Tag: Diary of a Film Startup

By Roger Jackson 

Previously: Secret 19-Point VoD Marketing Plan, Part III

We want you films

Kinonation wants your film to distribute to dozens of video-on-demand outlets, with no cost, no risk and 100% integrity.  Click to Get Started.

Cutting Checks

We’re now cutting checks to filmmakers for Q2 2013. Very satisfying. It takes a while, since VoD outlets tend to pay 60-90 days after the end of the quarter that the film made money. And then Kinonation has to process the cash, take our 20% and PayPal the rest to the content owner. Not simple, not fast — but we’re doing it and this month will see payments to some of our amazing filmmakers. How much can you make? It’s hundreds at a minimum if you do nothing or if your film just isn’t very good. It’s thousands if your film is good, genuinely impressive. It is tens of thousands if your film is outstanding. And that’s the bottom line — how do you make your film, and the marketing & distribution of your film — outstanding rather than just festival average? 

New Outlets

We’re busy signing deals with VoD outlets around the world.

By Roger Jackson

Previously: Movie Live on VoD…Now What?

Ted Hope recently asked me to write about what we might have done differently at Kinonation with the benefit of a year’s hindsight. Mistakes made, lessons learned, what worked, what didn’t…

1. Big, Fat Assumptions

Most startups ventures are premised on one or more big, fat assumptions…which may or may not be accurate, even if you’re convinced they are. Kinonation is based on the assumptions that it’s really hard to get indie films widespread VoD distribution…and that there’s a huge backlog of films whose producers want help with this problem…and that the VoD outlets are actually interested in running indie films…and they have the audience to watch them.

By Roger Jackson

Previously: The Vision Thing

Progress Bar

If you’ve submitted a feature or documentary to KinoNation, you were probably a little overwhelmed at first by all the metadata that’s required. We just made the process much easier by including a real-time Progress Bar, with a dynamic list of what required metadata is still missing.  We’ve also radically simplified the signup & login process. Check it out, the sooner you submit (or complete) a film, the sooner we can get it distributed.

Movie Live on VoD…Now What?

KinoNation films are now going live every day on our beta partners Hulu, Amazon and Viewster. And they’re getting watched. And generating revenue for the filmmakers. So now’s a good time to get into the weeds about marketing. i.e. what concrete steps can get people to discover your film on video-on-demand? And once they’ve discovered it, how do you get them to start watching…and keep watching ‘till the end credits roll? What’s at stake is whether your film makes, for example, a trivial $250 on Hulu in 2014 — or it makes $25,000. And then repeat that across a dozen other platforms? It’s what Gravitas Ventures CEO Nolan Gallagher calls “The Last Mile” — and like every other part of the filmmaking process, it requires imagination, hard work and persistence.

Early Success

Roseanne Liang submitted her documentary “Banana in a Nutshell” to KinoNation a few months ago. Roseanne in the doc is the “banana” — that is, white on the inside, yellow on the outside.

By Roger Jackson

Previously: London Calling

Who Pays What?

At the recent Artist to Entrepreneur (A2E) summit at the SF Film festival, a frequently asked questions from filmmakers was “How much can I expect to make from VoD?” The question was greeted with stony silence, mostly because the data just isn’t out there in a meaningful, predictive way. That is, there aren’t enough proxies. A proxy for your film would be a film in the same genre, similar level of name talent, similar marketing budget — and perhaps comparable subject matter for documentaries. In short, a film with much the same chances in the market. That’s a proxy, and they just don’t exist. Or rather, the data isn’t being made public. Why? It’s not a nefarious conspiracy, it’s simply because no one has an incentive to release this data — and anyway there’s no much of it to begin with. So I thought it would be useful to shed what light I can on how much you might expect to make from various types of VoD outlets — ad supported, subscription, transactional, etc. The BIG caveat here is that KinoNation is just getting started, we’re only delivering films to a handful of “beta test” outlets, and so far films have only been live for a month or so — not nearly enough to make revenue predictions.