Tag: KinoNation

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Startup Part 13: Indie Film Inspiration

By Roger Jackson

Previously: Doubling the Upload Speed
 
First Looks
This is an important week for KinoNation. Well, every week is crucial for a startup, but this feels extra critical. We’re submitting our first tranche of films to several video-on-demand platforms. We haven’t finished the dashboard for our VoD partners yet — that’s scheduled for December — so the submission process is old school. That is, we’re sending them a spreadsheet with details of films, trailer, IMDb link, festivals & awards, and the all-important written pitch. The results & feedback from these submission — whether VoD platforms accept 10% or 30% or 65% of the films we show them — will give us the early data we need to solidify our business model. I’ll keep you posted.

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Start-Up Part 12: Doubling the Upload Speed

By Roger Jackson

Previously: Ranking System for Indie Films?

Twice as Fast
We’ve made big strides at KinoNation over the past week. Klaus has been pulling late nights building the cloud-based Transcoding Engine. This automatically encodes films to the specs for each of dozens of VoD platforms. It’s complex work that’s normally done manually at encoding houses — and costs several hundred dollars per film. It’s a non-trivial challenge, so I was pretty psyched to see it working — and to see how fantastic the encoded films look! Not wanting to get too techy, but this means the huge ProRes files being uploaded by filmmakers are auto-checked on completion, queued and then transcoded into the Preview version that VoD platforms can watch and review.

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Start-Up Part 11: Ranking System for Indie Films?

By Roger Jackson

Previously: Three Months of Work

Ranking System
Consistent feedback from VoD platforms: it’s tough for them to decide whether to accept — or reject — an independent film. And how useful it would be to have some sort of independent films ranking system, to give them some indication of how well a movie might perform on VoD. We agree. So we’re building it. We found the perfect person to create what is quite a complex real-time algorithm — an indie filmmaker with a math PhD from Harvard.

Here’s the concept: For every film uploaded to KinoNation we gather dozens of data points. Film in a festival? It gets points, based on the prestige and importance of the festival.

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Start-Up Part 10: Three Months of Work

By Roger Jackson

Previously: Filmmakers Festival Feedback

3 Months In

We’ve been at it for three months now. Building a platform like KinoNation from scratch is an enormous amount of work, and like most start-ups we have limited resources. But we’re having fun, meeting a ton of really great people in the indie film world, and making rapid progress. Most important, we’re increasingly certain that KinoNation is a viable business, and we’ve been able to validate (prove) most of  our early assumptions.

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Start-Up Part 6: Late Nights and Early Breakthroughs

By Roger Jackson
 

Previously: A Crash Course in Film Distribution (and why video-on-demand is even more complicated)

Lining up Deals
Lots of late nights for the team, figuring out the “flow” of the KinoNation platform, writing code and reaching out to global video-on-demand outlets. My spreadsheet list of these outlets just keeps growing. There’s more than 100 now, and I’ve barely scratched the surface. That’s a lot of phone calls and pitches! This is a rapidly expanding market — it seems almost every day there’s a new VoD initiative. Last week Canadian cable giant Shaw Communications announced “Shaw Go” to compete with Netflix in Canada. And you’ve doubtless heard that Redbox are rolling out “Redbox Instant by Verizon” in December.

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Start-Up Part 4: Story Arc for Investors or Why I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Raising Money.

By Roger Jackson

Previously: Diary of a Film Start-Up Part 3: The Producer’s Dilemma

Last Week

Before I write about seeking money and investors, here’s what’s been happening in the past week. We’ve had — as of writing — 18 films submitted for our private beta launch. Films come in every day and we will never tire of clicking on the trailer link and getting a glimpse into a new world. I mean that. We know what it takes to make a feature film or documentary, and the reason we’re building KinoNation is to serve the creators of films like these. Keep them coming, the Private Beta is still open, we’re looking for lots more great films. It’s really fun to watch a group of compelling and disparate trailers, then delve into the IMDb pages for each movie, and in some case have discussions with the filmmakers. A couple of examples this week. Greek director Stathis Athanasiou submitted his stunning fantasy-romance DOS. Our reaction was pretty much “wow!”  Then Roseanne Liang submitted her delightful 2005 documentary Banana in a Nutshell. (which spawned her theatrical release My Wedding and Other Secrets.) Films like this that performed (or are performing) well on the festival circuit, but struggling to find video-on-demand distribution, are exactly what Klaus and I had in mind when we conceived KinoNation.

 

Bootstrapping

OK, so the subject of this post is finding investors.

Continue reading “Diary of a Film Start-Up Part 4: Story Arc for Investors or Why I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Raising Money.”