By Roger Jackson
Previously: The Importance of Subtitles & Closed Captions
Post-Script
In my last post I wrote about Closed Captions and recommended you get them made by ZenCaptions. Now Amazon Prime has announced that captions are mandatory from March 1st. It’s already mandatory for iTunes. And has long been a requirement for Cable TV video-on-demand. It makes sense, it’s a good thing for people with hearing difficulties, and it makes your film more viable to watch in a noisy cafe or bar. At $1/minute it should be a no-brainer…get it done.
Hard Work, Innovation & Blind Alleys
Kinonation has come a long way in the past year. We dived into the very complex video-on-demand ecosystem. More complex than we expected, to be honest. We’ve invested heavily in technology and signing new outlets and content acquisition. We’ve made some mistakes with all of the above…and we’ve backed out of some blind alleys. But we’ve stayed super-lean and kept our overhead low. Because building a tech company is rarely about hockey-stick growth, and most often about consistent innovation, improvement…and making customers happy. Which we do at the end of every quarter by cutting checks to filmmakers, making money for outlets and giving consumers access to amazing indie films.
Technology is Scalable, Salaries Aren’t
Fundamentally we know that the only way to distribute thousands of movies to hundreds of outlets in dozens of countries and multiple languages is with super-scalable cloud technology. Because the matrix of distribution possibilities just becomes too much for humans to manage and track…remarkably quickly. The deeper we dive in, the more complex and nuanced it becomes….films and formats and outlets and territories and languages and deal terms and…on and on. Technology is good at this stuff, humans not so much. So that’s what we spend most of our time on — developing software that handles the multiple variances of VoD distribution, so we can distribute a catalog of 10,000 films to 200 outlets in 50 countries & languages.
Signing Outlets
We’ve done a pretty good job signing new video-on-demand outlets. But it’s taking too long. Hard to get their attention — everyone is busy. How can we make it a no-brainer for XYZmovies.com in Italy to sign a deal to take Kinonation content? Why should they care? What’s in it for them? Figuring that out is a daily challenge. But we’re getting there.
International
We have deals with all the major USA outlets. And now we’re very focused on international. We have deals with outlets in the UK, Spain, Germany, Australia, Japan, Arabia, China, New Zealand. And we’re just scratching the surface. The challenge is to entice these overseas outlets with relevant, localized content that will excite their customers. We can sign them, but for the deal to work we need movies that their customers will buy. That’s what you should be thinking as a filmmaker — how can I make my movie attractive and relevant in Japan or France or Germany or Saudi Arabia?
Catalog Content
Most video-on-demand outlets concentrate on movies and television. But there’s a ton of content that should be available on-demand that doesn’t fit those categories. We’re courting those catalog owners. I just started talking to a Filipino rights holder with a catalog of 1,400 feature films…real, serious movies in the Philippines, but unavailable in North America. We’d like to get them onto VoD. But who will take them…these are films in Tagalog not English, and the Filipino population in the US is big-ish — 3 million or so — but not huge. Could it be profitable? Maybe? We have the technology to ingest, store & distribute. But is the demand worth it? There are hundreds of similar libraries of under-exploited content. Fun to contemplate.
Marketing
Ultimately the biggest challenge is marketing. It’s true for everyone in this VoD business. In a world of infinite abundance of cheap or free movie content, how do you get a film to stand out? How do you get consumers to watch? Well, you start with the basics. We work with our filmmakers to craft the essential elements that make a consumer click…or not. Sometimes we lobby the filmmaker to nix the movie title he’s been attached to for 2 years. Kill it. It’s generic and boring and not at all provocative. But that means editing the trailer and the opening of the film. So be it. Do you want a title you love, or a title that will sell? We get very involved in poster art — looks great on a bus shelter, but is it readable at thumbnail size? Is there a tagline that helps the consumer decipher what the hell your film is about? We damn near insist on it. Is the description the type of prose that makes the reader melt in anticipation? It should be but usually isn’t. We re-write 90% of the synopses we get. I wish we didn’t have to, but pithy, elegant prose is a must-have to help sell the movie. That’s just the basics of VoD marketing. There’s lots more. We’re getting good at it, and we’re seeing the results.
We Want Your Film
Kinonation wants your film to distribute to video-on-demand outlets, with no cost, no risk and 100% integrity. Click to Get Started.
Next Up: Post # 44: $45 Billion by 2018
Roger Jackson is a producer and the co-founder of film distribution start-up KinoNation. He was Vice President, Content for digital film pioneer iFilm.com and has produced short films in Los Angeles, documentaries in Darfur, Palestine and Bangladesh, a reality series for VH1 and one rather bad movie for FuelTV. You can reach him at roger@kinonation.com.
