By Roger Jackson
Previously: Comparison Shopping
Update for Beta-Testers
Klaus and the coding team have been pulling late nights on one of our toughest tech challenges: building the system that does the automated delivery of films to video-on-demand outlets. Right now we have a backlog of film orders — for iTunes, Amazon, Hulu, SnagFilms, Viewster, etc. — that we’ve been delivering manually. That’s hugely time-consuming and inefficient. It takes several hours to prep one film for a single outlet. Not just the custom transcode, but the custom everything — metadata, images, file naming conventions, FTP delivery, etc. But it’s good to do this manual work a few times — in the same way it’s good to hand wash a pile of really dirty clothes to appreciate the genius of a washer-dryer! Now we’re days away from having an automated delivery system for our three beta VoD outlets, Hulu, Amazon and Viewster. And then we’ll scale it up to five then 10 then fifty global VoD outlets. What does automated mean? It means that the “several hours” manual job (even more when I’m doing it) of authoring custom metadata and image files take just a few seconds. And it’s way more reliable than me. It means we’re getting close to the point where a filmmaker can upload her film, get it reviewed and selected by several (and ultimately dozens of) VoD outlets, then automatically delivered to them and in front of audiences — in less than a week. (Of course, how quickly the outlet says yes or no is out of our control.) So we’re building KinoNation as fast as we can, and working through the catalog to get all our films delivered. And our Private Beta is still open for feature film submissions – now’s a great time to jump in.
Amazonian Challenges
Like many businesses built “in the cloud” we’re relying on
