Tag: VOD

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Startup Part 14: Early Results

By Roger Jackson

Previously: Indie Film Inspiration

Quarter Million Views
I thought I’d share some results — as in numbers — for a feature that is having a nice run on YouTube Movies. The film is called Time Expired, and won a silver award for Comedy Feature at WorldFest Houston. It was submitted to KinoNation last week. And in fact the master ProRes file (71GB) is currently being uploaded by the filmmakers to our cloud storage servers. What immediately caught my attention is that Time Expired has almost a quarter million views on YouTube Movies since it was placed there by director Nick Lawrence 12 months ago. That’s the full length (93 mins) movie, not the trailer — an average of 20,000 per month, and accelerating. Nick has kindly agreed to share the extensive stats that YouTube provide. It’s interesting and quite instructive, I think, as YouTube Movies becomes an increasingly significant — and profitable — option for indie filmmakers.

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Startup Part 13: Indie Film Inspiration

By Roger Jackson

Previously: Doubling the Upload Speed
 
First Looks
This is an important week for KinoNation. Well, every week is crucial for a startup, but this feels extra critical. We’re submitting our first tranche of films to several video-on-demand platforms. We haven’t finished the dashboard for our VoD partners yet — that’s scheduled for December — so the submission process is old school. That is, we’re sending them a spreadsheet with details of films, trailer, IMDb link, festivals & awards, and the all-important written pitch. The results & feedback from these submission — whether VoD platforms accept 10% or 30% or 65% of the films we show them — will give us the early data we need to solidify our business model. I’ll keep you posted.

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Start-Up Part 12: Doubling the Upload Speed

By Roger Jackson

Previously: Ranking System for Indie Films?

Twice as Fast
We’ve made big strides at KinoNation over the past week. Klaus has been pulling late nights building the cloud-based Transcoding Engine. This automatically encodes films to the specs for each of dozens of VoD platforms. It’s complex work that’s normally done manually at encoding houses — and costs several hundred dollars per film. It’s a non-trivial challenge, so I was pretty psyched to see it working — and to see how fantastic the encoded films look! Not wanting to get too techy, but this means the huge ProRes files being uploaded by filmmakers are auto-checked on completion, queued and then transcoded into the Preview version that VoD platforms can watch and review.

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Start-Up Part 11: Ranking System for Indie Films?

By Roger Jackson

Previously: Three Months of Work

Ranking System
Consistent feedback from VoD platforms: it’s tough for them to decide whether to accept — or reject — an independent film. And how useful it would be to have some sort of independent films ranking system, to give them some indication of how well a movie might perform on VoD. We agree. So we’re building it. We found the perfect person to create what is quite a complex real-time algorithm — an indie filmmaker with a math PhD from Harvard.

Here’s the concept: For every film uploaded to KinoNation we gather dozens of data points. Film in a festival? It gets points, based on the prestige and importance of the festival.

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Start-Up Part 6: Late Nights and Early Breakthroughs

By Roger Jackson
 

Previously: A Crash Course in Film Distribution (and why video-on-demand is even more complicated)

Lining up Deals
Lots of late nights for the team, figuring out the “flow” of the KinoNation platform, writing code and reaching out to global video-on-demand outlets. My spreadsheet list of these outlets just keeps growing. There’s more than 100 now, and I’ve barely scratched the surface. That’s a lot of phone calls and pitches! This is a rapidly expanding market — it seems almost every day there’s a new VoD initiative. Last week Canadian cable giant Shaw Communications announced “Shaw Go” to compete with Netflix in Canada. And you’ve doubtless heard that Redbox are rolling out “Redbox Instant by Verizon” in December.

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Good News Re: Getting Attention For VOD Titles

This press release just came in… As a fan of both outlets, I am jazzed.  As a fan of specialized film and a dreamer of a land where we have the filters and curators necessary to deal with the challenge of The Grand Abundance (of Films), I am hopeful.  As a producer of films far too cognizant of the challenges we all face, I am happy to share this news!
 
Filmwax Radio, a weekly talk show about independent film, is increasing its focus to include Video On Demand (VOD) subject matter and guests.

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Truly Free Film

A New Light for Social Cinema

Editor’s Note: When I discover new platforms for filmmakers to get their work seen, I tend to invite the innovators to write a post to introduce our readers to the service.  This is not an endorsement, but I do find it thrilling there are so many options!

by Colin George, Editor-in-Chief, Cinecliq.com

The lights are down. The score swells. Unbelievable — that guy three rows down is texting again.

How many times has this happened to you? Moviegoing, real moviegoing, is an increasingly alienating experience, thanks in part to smartphone dependency and our addiction to social media. We can’t even go cold turkey for two hours. Watching movies can and should be a communal experience, but that white rectangle three rows down illuminates the face of an outlier, not a participant.

So how do we reconcile our shared love for cinematic storytelling with our growing need for 24/7 connectivity?

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