Tag: Roger Jackson

Diary of a Film Startup: Post # 29: The Vision Thing

Post author By Ted Hope
Post date June 12, 2013
141 Comments on Diary of a Film Startup: Post # 29: The Vision Thing

By Roger Jackson

Crystal Ball

I thought I’d use this post to think about the future and some of the trends that will affect films & filmmakers, particularly in the video-on-demand space. I don’t want to sound like the pompous visionary. I’m not a visionary and I have no crystal ball — merely informed opinion. This is not what WILL happen, but what I think may happen. And much of what follows may be stating the obvious.

Languages & Territories

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The part of the future that gets me most excited is the global market. And I don’t mean just Europe and Asia. There are 7+ billion people on the planet. Right now most don’t have access to movies. Or at least not your movies. Early last year — just before we started KinoNation — I was working in a poor, village in a remote part of Africa, on the border of Mauritania and Mali. Despite extreme poverty and isolation, most of these rural subsistence farmers and their families had cellphones.

Tags Diary of a Film Start-Up, Diary of a Film Startup, Flicklist, Guest Post, HitBliss, KinoNation, Roger Jackson, VOD

Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Startup: Post # 28: Dough Ray Me (Getting Paid)

Post author By Ted Hope
Post date May 28, 2013
939 Comments on Diary of a Film Startup: Post # 28: Dough Ray Me (Getting Paid)

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.

Tags Diary of a Film Start-Up, Diary of a Film Startup, Guest Post, KinoNation, Roger Jackson, VOD

Truly Free Film

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

Post author By Ted Hope
Post date May 14, 2013
77 Comments on 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!

Tags Diary of a Film Start-Up, Diary of a Film Startup, Guest Post, KinoNation, Roger Jackson, VOD

Truly Free Film

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

Post author By Ted Hope
Post date April 30, 2013
123 Comments on 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:

Tags Diary of a Film Start-Up, Diary of a Film Startup, Guest Post, KinoNation, Roger Jackson

Truly Free Film

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

Post author By Ted Hope
Post date April 16, 2013
1 Comment on 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

Tags Diary of a Film Start-Up, Guest Post, KinoNation, Roger Jackson

Truly Free Film

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

Post author By Ted Hope
Post date April 2, 2013
127 Comments on 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.

Tags Diary of a Film Start-Up, Diary of a Film Startup, Guest Post, KinoNation, Roger Jackson

Truly Free Film

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

Post author By Ted Hope
Post date March 19, 2013
89 Comments on 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.

Tags Diary of a Film Startup, Guest Post, KinoNation, Roger Jackson

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