Tag: KinoNation

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Startup: Post # 27: London Calling

By Roger Jackson

Previously: How to Avoid Rejection

London Calling

I’m in London talking to most of the UK video-on-demand outlets. Being English myself doesn’t seem to confer any advantages. It may even cause suspicion — the Brit who abandoned ship and washed up in sunny California, and now he wants our business…screw him.  That’s still the attitude here, at least among some. LOVEFiLM (yes, that’s how they write the name) just told me that while they’ll happily ingest KinoNation films, they’re much more interested in — and focused on — television content. I like that level of honesty, and I’m not surprised. The lion’s share of VoD revenue on platforms like Netflix, Hulu and LOVEFiLM right now is being generated by TV shows, rather than movies. But movies on demand is still a big — and growing — business. Big enough for us to disrupt!

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Startup: Post # 26: How to Avoid Rejection

Previously: Film Delivery Automation

Films Are Flowing

The KinoNation tech team has now finished the automated delivery module for our three beta outlets — Hulu, Amazon and Viewster. Which means film packages are flowing — more rapidly every day — to those outlets. And it won’t be long before we add all the other video-on-demand outlets we’ve done distribution deals with. But with that success comes other problems — notably films that get rejected at the Quality Control (QC) stage, either at KinoNation QC, or at the outlet QC. So this post is about how to avoid having your film be a QC casualty. It’s like a theatrical distribution deal — there’s a list of deliverables, and they have to be exactly to the required spec, with zero wiggle room.

Assets

The movie “assets” we require are the master ProRes files for the film and the trailer, four images (2 x portrait & 2 x landscape), a very comprehensive set of metadata, and a subtitles file if the film audio is anything other than English. The tech specs for uploading these assets are simple — but very specific. The last thing you want is to assemble these assets, upload them to KinoNation (or anyone else) and then fail QC. Instead, take a little extra time to get everything right.

Here are some common reasons for QC failure:

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Startup: Post # 25: Film Delivery Automation

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

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Startup: Post # 24: Comparison Shopping

By Roger Jackson

Previously: Countdown to Launch

Comparison Shopping

Last week I had a discussion with a Netflix executive that convinced me of the importance of online VoD guides. Sites like Can I Stream It in the US, and Find Any Film in the UK. Netflix see them as a huge threat, since these sites make it super easy to discover which video-on-demand platforms have the film you want to watch. And which ones don’t. The reality is that Netflix don’t have most films.

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Startup: Post # 23: Countdown to Launch

By Roger Jackson

Previously: Outlet Soup

Countdown to Launch

We’re getting close to the launch of KinoNation, when we’ll remove the beta login requirement, open the service to all filmmakers, announce to the press, etc. Probably early April. Yesterday we released to our 100+ beta testers the latest version of the film uploader and metadata capture. It’s now much slicker and easier to upload, and we can capture a huge amount of essential metadata that’s required by the video-on-demand outlets. For example, we need four hi-resolution poster images in various sizes and aspect ratios, in order to meet the different delivery specs of iTunes, Amazon, Hulu, et al. And at the risk of sounding like a broken record: if you want people to discover and watch your film, you should be prepared to invest time (and maybe cash) on really great poster art. And it must be highly readable. That’s easy when it’s a full size poster on the side of a bus shelter. More difficult when it’s this size. Even tougher when it’s this size. Think big title, bold & arresting art — an image and title so compelling that consumers just HAVE to click.

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Startup: Post # 22: Outlet Soup

By Roger Jackson

Previously: Delivery Begins

Outlet Soup

It seems like every few days there’s an announcement of another video-on-demand platform. We’ve been tracking them since we started 6 months ago. I have a spreadsheet listing them all — where they are, what type of films they want, deal terms, ownership, traffic ranking, etc. As of today there are 163 on my list, and I’m sure I’m missing a few. What does this mean? How is it possible for even a fraction of these platforms to thrive and prosper in a VoD ecosystem dominated by large incumbents with established brands, pre-existing audiences and deep pockets? Netflix has 27m subscribers in the USA and is rapidly expanding in Europe and Latin America, with 6m+ non-US subscribers already. Amazon has a multi-billion dollar VoD war-chest and has gobbled up LOVEFiLM in the UK and Germany.

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Startup: Post # 21: Delivery Begins

By Roger Jackson

Previously: Video-on-Demand Sales Tips

Distributing the Betas
We’ve started delivering films to video-on-demand outlets. That may not sound like much — we could have done it 3 months ago by sending them a hard drive. But these are highly complex — and automated — deliveries, with literally hundreds of variables in the transcode presets, the type of poster image, the metadata fields, the trailer, the subtitles or closed captions…an error in any element will get the film rejected by the very rigorous Quality Control (QC) at the outlets. We’re impatient to get the films live so we can share some links with you — but we’re sanguine also. Even after a film gets to Amazon or iTunes or any other outlet it can take up to 90 days to go live — like it or not, that’s the reality we face.

Greek, Spanish & English
We decided to use a foreign film — the stunning Greek drama DOS — as our very first delivery. It looks stunning, every outlet has ordered it, and DOS is a great “use case” since it involves three languages. It’s a Greek film — set in Spain — with English subtitles.

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