O insurance is required BEFORE any deal is signed, not after, and can take 3-5 days to obtain if all rights and releases, a title report and music clearances can be supplied.

Digital aggregators in general do not require E&O insurance unless it is for cable VOD and Netflix (these do). However, they do require closed captioning (around $900), subtitling (if you intend to distribute in non English speaking territories, usually costs around $3 per minute) and a ratings certificate (if distributing in some foreign territories, prices vary according to run time and ratings board).

The production will need to supply a Quality Control (QC) report, preferably from a reputable encoding house. If you film fails QC for iTunes and other digital platforms, it can be costly to fix the problems with the file and it will lead to a delay of the film’s release. MANY problems can be found in the QC process so whatever you think you are saving by encoding yourself or via a less reputable company, you will more than make up for in having to redo it. The most common problems arise from duplicate frames or merged frames as a result of changing frame rates; audio dropouts or other audio problems; sync problems from closed caption or subtitling files.

Distributors will accept a master in Apple ProRes HQ 422 file on an external hard drive or HD Cam. By far, the digital drive is preferable to tape and unless your distributor specifically requests HD Cam, do not go to the expense of creating this. The master should NOT have pre roll advertising, website URLs, bars/tones/countdowns, ratings information, or release date information. For digital files, content must begin and end with at least one frame of black.

Other delivery items required by sales agents/distributors include: trailer (preferably 2 minutes) in the same aspect ratio as the film with no nudity or profanity; chapter points using the same time code as the master file; key art files as a layered PSD or EPS with minimum 2400 pixels wide at 300 dpi; at least 3-5 still images in high resolution (traditional distributors often require as many as 50 still images) and already approved by talent; DVD screeners; press kit which includes a synopsis, production notes, biographies for key players, director, producer, screenwriter, and credit list of both cast and crew; pdf of the original copyright document for the screenplay and the motion picture; IRS W-9 form or tax forms from governments of the licensor; music cue sheet and music licenses.

There are technical specifications that need to be met as far as the video and audio files. Most post production supervisors are aware of these. It is also not unheard of to be asked to supply 35 mm prints for foreign distribution if a theatrical release is desired or contractually obligated.

Sometimes if your film is considered a hot property, a distributor might be willing to create the delivery items at their expense in exchange for full recoupment and/or a greater cut of the revenues. But do not count on this. We have heard from many filmmakers who didn’t clear music rights for their films, assuming a distributor would take on this expense, and were sorely disappointed to find none would do that. If you can’t supply the delivery list, no agreement will be signed.

Sheri Candler July 23rd, 2014

Posted In: Digital Distribution, Distribution, International Sales

Tags: deliverables, Digital Distribution, digital film distribution, distribution contracts, film distribution, film distributors, independent film, Orly Ravid, preparing for film distribution, Sheri Candler

By Orly Ravid and Sheri Candler

In the past 2 posts, we have covered knowing the market BEFORE making your film and how to incorporate the festival circuit into your marketing and distribution efforts. This post will cover terms you need to know; whether a foreign distribution agreement is in your film’s future and what to do if it isn’t; the patterns, or windows, that need to be considered in your release. Just to be clear, we are targeting these posts mainly to filmmakers who seek to self finance and actively control their distribution. If that is not your plan, the usefulness of these posts may vary.

Distributors; platforms; aggregators; self hosting sites; applications

If you are new to the distribution game, here are some terms you now need to be familiar with.

Distributors (ie. A24, Oscilloscope, Fox Searchlight, Sony Classics, The Weinstein Company, Roadside Attractions) take exclusive rights to your film for a negotiated period of time and coordinate its release. These companies often acquire independent films out of the most prestigious film festivals and pay decent advances for ALL RIGHTS, sometimes even for ALL TERRITORIES. A signed and binding contract takes all responsibility for the film away from its creator and places it with the distributor to decide how to release it into the public. Distribution through these entities entails theatrical, digital, DVD, educational, leisure (airline/hotel/cruiseship).

Platforms (ie. iTunes, Amazon Prime, Google Play, Hulu, Netflix, cable VOD) are digital destinations where customers watch or buy films. Viewing happens on a variety of devices and some allow for worldwide distribution. Mainly platforms do not deal directly with creators, but insist on signing deals with representative companies such as distributors or aggregators.

Aggregators (ie. Premiere Digital, Inception Media Group, BitMAX, Kinonation) are conduits between filmmakers/distributors and platforms. Aggregators have direct relationships with digital platforms and often do not take an ownership stake. Aggregators usually focus more on converting files for platforms, supplying metadata, images, trailers to platforms and collecting revenue from platforms to disperse to the rights holder. Sometimes distributors (Cinedigm, FilmBuff) also have direct relationships with digital platforms, helping reduce the number of intermediaries being paid out of the film’s revenue.

Self hosting sites (ie. VHX, Distrify, Vimeo on Demand) are all services that allow filmmakers to upload their films and host them on whatever website they choose. Vimeo on Demand also hosts the video player on its own central website and has just integrated with Apple TV to allow for viewing on in-home TV screens.

Applications for many digital platforms can be found on mobile devices (smartphones and tablets),Over the Top (OTT) internet-enabled devices like Roku, Chromecast, Apple TV, Playstation and Xbox and on smart TVs. Viewers must add the applications to their devices and then either subscribe or pay per view to the platforms in order to see the film.

What about international?

In the latest edition of our Selling Your Film book series, Amsterdam based consultant Wendy Bernfeld goes into great depth about the digital distribution market in Europe. Many low-budget, independent American films are not good candidates for international sales because various international distributors tend to be attracted to celebrity actors or action, thriller and horror genre fare that translate easily into other languages.

Rather than give all of your film’s rights to a foreign sales agent for years (often 7-10 years duration) just to see what the agent can accomplish, think seriously about selling to global audiences from your own website and from sites such as Vimeo, VHX, Google Play and iTunes. The volume of potential viewers or sales it takes to attract a foreign distributor to your film is often very high. But just because they aren’t interested doesn’t mean there is NO audience interest. It simply means audience interest isn’t high enough to warrant a distribution deal. However, if you take a look at your own analytics via social media sites and website traffic, you may find that audience interest in foreign territories is certainly high enough to warrant self distributing in those territories. Look at this stats page on the VHX site. There are plenty of foreign audiences willing to buy directly from a film’s website. Why not service that demand yourself and keep most of the money? Plus keep the contact data on the buyers, such as email address?

Often, sales agents who cannot make foreign deals will use aggregators to access digital platforms and cut themselves into the revenue. You can save this commission fee by going through an aggregator yourself. In agreements we make with distributors for our Film Collaborative members, we negotiate for the filmmaker to have the ability to sell worldwide to audiences directly from their website. If you are negotiating agreements directly with distributors, the right to sell directly via your own website can be extremely beneficial to separate and carve out because sales via your website will generate revenue immediately. However, this tactic is now being scrutinized by distributors who are allowing direct to audience sales by filmmakers, but asking in their agreement for a percentage of the revenue generated. It is up to the filmmaker to decide if this is an acceptable term.

If you do happen to sell your film in certain international territories, make sure not to distribute on your site in a way that will conflict with any worldwide release dates and any other distribution holdbacks or windowing that may be required per your distribution contracts. An example: You have signed a broadcast agreement that calls for a digital release holdback of 90 days-6 months-1 year or whatever. You cannot go ahead and start selling via digital in that territory until that holdback is lifted. Instead, use a hosting service that will allow you to geoblock sales in that territory.

Know your windows.

If you do decide to release on your own, it’s important to know how release phases or “windows” work within the industry and why windowing was even created.

The release window is an artificial scarcity construct wherein the maximum amount of money is squeezed from each phase of distribution. Each window is opened at different times to keep the revenue streams from competing with each other. The reason it is artificial is the film continues to be the same and could be released to the audience all at one time, but is purposely curbed from that in order to maximize revenue and viewership. The Hollywood legacy window sequence consists of movie theaters (theatrical window), then, after approximately 3-4 months, DVD release (video window). After an additional 3 months or so, a release to Pay TV (subscription cable and cable pay per view) and VOD services (download to own, paid streaming, subscription VOD) and approximately two years after its theatrical release date, it is made available for free-to-air TV.

Now, there is a lot of experimentation with release windows. Each release window is getting shorter and sometimes they are opened out of the traditional sequence. Magnolia Pictures has pioneered experimentation with Ultra VOD release, the practice of releasing a film digitally BEFORE its theatrical window and generally charging a premium price; and with Day and Date, the practice of releasing a film digitally and theatrically at the same time. Many other distributors have followed suit. Radius-TWC just shortened the theatrical only window for Snowpiercer by making it available on digital VOD within only 2 weeks of its US theatrical release. During its first weekend in US multiplatform release, Snowpiercer earned an estimated $1.1 million from VOD, nearly twice as much as the $635,000 it earned in theaters.

So, while there are certainly bends in the rules, you will need to pay attention to which release window you open for your film on what date. For example, it might be enticing to try to negotiate a flat licensing fee from Netflix (Subscription VOD or SVOD window) at the start of release. However, from a filmmaker’s (and also distributor’s) perspective, if the movie has not yet played on any other digital platforms, it would be preferable to wait until after the Transactional VOD (TVOD) window in order to generate more revenue as a percentage of every TVOD purchase, before going live on Netflix. If the transactional release and subscription release happen at the same time, it cannibalizes transactional revenue.

Also, sites like Netflix will likely use numbers from a film’s transactional window purchases to inform their decision on whether to make an offer on a film and how big that offer should be. Subscription sites such as Netflix also pay attention to general buzz, theatrical gross, and a film’s popularity on the film’s website. There is value in gathering web traffic analytics, email database analytics and website sales data in order to demonstrate you have a sizable audience behind your film. This is useful information when talking to any platform where you need their permission to access it. Caution: Netflix is not as interested in licensing independent film content as it once was. If your film is not a strong performer theatrically, or via other transactional VOD sites; does not have a big festival pedigree; or does not have notable actor names in it, it may not achieve a significant Netflix licensing fee or they may refuse to license it for the platform. Netflix is no longer building its brand for subscribers and it has significant data that guides what content it licenses and what it produces.

Also be aware that some TV licensing will call for holding back Subscription VOD (SVOD) releases for a period of time. If your film is strong enough to achieve a broadcast license deal, you will need to wait before making a subscription release deal. On the other hand, holding out too long for a broadcast distribution offer might cause the publicity and interest you’ve generated for your film to dissipate.

If your film is truly a candidate for theatrical release, most cinemas will not screen a film that is already available on TVOD or SVOD services. In fact, most of the chain cinemas will not screen a film that is available in any other form prior to or at the same time as theatrical release.

The way you choose to release your film is a judgment call in order to reach your particular goal. All decisions have consequences and you will have to live with the decisions you make in releasing your film. Like all decisions, you base them on what you know at the time with no guarantee as to how they will turn out.

Sheri Candler July 16th, 2014

Posted In: Digital Distribution, Distribution, Distribution Platforms, DIY, International Sales, Theatrical

Tags: aggregators, Distrify, independent film distribution, Orly Ravid, release windows, Sheri Candler, SVOD, The Film Collaborative, theatrical distribution, TVOD, VHX, Vimeo on Demand, Wendy Bernfeld

Today’s guest post is from Matthew Helderman, founder and CEO of Buffalo 8 Productions and BondIt, a new service that cash-flows union bond deposits for independent feature films. Having just returned from this year’s Cannes Film Festival, here are his impressions and advice for filmmakers thinking of attending the festival one day.

Cannes 2014 – Introduction

Each year tens of thousands descend upon Cannes in the south of France for the biggest and most exceptional film event of the year. From screenings of competition films, market shopping for completed films looking for additional sales opportunities and more events than one can count — the Cannes Festival is all at once incredibly exhilarating, essential for business and filmmaking endeavors and downright exhausting!

Cannes is the essential market for both new & old content — whether developing new material, finishing up post-production on others or selling international rights for ancillary one off revenues or library generating cash-flow.

Over the past few years as our feature film library has grown in size from a handful of titles to nearly 35+ titles by Cannes 2014 — our approach and experience at the festival has changed. At Buffalo 8 Productions — we represent a library of feature films ranging from micro-budgeted $100k features up to films at the $3M mark — spanning genre’s, cast strength and value.

Buffalo 8 Cannes image harbor night

Cannes 2014 – The Set-Up

Cannes is unique in that it offers four elements:

The most prestigious film festival in the world with in competition films typically ending up in Oscar and international award season contention. Additionally, there are a slew of films that screen out of competition that the festival honors for their efforts and merits — think “All is Lost” in 2013 or “Lost River” in 2014 — strong titles that have commercial value and artistic integrity — the essence of the Cannes appeal.

The biggest film market in the world with over 1,500 new film titles for sale and on display for the international buying community. The “Marche” is often times a difficult pill to swallow — with hundreds upon hundreds of films from across the world — the first visit to the market is hard to comprehend. Selling and buying are both relationship based communities in the film business – requiring pre-established relationships with sales agents (those who represent content internationally) and buyers (distributors in individual territories around the world).

The strongest worldwide representation at the international pavilions with each major country in the world representing their national film programs — from tax incentives, to promotions to rebates and panels — each country seeking to draw in productions offers an all inclusive look and conversation into the dealings of their specific region. Often used as meeting places (since Cannes has very limited seating areas in the Marche and festival), the pavilions serve as a landing base for much of the conversations during the 10+ days of Cannes — which offer the countries with the strongest presence an ability to market their offerings while playing host to the film community.

The most important and constant social & networking events that anyone has ever seen. From panel discussions with big name producers, directors and the like to parties at villas, clubs, beach front and yachts to the invite only exclusive dinners and hotel gatherings — Cannes offers the best opportunity year round for the filmmaking and distribution community to mingle for fun and business.

But there is a catch…

Cannes Opportunity Cost

The most difficult part about attending Cannes is deciding how best to spend your valuable time. The cost of attending is steep both financially, time wise (the travel from Los Angeles is 15+ hours door-to-door) and opportunity wise. If you spend all of your time seeing the great films you’ll miss the networking and sales opportunities. However, if you spend all your time networking and selling, you’ll miss the festival — which is a difficult pill to swallow given the strength of the titles screening at Cannes each year.

Assessing your main objectives months before you attend is crucial — are you looking for financing? If so, pre-sales discussions with sales agents in the Marche is crucial.

Are you seeking tax incentives and interested in discussing with international territories about your options? Then spending your time at the pavilions is the best option.

Regardless — you’re going to need to plan your goals well in advance, schedule your meetings 50+ days out (everyone’s schedules get ridiculously crowded) and be prepared to miss out on events you want to attend (it’s simply not possible to attend everything).

The Buffalo 8 Productions & BondIt Approach to Cannes 2014

With a library of content for sale, multiple projects gearing up for production and a continued need to expand our social and business networks — we spent our time divided up among our company divisions.

Our film team at Buffalo 8 spent their days selling in the Marche and meeting new buyers to form relationships with companies we’ll be in business with for the rest of the year. An interesting piece of advice here being that if you live in Los Angeles – take meetings with people & companies that live elsewhere (similarly for NYC, Chicago, etc…) — this is your rare chance each year to be face-to-face with buyers from every corner of the world. And even in the current times of easily transferred digital files for streaming and viewing purposes – meeting with financiers, buyers and the like go a long way.

Our production team spent time meeting with financiers who cash-flow tax incentives, pre-sales and those looking for equity investment opportunities. These meetings are more difficult to come by and require advance planning to keep the momentum sustained during the craziness of Cannes.

Our BondIt team (BondIt cash-flows union deposits for independent feature films freeing up cashflow liquidity) split their time between finding companies who actively produce content between $100k – $10M budgets (the sweet spot for the BondIt application) and those looking for equity investments into media technology companies. Note here that all of these meetings — at least a large portion — were pre-planned and scheduled. Again, most of the big hitters in Cannes whether individuals or companies have packed schedules so getting in front of them is only possible if you’ve pre-scheduled.

Cannes Conclusions

Once you’ve attended your first major market (Berlin, Toronto, Cannes), it’s difficult not to go back for another year. The value of attending is so high from a networking, business and relationship stand point. Before attending the major markets, Buffalo 8 was a smaller boutique production entity with limited international presence — but now having attended markets for several years, our database of useful contacts and our business have grown simultaneously.

Weigh out the pro’s & con’s of attending — be self aware in what you’re seeking and who will be attending that could facilitate what you need and may be willing to grant a meeting with you. Recognize that the investments available at Cannes are insanely competitive (Martin Scorsese attended the 2013 Cannes market seeking financing for multiple productions) as the world of financing and distribution continues to get stranger and stranger (a nice way of saying it’s getting overly complicated and competitive).

Pre-plan your meetings and have a goal in mind for each contact you sit down with and leave room for those coincidental meetings that will often happen (but don’t bank on them) that could open new doors.

Cannes is the most important event of year — make the most of it and you’ll never remember why you weren’t there years before.

BondIt was founded by independent film producers Matthew Helderman & Luke Taylor of Beverly Hills based Buffalo 8 Productions. Having produced 30+ feature films, the team recognized a dilemma in the production process — union deposits — and launched BondIt to resolve the situation to assist producers & union representatives alike.

www.Buffalo8.com

www.BondIt.us

Sheri Candler May 22nd, 2014

Posted In: Distribution, Film Festivals, International Sales, Uncategorized

Tags: BondIt, Buffalo 8 Productions, Cannes Film Festival, film financing, impressions of Cannes Film Festival, international sales, Marche du Film, Matthew Helderman, sales agents, union bond deposits

In this final excerpt from our upcoming edition of Selling Your Film Outside the U.S., Wendy Bernfeld of Amsterdam-based consultancy Rights Stuff talks about the current situation in Europe for independent film in the digital on demand landscape.

There have been many European platforms operating in the digital VOD space for the last 8 years or so, but recent changes to their consumer pricing structures and offerings that now include smaller foreign films, genre films and special interest fare as well as episodic content have contributed to robust growth. European consumers are now embracing transactional and subscription services , and in some cases ad-supported services, in addition to free TV, DVD and theatrical films. Many new services are being added to traditional broadcasters’ offerings and completely new companies have sprung up to take advantage of burgeoning consumer appetite for entertainment viewable anywhere, anytime and through any device they choose.

From Wendy Bernfeld’s chapter in the forthcoming Selling Your Film Outside the U.S.:

Snapshot

For the first decade or so of the dozen years that I’ve been working an agent, buyer, and seller in the international digital pay and VOD sector, few of the players, whether rights holders or platforms, actually made any serious money from VOD, and over the years, many platforms came and went.

However, the tables have turned significantly, and particularly for certain types of films such as mainstream theatrical features, TV shows and kids programming, VOD has been strengthening, first in English-language mainstream markets such as the United States, then in the United Kingdom, and now more recently across Europe and other foreign language international territories. While traditional revenues (eg DVD,) have dropped generally as much as 20% – 30%, VOD revenues—from cable, telecom, IPTV, etc.—have been growing, and, depending on the film and the circumstances, have sometimes not only filled that revenue gap, but exceeded it.

For smaller art house, festival, niche, or indie films, particularly overseas, though, VOD has not yet become as remunerative. This is gradually improving now in 2014 in Europe, but for these special gems, more effort for relatively less money is still required, particularly when the films do not have a recognizable/strong cast, major festival acclaim, or other wide exposure or marketing.

What type of film works and why?

Generally speaking, the telecoms and larger mainstream platforms prioritize mainstream films in English or in their local language. In Nordic and Benelux countries, and sometimes in France, platforms will accept subtitled versions, while others (like Germany, Spain, Italy, and Brazil) require local language dubs. However, some platforms, like Viewster, will accept films in English without dubbed or subtitled localized versions, and that becomes part of the deal-making process as well. This is the case, particularly for art house and festival films, where audiences are not surprised to see films in English without the availability of a localized version.

Of course, when approaching platforms in specific regions that buy indie, art house, and festival films, it is important to remember that they do tend to prioritize films in their own local language and by local filmmakers first. However, where there is no theatrical, TV exposure, or stars, but significant international festival acclaim, such as SXSW, IDFA, Berlinale, Sundance, or Tribeca, there is more appetite. We’ve also found that selling a thematic package or branded bundle under the brand of a festival, like IDFA, with whom we have worked (such as “Best of IDFA”) makes it more recognizable to consumers than the individual one-off films.

What does well: Younger (i.e., hip), drama, satire, action, futuristic, family and sci-fi themes tend to travel well, along with strong, universal, human-interest-themed docs that are faster-paced in style (like Occupy Wall Street, economic crisis, and environmental themes), rather than traditionally educational docs or those with a very local slant.

What does less well: World cinema or art house that is a bit too slow-moving or obscure, which usually finds more of a home in festival cinema environments or public TV than on commercial paid VOD services, as well as language/culture-specific humor, will not travel as well to VOD platforms.

Keep in mind that docs are widely represented in European free television, so it’s trickier to monetize one-offs in that sector, particularly on a pay-per-view basis. While SVOD or AVOD offerings (such as the European equivalents of Snagfilm.com in the US) do have some appetite, monetization is trickier, especially in the smaller, non-English regions. Very niche films such as horror, LGBTQ, etc. have their fan-based niche sites, and will be prominently positioned instead of buried there, but monetization is also more challenging for these niche films than for films whose topics are more generic, such as conspiracy, rom-com, thrillers, kids and sci-fi, which travel more easily, even in the art house sector.

However, platforms evolve, as do genres and trends in buying. Things go in waves. For example, some online platforms that were heavily active in buying indie and art house film have, at least for now, stocked up on feature films and docs. They are turning their sights to TV series in order to attract return audiences (hooked on sequential storytelling), justify continued monthly SVOD fees, and /or increase AVOD returns.

Attitude Shifts

One plus these days is that conventional film platform buyers can no longer sit back with the same historic attitudes to buying or pricing as before, as they’re no longer the “only game in town” and have to be more open in their programming and buying practices. But not only the platforms have to shift their attitude.

To really see the growth in audiences and revenues in the coming year or two, filmmakers (if dealing direct) and/or their representatives (sales agents, distributors, agents) must act quickly, and start to work together where possible, to seize timing opportunities, particularly around certain countries where VOD activities are heating up. Moreover, since non-exclusive VOD revenues are cumulative and incremental, they should also take the time to balance their strategies with traditional media buys, to build relationships, construct a longer-term pipeline, and maintain realistic revenue expectations.

This may require new approaches and initiatives, drawing on DIY and shared hybrid distribution, for example, when the traditional sales agent or distributor is not as well-versed in all the digital sector, but very strong in the other media—and vice versa. Joining forces, sharing rights, or at least activities and commissions is a great route to maximize potential for all concerned. One of our mantras here at Rights Stuff is “100% of nothing is nothing.” Rights holders sitting on the rights and not exploiting them fully do not put money in your pockets or theirs, or new audiences in front of your films.

Thus, new filmmaker roles are increasingly important. Instead of sitting back or abdicating to third parties, we find the more successful filmmakers and sales reps in VOD have to be quite active in social media marketing, audience engagement, and helping fans find their films once deals are done.

To learn more about the all the new service offerings available in Europe to the savvy producer or sales agent, read Wendy’s entire chapter in the new edition of Selling Your Film Outside the US when it is released later this month. If you haven’t read our previous edition of Selling Your Film, you can find it HERE.

Sheri Candler May 15th, 2014

Posted In: book, Digital Distribution, Distribution, International Sales

Tags: attitude shift, AVOD, digital film distribution, dubbing, Europe, Rights Stuff, self distribution, Selling Your Film Outside the U.S., subtitling, SVOD, VOD, Wendy Bernfeld

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