By Matthew Helderman, & Luke Taylor
The smoke & mirrors of the entertainment business
The entertainment business has long been known for its less then above board dealings. Sharky agents, ridiculous financing structures, limited transparency and faulty business models.
That hasn’t stopped an influx of great content, great talent and hard work to get done — it’s just a reality of the territory. But does it have to be? With technology enabling scalability of information and transparency through widespread communication abilities — the entertainment business stands to benefit greatly at the bottom line level.
The compounded mess of the past six years
When the economy collapsed in 2008 — everything changed. Coupled with a growing digital presence for content consumption – a large sector of the film business scrambled (and it still scrambling today, eight years later).
The difficult reality is that financing a product – whether it be a film, a tangible good or a digital asset – needs to have a back-end model resulting in financial profitability — otherwise it becomes a non-profit sector with a defaulted business model.
Entertainment & specifically the independent film business has been nearing the risk of becoming such a segment of the economy — but doom & gloom isn’t necessary and can be avoided.
With pre-sales, debt models, mezzanine and new opportunities for lower costs than ever before — the film business has sustainability as long as it has the ability the pivot like the technology business has proven to be so valuable.
A great deal of the smoke-&-mirrors notoriety of the film business comes from people – whether they be talent, financiers, producers or distributors – feeling the necessity to bend the truth in order to get the project up, running and sold.
Regardless of the realities that are bound by economic principles and hard facts – these individuals and companies want the project to get made — bottom line.
What if this continued to be the case but it worked? Such that, the hardworking and incredible hustling entertainment community members continued hitting the pavement but provided transparency?
And what if on the other end there was profitability for the financial entities and individuals involved?
At BondIt — we believe this is the future of the entertainment business.
Influx of funding, streaming & simplifying platforms
Watching industries collide and create revolutionary results is one of the most exciting elements of the times we live in.
Our friends at Slated have done an incredible job in bringing multiple worlds together for unity and simplicity for the user and back-end results.
Similarly, our colleagues at crowd funding platforms have democratized the ability to raise capital through donation processes & are furthering the governmental shift in capital raise legalities. This paradigm shift will drastically alter the ways in which entities, projects and entrepreneurs fund and spread awareness — once again offering a globalization-like effect to previously segmented industries.
Another great example are the big-data driven powerhouses of IMDB, StudioSystem, BaseLine, SpecScout & The Black List who are all utilizing user data and collection methods to organize tools, systems and metrics for their platforms.
The key importance of all of these models — is that they use transparency as a powerful means of revealing truth.
Slated — ranks their projects on an algorithmic system enabling an investor, performer or distributor to quickly assess the valuation of said project.
IMDB — has the ability to scrape data from Google to uniformly gather a systematized metric rank for each member of the community on a weekly basis — similar to Twitter trending.
These advancements are major signs of positivity through the usage of technology to implement accuracy and transparency — whether the user, project, company or entity wishes to so or not.
BondIt – a streamlined tool for simplicity & effectiveness for financials & guilds
All of these technologies – along with the numerous other successful ventures at the tech & media intersection – have done a tremendous job blending simplicity with authenticity — which therefore lead to large user bases interested in the tools being offered.
At BondIt, we offer our clients ease of use when dealing with the unions. We offer ease of financial liquidity through underwriting applications on their union deposits. And more than anything – we offer intensely structured customer relations so that the user interface is not only an online presence – but a phone call away to a knowledgable staff.
The future for the entertainment business is similar to others – budget cuts, job changes and profitability model restructuring – but the future is bright & at BondIt we are working to continually make the process easier, to make sense of the jumbled mess of the current protocols and to offer a useful service that enables transparency and in the long run assists with building more revealed business — leaving the smoke & mirror days of Hollywood behind.
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.
