TFC Blog

> tfc blog

by Jeffrey Winter

Sometimes revolutions happen with a bang, sometimes with a whimper. More often they arrive in stealth mode; one day you look up and is everything is different…just not quite the way you thought it would be.

Ever since 1) I have worked in film exhibition/distribution and 2) there has been an internet, there has been one shimmering vision on the horizon… that 1 & 2 would fully merge and the physical formats and pipelines of so-called “print” delivery would merge seamlessly into the digital data flows of the world wide web. Simply put: no more 35mm prints, no more VHS tapes, no more DVDs, Digitbetas, HDCAMs, or suitcase sized DCPs. No more trips to the post office, Fed Ex forms, tracking numbers, fretting about customs and worrying whether a snowstorm would screw up the print delivery and cancel the screening. Most importantly of course, none of the hideous and often prohibitive costs associated with all of this, that can heavily weigh down the distribution balance sheets. Simply put, something akin to distribution heaven.

Sometime in 2019, it dawned on me that after many years of twists, hiccups, re-visions and rude awakenings, the future wasn’t just the future anymore. We have finally arrived at the moment where a working draft of end-to-end digital distribution/delivery is actually in place, in rough-cut form. It’s certainly not the push-one-button, send-a-film-over email nirvana I had imagined; instead it’s a hodgepodge of file formats, myriad cloud-based services, and calculations around uploads/downloads, storage space, and piracy considerations. But it is happening and it is wonderful, with tremendous upsides and seemingly negligible negatives other than an investment of time, technical education, and reasonable precautionary practices.

Allow me to throw some numbers at you. Every year, The Film Collaborative books and executes a few thousand screenings of our films at public venues such as film festivals, theatrical venues, universities, community centers, etc. For many years now, we have been tracking the formats we show at each booking, and analyzing the data to show how the exhibition formats are evolving. It should be noted that not all of the factors are in our control, regardless of what formats and delivery services we OFFER to a venue, THEY have to have the willingness and technical capacity to receive and show it. So, as an industry made of up many players and technical capabilities, we evolve together.

Consider the following change between bookings in October 2015 and October 2019. We typically use the month of October for purposes of analysis because it is reliably one of the busiest months of the year, so the data holds the most statistical significance.

click image to open larger

Let’s look at just 2015 versus 2019 for a moment:

Exhibition Formats: 2015 vs. 2019 (2015/2019)
total October bookings = 279/249*
Bluray: 123/83 bookings (44%/35%)
DVD: 24/4 bookings (8.6%/2%)
Physical DCP: 109/58 bookings (39%/24%)
Digital Tape Formats (HDCAM, Digibeta etc): 0/0 bookings (0%/0%)
Apple ProRes (Physical HARD DRIVE formats): 8/1 bookings (2.7%/0%)
Digital Download .MP4 FORMAT: 15/51 bookings (5.7%/21%)
Digital Download DCP Format (cloud service download): 0/43 bookings (0/18%)

*note: 9 of the Oct. 2019 bookings required no deliverables because the venue already had the film in house from a prior booking, either in physical or digital format.

Of course, in all the data, the physical versus digital delivery comparison stands out well above the rest…

In 2015: entirely digital delivery was in its infancy at 5.7% of 279 bookings in a 31-day period.
In 2019: digital delivery rose to 39% of all bookings in the same 31-day period.
In 2015, digital DCP delivery was not even something we discussed, and all digital delivery was made via .mp4 downloads sent either through direct download from a website or, mostly, though DropBox links.
In 2019, we delivered 45.75% of our total digital downloads as standard DCP files made available from an Amazon cloud based storage service, and 54.25% of all digital downloads were sent as .mp4 download links shared via Dropbox.

Looking at this dense array of formats, stats, delivery systems and storage spaces, it seems safe to revert to my pervious assertion: we have certainly not yet arrived at the push-one-button, send-a-film-over email nirvana we might once have imagined. I now currently suspect that we never will, and that was a fundamental misunderstanding of how distribution systems and broadband technology could ever work…in much the same way the flying cars in the Jetson were an absurd vision given the contemporary reality of 2019 urban traffic patterns.

And that, my filmmaking friends, is just fine…and definitely heading in a good direction!

In looking at the current data points, we clearly see that physical formats have not turned into dinosaurs, or at least not yet. A lot of that is due to residual resistance from both festivals and filmmakers, especially the most established ones. Most big film festivals, especially in the United States (we have always been the furthest behind in digital cinema in the U.S. for reasons associated with government funding structures and de-centralized infrastructure), still see digital delivery of their films as risky and substandard, and perhaps even not worth the time and energy since they can get filmmakers to deliver at their own cost. Indeed, a majority or festivals and screening venues ask for PHYSICAL BACKUPS to digital delivery…which on some level is patently absurd since once a venue downloads a film they literally have a pristine copy that can be duplicated and is just mirrored by the physical backup, which is much more susceptible to damage, loss, etc. Also…there are still plenty of smaller venues and grassroots venues, especially at universities as well as in countries with less robust broadband, that are not yet set up for internet delivery of film yet (though this is rapidly changing).

Just as significantly, many filmmakers who have been around a while still worry that internet delivery makes their films less safe, and are reticent or slow to give us full access to their pristine digital files. In analyzing the October 2019 data, it is critical to note that one well-performing film that premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival and was peaking in October festivals refused to allow us ANY access to digital files, even forbidding us from creating an emergency digital back-up to send over if the physical format failed or did not arrive! As such, the percentage of the October bookings in digital delivery would have most certainly been higher had we not been denied access to the film’s digital assets, perhaps as much as 10% higher.

It should also be noted that while digital delivery has tremendous upsides, it is also much more complicated and technical at the outset. Burning Blurays in a lab is arduous but compressing a file to decent exhibition specs and making it small enough to conform to DropBox capacities is no simple matter either. We at TFC have only been able to achieve successful digital exhibition capabilities through years of exploring technology partners and services, and amazing staffers who understand far, far more about bits and bytes than I ever will. And you’ll have to spend a lot of time prepping the films for delivery to those technology partners too.

However lest this all starts to sound frightening to filmmakers, let me list some of the ways that embracing digital exhibition has greatly enhanced our business and our sanity.

Enormous savings in time. No, we can’t just attach a movie to an email and hit send. However, once we’ve uploaded a film once to the cloud, it’s mostly just as simple as messaging a download link to the venue (my print traffic colleague assures me that it is at least a bit more complicated to work with large files stored with Amazon Web Services). The fact that we can service a booking of four films in in Bratislava in 30 seconds by just sending an email with four links is miraculous. Multiply this by many dozens of bookings across a month, the time saved is breath-taking.
Enormous savings in shipping costs and resources. Although the data above shows that the number of digital bookings was generally less than 50% of the total, our shipping and duping costs for the associated business quarter was actually more than 80% less than normal! At first, I was so shocked by this reduction in cost, I genuinely freaked out and assumed we had lost a huge number of our receipts! Upon closer examination, it became clear that by having digital delivery as an option, we were able to convince the venues that would have required the most expensive shipping to switch to digital receivership, and also we were able to adjust the distribution supply chain to save money in many places, especially from labs. NOTE: I generally draw the nerd/wonk line once I start using words like “distribution supply chain,” so enough about that for now. However, discussion of resources is critical…and not just in terms of saving money from duping. Obviously, any significant reduction in duping of plastics and use of carbon-based fuels associated with shipping has a tremendously positive and feel-good effect on the climate science of it all, even if I cannot offer you numbers to prove that.
Huge reductions in stress and emergencies. One cannot overestimate the fact that now we have emergency digital backups that can resolve any sort of delivery/exhibition snafu. Throughout the entire history of film exhibition, there has always been the worry that a print will malfunction, or a delivery truck won’t arrive on time, etc. That has resulted in many a week, weeknight, or weekend filled with panicked calls and crisis management. Those days it seems, are very nearly gone, and good riddance.

To close, it should be stressed that there are lingering questions as to whether digital delivery of films makes our intellectual property less or more safe, and if filmmakers and distributors should worry how piracy will evolve to take advantage. It is important to note that for as long as there have been physical formats, especially following the decline of the all-35mm supply chain with the introduction of video, there have always been those who will figure out how to a pirate a film, regardless of format. The internet at least offers passwords, analytics, tracking, and geo-blocking that are a far cry safer than sweatshops in Asia copying DVDs smuggled out of a lab.

I, for one, have not seen any data to suggest piracy is on the rise due to digital cinema, and am open to re-evaluation should I see some. However, for now, I have learned to stop worrying so much, and hope the rest of you can see clear to join me at this exciting new juncture.

admin January 28th, 2020

Posted In: Uncategorized

forest_road_logo

zachary_tarica Zachary Tarica is the CEO of The Forest Road Company, a specialty film financing company that lends against U.S. tax credits, providing financing solutions for responsible creators across not just the film industry, but the real estate and renewable energy sectors as well. For more information, please visit their website or Facebook Page.

[The Film Collaborative:] What are tax credits?
[Zach Tarica:] A tax credit is a way in which state governments incentivize people to complete otherwise expensive transactions (like making films). Movie incentive programs entice production companies to spend in their state by offering a percentage of qualified expenditures back to the production company. State governments do this because it builds infrastructure, creates jobs, and boosts tourism. These programs vary by state (and country) in structure and scope, but the end goal is universal: a symbiotic financial relationship between the state/country and the production company.
[TFC:] How do they work?
[ZT:] Each state has different requirements for qualifying for a tax credit, but in most states you must submit an initial application, spend at least a specific amount on qualifying expenditures, and go through an audit or AUP. The audit/AUP is conducted after you’ve completed spend. You then submit your audit along with a final application to the film office. After the film office reviews and approves, they send it to the state-level department of revenue. This department issues your credit. You can receive it in the form of a credit, which is a certificate that must be bought by an entity that has tax liability in that state, or a check, which is payable directly to the production entity and its owners.
Many states offer additional incentives for certain categories. For instance, there is a 10% increase in Louisiana if your screenplay was written by a Louisiana resident. New Jersey offers a 2% increase if your crew meets a certain diversity threshold. Forest Road offers detailed information on the programs in each state to help you determine what works best for your production and budget.
[TFC:] Which states and countries offer them?
[ZT:] We’ve funded projects in the following states:
- Alabama
- Georgia
- Louisiana
- Nevada
- New Mexico
- New York
There are plenty more states that offer competitive incentives. For more info on each state, please visit our site below:

https://www.forestroadco.com/state-rankings

They are also offered in the following countries:
- Australia
- New Zealand
- Canada
- Ireland
- Romania
- Poland
- Belgium
- Hungary
[TFC:] What does Forest Road do?
[ZT:] Forest Road is a lender against tax credits. Every US state (and many countries) with a tax incentive program requires a production to be completed before receiving a tax credit, so Forest Road helps by lending a portion of the value of the tax credit to the production company before the project is completed. A loan from Forest Road can be used to help complete production so that the tax credit is received, and the money from the credit is used to repay the loan. Forest Road also offers tax credit administration services to production companies to help ensure they qualify for and maximize the value of the credit.
[TFC:] How does it distinguish itself from other similar services/companies?
[ZT:] Forest Road offers a solution for independent films that don’t have access to the major banks’ lending platform: either the production is too small, the paperwork process is too arduous, or the time it takes for banks to close on deals is too long. Non-bonded films in particular do not have access to the banks’ lending platform. Other non-bank lenders are often too expensive for most independent films. Forest Road works with low-budget films to offer a no-fee lending service at a year-one interest rate of 10% (about half the rate of our closest competitors).

We can also close on and fund projects within days, not months. This is due to the fact that our diligence process is streamlined, and our agreements are short. We took the opportunity to expand on this below, but we take pride in our docs being easy to read with no hidden agenda or confusing legal language. We keep our lending process as simple as possible, and straightforward paperwork is one of the best ways to maintain simplicity.

Furthermore, we are careful to lend only what we are confident production companies will be able to pay back. We provide a conservative estimate of the value of the tax credit, and then lend a percentage of that value — enough so that the production accomplishes its goals, while also having enough money left over to meet the repayment schedule. And because we are lending against the credit, rather than buying it outright, any extra value that comes in from the state goes back into the production company. Therefore, you’re left with extra money from the tax credit, even after repaying the loan and interest.

Lastly, Forest Road takes no producer credits on your film. We appreciate that the filmmakers are the storytellers, and we want to help tell stories that are the most authentic to their creators. We call this “letting you make the movie, while we take care of the headache.” We keep 100% of the creative decisions to you, and empower you to create unique content by providing unique services.
[TFC:] What are some common producer/filmmaker mistakes?
[ZT:] Producers often receive funds from debt lenders that they can’t afford to use. Most lenders will try to give as much money upfront against an incentive in the hopes that you are not able to pay back principal + interest using only credit proceeds, therefore you default on your loan and the lender can foreclose on your film or other collateral. Production teams also make a number of administrative mistakes. Producers often enter incorrect corporate and tax information on their initial/final application. They also organize their entity incorrectly, or choose the wrong type of entity altogether. It’s very important to have the entity earning the incentive setup correctly, otherwise it may not be possible to obtain financing against the incentive; or even earn the incentive at all.

It is extremely important to pay close attention to how purchases are made during production. Remember, governments create incentive programs in order to bring money to the state. So, ordering everything online for your production means none of those expenses will qualify. Take the time to ensure what you’re purchasing, and what you have outlined in your budget that will qualify for the credit, does in fact qualify. It can be the difference between receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars back from the state or much, much less.
[TFC:] Feel free to share common FAQs and answers not covered above.
[ZT:] What’s the best state to shoot in?
Louisiana has a great base incentive coupled with a number of regional bonuses and bumps based on personnel. They also have a healthy buyback system and solid infrastructure. An often-overlooked state is Massachusetts. The program has no cap, a minimum spend requirement of $50,000, and your above-the-line talent qualifies. Ultimately, producers have to determine whether the production can work in a given incentive jurisdiction, then look to see if the production spend will meet the minimum requirements of the program.

At what point do I come to a tax credit lender to receive money?

In order to fund your project, Forest Road needs to see that you have your equity raised and your package secure. However, we can get involved even at script stage to advise on which states to shoot in, how to properly create a budget that makes sense for your project, and even how to properly fill out a state application.

What should I look out for when I’m financing my project?

A key indicator that a lender/financier is taking advantage of you is if there are high fees associated with the funds you’re receiving or sliding closing dates. Upfront legal fees, closing fees, marketing fees etc. are very quick ways for lenders to take money away from the screen without doing much work. Forest Road charges zero fees. Also, you should look at the length of the agreements that they send over. Film finance is relatively straightforward. If the documentation is extensive, the financier is usually trying to slip something by you. All Forest Road agreements combined are no more than 20 pages. That includes signature pages.

When I receive a loan against the tax credit, why am I not receiving the full estimated amount?

With any purchase, you never want to buy into something that you cannot afford to pay back. Therefore, we protect the production from this happening by pricing out a loan in such a way that you’ll have excess value in state proceeds after you pay back principal + interest. When you receive the incentive in the form of a credit, you also have to take into consideration brokerage fees as well as at what price the market is trading your credit at. For example, Georgia credits are trading at a very different price point than Nevada credits.

Orly Ravid May 16th, 2019

Posted In: Uncategorized

Tags: financing, tax

A review of all of our distribution-related articles of the past year or so… enjoy!

New Blockchain Distribution Platform in India

VOD Distribution in India + New Blockchain Distribution Platform/Service

Light of the Moon Case Study

SXSW Case Study Discussion – The Light of the Moon

Making Distribution Choices with Your Film

David Averbach April 15th, 2019

Posted In: Uncategorized

We invited Bunker 15, whom we worked with on the theatrical release of The Light of the Moon, to write a guest blog post for us, explaining who they are and what they did for TLOTM and other films.

bunker15
Tech Entrepreneur bringing Influencer Marketing to Hollywood

Technology may be making it easier to get a film made and distributed…but how do you get your film to stand out in such a crowded marketplace? Sundance just had a mind-blowing 14,000+ applicants for their festival. Even with a theatrical release, it is difficult to capture the mind-share of viewers and build a critical mass when you have a small marketing budget and no A-list talent. To publicize their films, distribution firms and filmmakers are turning to social media campaigns to get in front of an audience because they are easy to run, relatively cheap and (hopefully) you can target a niche audience. However, in practice, again and again, social media campaigns cost more than the viewership they produce.

There might be other options. Daniel Harlow, a tech entrepreneur and founder of Bunker 15 Films, has a strategy that seems to be working—even for small indie films with limited budgets.

Background

Harlow sold his IT Consulting company (founded right out of UCLA) in 2015. After 23 years of work, 6 offices, and 300 employees, he suddenly nothing to do. He ended up going back to UCLA, this time for their post-graduate Film Studies Program for Independent Producers—mostly for fun. Harlow became fascinated with the technology changes in the entertainment industry. DVD sales had mostly gone away and theaters were primarily for large Special-Effects-driven studio blockbusters. Indies were seen at home through streaming services where piracy cut into revenues even further. “There were no answers at UCLA Film Studies for how to draw audiences to a particular film,” said Harlow. All new technology players in the film space were making their money from the Long Tail theory. Less revenue per film but a massive number of additional films will lead to more revenues overall. The game is volume. Players like Apple, Amazon and Netflix were making money but each individual film was getting a smaller and smaller share of a larger overall pie.

At his former company, Harlow ran several marketing campaigns for clients like Walmart, Nike, Macy’s, Sephora, The Gap and others. “In many situations we had exactly this Long Tail issue: an infinitely large storefront of the internet. How do you make a product stand out? Most times, we used Influencer Marketing campaigns – which are now common for the Makeup, Fashion and other industries,” said Harlow. “I went to SXSW thinking that I could find the thought leadership on this and work on real solutions, but there was no leadership on the subject. The only solution anyone proposed was the Do-It-Yourself model which I thought was only applicable to a small number of filmmakers.”

Do-It-Yourself

The DIY movement in film certainly has a lot of buzz and momentum. The Sundance Institute and other prominent institutions advocate filmmakers marketing their own films. “I had interviewed dozens of filmmakers and I just don’t know if you could possibly find a worse fit than a filmmaker with marketing. They aren’t oriented toward that and they really don’t want to do it,” said Harlow.

The DIY process for PR is fairly simple. Go online and hunt down journalists and critics yourself. Find them or their editors and email them about your film. You are bound to find some interested in watching or writing about your movie which is, by definition, more PR than you had before. And you Did It Yourself. Voila.

For a small minority of filmmakers, it works – if it fits their personality. Some producers are exhausted after the filmmaking process and would love to do something more left-brain like monetizing, marketing and distributing the film. “These types of filmmakers would probably have been involved in the business side of the film no matter what happened,” said Harlow. But it is a small group. The majority of filmmakers are artists, right-brain thinkers, and writers. Monetizing the film is too tedious for them and they probably have a queue of scripts and projects they want to move on to. The majority, once the film is finished, want to do a little press then start working on the next project. Often, these projects take so long to come to fruition that if they don’t move on quickly, it could be years before they have another finished film.

Plus, there are practical obstacles of trying to publicize your own film. Many publications have rules forbidding communicating directly with a film producer. The publication needs to be communicating with a third party to keep the article unbiased. And the sheer difficulty of chasing down critics one by one and asking them to review a film is a daunting task, particularly when coupled with the time-critical nature of the job. Film critics usually want to publish an article within a week of a film’s release. If it’s already been released, it’s ‘old news’ and if it’s not going to be released for 3 months, then don’t bother me yet, they think. That’s a narrow time window to communicate with dozens of journalists.

Thinking Forward

Despite the fact that it would be difficult for an individual filmmaker, Harlow thought that if Influencer Marketing could work in other industries, why not film? After all, film journalism already has a rich and storied history. “There must be a way to leverage the hundreds of entertainment writers out there, at least I hoped so,” said Harlow. But his initial research wasn’t encouraging. Project Lodestar did a study that surveyed 750 entertainment writers worldwide and found an overall downward trend in the coverage of Indie films. Publications had downsized their writing staff and decreased the size of their Entertainment sections, and thus they mostly needed to focus only on the biggest films. Journalists were more restricted than ever to covering only theatrically-run films in their local market.

“SXSW, UCLA and now Project Lodestar all gave off this grim picture for individual filmmakers, but I thought that what they were missing was this burgeoning space of film writers that were taking to the internet to blog on their own. More entertainment publications (especially websites) were decoupling from any given geography. And it was the geographical boundary that tied a publication to theaters in their area. The hard copy nature of old-world, established journals limited physical space available for Indie articles but these limitations also didn’t apply to website and blogs. For example, Roger Moore’s Movie Nation covers a large number of Indie films every month. So why not work with publications like that?” Harlow thought.

tlotm_poster

After several initial Beta-tests with tiny films that gave Bunker 15 Films encouraging results, it took on a big festival winner: Light of the Moon by Jessica M. Thompson. Light of the Moon was one of their first major efforts to see if the system would work. And did it! 75 Rotten-Tomatoes journalists requested to see a preview screener of the film. As expected, many of them couldn’t get their publications to publish a review about an Amazon Prime release but even some of the larger outfits did cover the film in other ways. The LA Times, for example, made Light of the Moon their VOD Pick of the Week based on Bunker 15’s outreach. The Chicago Tribune interviewed one of the actors for a piece in the paper and several of the writers wrote reviews for their blogs, many of which had huge followings. All in all, Bunker 15 Films secured 17 additional Rotten Tomatoes certified reviews for the film and a number of other pieces like the LA Times, Chicago Tribune, FilmINK in Australia, etc.

What Bunker 15 Does and How it Works

Bunker 15 doesn’t just have a large database of film and entertainment journalists but also it catalogs the films they have written about. There is information on what they have liked and disliked over time. Therefore, they can target the journalists that cover and like small Indie films. Mike Bravo, the company’s CTO, says, “There’s quite a bit of technology in place now to find entertainment bloggers and reach out to them when certain films fit their profile. We are building profiles of both critics and the publications they write for, which is complicated, because one writer might write freelance for one publication doing VOD Streaming movies but might only cover theatrical films for another publication. Plus, writers move around and change publications all the time. We are also trying to build resources for the critics themselves so the critics have an interest in being in contact with Bunker 15,” Bravo says.

“The key for us really is finding that subset of critics that are going to be interested in a particular film and that’s not real easy. Each journalist and publication has geographical and theatrical constraints, genre interests, timing issues… there are a lot of variables but we try to find the journalists that are really into a particular film or genre and focus there,” Harlow says.

The results have been amazing. Turns out that critics really want to watch Indies and like them when they watch them. It’s all about expectations. If it’s a small film, the critic will judge it on its own merit, not by its production value or special effects budget.

Critical reception for many of their films, like Light of the Moon, Stay Human, A Boy Called Sailboat, and others has been overwhelmingly positive. “Not every film we work with has a fantastic reception among the critics but our ability to get to journalists that do like Indies (as opposed to those whose expectations are met only by large Studio efforts) can make a big difference,” says Harlow.

The Future of Bunker 15 Films

“We see ourselves moving into other industries eventually because the same macro-trends that are affecting film are also at work with literature and music. The technologies that allow them to be created and distributed have resulted in an explosion of content for the average consumer to wade through with little except Influencers and reviewers to help choose among everything coming at them each day. But for now, we continue to build out tools and content for entertainment journalists and focus on film,” he says.
“As we move forward, I think the ground will shift in our favor,” say Harlow. The MN Star Tribune now has a Rotten Tomatoes certified movie critic reviewing VOD releases for the week. The LA Times is expanding their coverage of Streaming films and so is the New York Times. In addition, many publications are treating Netflix Originals in the same category as Theatrical releases. Harlow continues, “The trend to cover more and more VOD Streaming releases will increase which will put more journalists within our reach for our Indie films.” If it’s working now, then it’s safe to say it will work better as time goes on.

About Bunker 15 Films

Bunker15’s smart-tech Publicity Engine helps find the right journalists to promote your film (VOD or Theatrical). Even VOD releases can earn Press. Every film deserves to find its audience. Whether you have a small film with a limited theatrical release or you have a Straight-to-VOD feature, they can reach out to the journalists that are interested in your story.

admin April 15th, 2019

Posted In: Uncategorized

by Orly Ravid

After participating in the Film Bazaar market in India (connected to the International Film Festival of India, now in Goa), I decided to investigate the distribution potential in India, specifically VOD and Blockchain and the distribution potential for independent cinema.

A 2018 report in Business Today noted that the OTT market in India is worth ½ billion and will grow to be 5 billion by 2023 with Fox’s Hotstar leading with 75 million subscribers with American companies such as Netflix and Amazon in hot pursuit. The reason for the growth is rising affluence and adoption across demographics including in rural areas. Today, the VOD market is AVOD-dominated but Business Today anticipates a flip with AVOD going down and SVOD and TVOD doubling from their present estimated 18% of the market.

This is fun—search “Film distribution in India” on Google and you get a nice scroll of logos with links to a bunch of companies. And you can find a list on Wikipedia.

At Film Bazaar I interviewed a couple of top players in the VOD distribution space, and also MinersINC, a new Blockchain distribution platform/service.

First, I spoke to Ajay Chacko is Co-founder & CEO of Arré, one of the country’s foremost original digital content brands. Arré was founded in 2015 by B. Saikumar, Ajay Chacko & Sanjay Ray Chaudhuri. Arré offers multimedia content across genres & formats and has won many international & domestic awards & accolades for its work in digital fiction & non-fiction. Arré Studio is also working on large-format original shows in collaboration with domestic and international OTT platforms as well as broadcast television networks. Ajay has over 2 decades of experience in media & financial services. He spent over a decade with Network18 and was Group COO and also President A+E – TV18 JV in his last held roles with the Group. He has also worked with IL&FS, Sharekhan and the Indian Express Group prior to his stint with Network18. The company’s website can be found here.

Q [to Ajay Chacko of Arré]: What are key trends today in India with respect to audiences/consumers getting content (please comment on both type of content and means of consumption/viewing (technology and price model))?:

A: The Indian digital media market has seen renewed traction ever since data prices crashed with the advent of JIO & the subsequent competitive intensity in the telecom market; the digital media audience is approaching the 400 million mark. More than (>)85% of content consumed is on the mobilewith the structure of consumption now pretty much getting aligned to what it was in the case of TV but with a different idiom i.e. audiences are watching long form shows and movies, albeit on-demand and of the kind they’d like to watch. This has also created a boom in original content commissioned by OTT platformssince TV content in India has isn’t really working when it comes to individual level consumption (remember India is a single TV household where most programming was catering to semi-urban and rural housewives since they formed the primary ratings driven chunk of viewership). The granularity of the Indian market is reflected by its languages and consumption driven by regional and national languages – these trend in the long run to be 50/50 or thereabouts (Hindi: Regional Indian languages like Bengali, Tamil, Telegu, Marathi etc.). The current roughly 800 million TV audiences which is fairly penetrated has reflected this trend and this is also showing up in digital with YouTube India reporting that almost half of its 200 million+ audience is coming from regional markets/ watching regional language content. Video market for English content is at the ‘uppermost socio-economic’ strata but it has never exceeded 4-5% of the overall pie. In fact, English TV entertainment did not cross 2% market share despite it being present in India for over two decades.

India has also been a predominantly ad-funded marketwhen it comes to even fiction/ entertainment. Currently the OTT space is 95%+ AVOD (audience numbers) and some players like Netflix, Amazon, Alt Balaji, Eros Now etc. are trying to push a subscription- based model with some degree of success. Even after 2.5 decades of the existence of cable TV with over 500 channels, India still remains a 70%+ advertising driven market and cable/ pay TV subscription packs are available for 300+ channels at less than 2.5 dollars a month.The consumption trend when it comes to the ‘pay for content’ aspect is still pretty much in the Indian idiom of being ad-driven (various models have emerged here – for example brand integrations into stories has also emerged as an important line of revenue for Independent content players as well as some AVOD platforms).

Q: What about piracy concerns and copyright infringement / protection in India?

A: Piracy has always been an issue in India though I would not put it to be the number one problem as most content in India is freely available since its ad driven/ AVOD. There are many steps being taken by industry associations to help tackle piracy when it comes to music and movies with some degree of success. Digitization has also helped in freeing the movie business from the distribution related leakages.

Q: To what extent is there an appetite / market for American independent cinema in India?

A: Like I mentioned in my earlier point, American Indie cinema has limited appeal, maybe restricted to the top tier of film-buffs etc. in terms of percentage share of the market. However, in terms numbers due to the sheer size of the market there maybe opportunities to have a couple of hundred thousand folks access these thru digital platforms/ OTT services.

Q: I hear documentaries are more popular in India than they used to be in large part due to services such as Netflix—what can you say about that?

A: Much as one would love for this to be true, it isn’t. Docs haven’t really taken off in any meaningful way and one can spend an entire day analyzing why 🙂

A couple of stray examples really don’t break this trend.

Q: Please comment about Amazon, Netflix, and Blockchain with respect to your market (India).

A: The entry of international players like Netflix, Amazon etc. has hastened the process of creation of quality original programming made for digital. This is an important breakthrough in the Indian market and a lot of the OTT platforms (who were banking on catchup tv content) now have realized that they need to up their game and come up with quality original programming in Indian and regional languages. This has thrown up a lot of opportunity for creators, film-makers who were earlier left out of the TV boom as that idiom of programming was considered regressive by most. So, I am hoping that one would see a deluge of quality original programming targeted at various demographics and geographies coming out of India in the near term. As for Arré, we are already working on over 140 hours of high-quality original shows (some for our own platform and a few in partnership with some of the domestic and international OTT players).

On Blockchain, I believe it’s a tad early, but it helps really disintermediate efficiently and this may be a boon for independent film makers and creators.

Then, I spoke to Suri Gopalanis, the Founder of Vista India Digital Media Inc., which distributes to the largest Indian studios and broadcasters with a focus on featuring films prominently on its partner platforms. Vista’s client list includes Red Chillies, Sun Network, Viacom18, Balaji Motion Pictures, Disney UTV, among others. Vista claims to be a pioneer in taking regional films on OTT platforms and having successfully delivered content in Indian languages like Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Kannada, Punjabi, Oriya, Assamese and Gujarati across all our digital platforms. The company’s website can be found here.

[Suru Gopalanis of Vista India Digital Media Inc.]: With a remarkably young population and low cost of bandwidth, the Indian market has seen explosive growth in online video. While YouTube continues to dominate AVOD, we have a hyper-competitive OTT space (both domestic and International players) operating at all the different segments. As of now, we have over 32 platformswith financial muscle fighting for a pie of the Indian market which is expected to touch $ 5 billion by 2023. While primary consumption is still on mobile devices it is expected to gravitate towards TV with dongles and apps built into TV sets.

India is a price sensitive market. With average cable bundling at less than $2.00 per month, the ability for Indian consumers to pay in comparison to International markets still remains to be proven. Having said that, there are a number of price tiers at work domestically with a mixture of AD (AVOD) and SVOD to provide maximum economic value to consumers.

India is a very diverse country with many different regional languages and audiences. The segmentation of this online is relatively easier compared to standard broadcast TV. This, in turn, is leading to a number of niche regional platforms emerging in the pay markets that are targeted via language and tastes.

Sports continues to the biggest driver both offline and online with Cricket dominating minutes watched. There has been a lot of inflows into content development as audience tastes are changing and continue to beinfluenced by what’s happening in the West.

Indian audiences have been habituated to YouTube which has grown very aggressively in India and continues to attract advertising dollars. Given the diversity of content consumption, it is little wonder that DIY content in a host of niches has found audiences on YouTube.

With so much of competition, there is a need to create differentiated content and almost all the platforms including YouTube are investing in new original shows to attract and retain eyeballs. We have seen a number of new shows which have been localized to multiple regional languages which is a new feature that OTT platforms have the advantage to experiment in.

In terms of independent features, there is not much good news. The consumption at this point appears to be to the big budget highly promoted features. Our hope is that a new generation of Indians will be more receptive to both foreign and Indian original films.

When at Film Bazaar I mentioned the launch of the Blockchain company to filmmakers and industry professionals the reaction was always extremely enthusiastic—It seems the right model for the market.…So I interviewed Nitin Narkhede, Founder & CEO of MinersINC, a new Blockchain platform/service that provides a unique opportunity to watch critically acclaimed films in India:

[Nitin Narkhede of MinersINC]: 2018 saw a progressive step forward for Indian independent cinema when Rima Das’ Village Rockstars became the country’s entry to the Oscars Best Foreign Language Film category.A passion project where Das and her school going cousins got together with a bunch of village kids to write, shoot, edit and direct this film entirely on hand held camera—Village Rockstars embodies the untapped, underutilized potential of self-trained, inspired and independent filmmakers in the country. That there is an audience for such cinema is evident to a logical mind, yet often left un-catered to by the country’s established filmmaking, distribution and exhibition segments. Das’ lilting, surreally beautiful film released in over 30 theatres in Assam and West Bengal and stayed on for over a month in very limited multiplex screens in Delhi and Bangalore, cities with sizeable and concentrated diaspora from the state. Village Rockstars had been screened at 88 film festivals, won 44 awards including four Swarna Kamals, the highest honors offered by the National Film Awards (India), to finally claim a restricted space in movie theatres.

This film elucidates aptly the absolute lack of a distribution mechanism for small, substantial and freethinking cinema or entertainment content within India. Another prime example is Mukti Bhawan, an introspective and moving film about death, old age and detachment. This film won critical acclaim in ten of the most respected film festivals, found theatrical releases in Japan and Germany, territories where familiarity with Hindi as a language is sparse.

Yet, in India, it barely found sufficient screen space- ultimately nesting on an OTT platform for viewers. Films that don’t boast of stars, celebrity filmmakers or the wizardry associated with mainstream movie making do not have a mechanism for their exhibition and distribution. Notwithstanding recognition globally, international independent films also never make it to an Indian audience’s viewing menu. With OTT platforms emerging in the country, some expected the restrictions that independent films, faced from a traditional, profit oriented distribution-exhibition system to change. Unfortunately, change for the small film, which rides on passion for a good, relevant story, is barely visible.

OTT platforms from international giants offer varied content but stay firmly focused on star-driven films and shows. English language content is also preferred by these platforms. Small, substantial films find room in a space where glitzier behemoths dominate.

Over the years, what we’ve come to firmly believe is that there is a definite audience keen on watching quality films, engaging stories from across the world here in India. With the country’s aspirational youth, levels of interest in cinema beyond typical Hollywood and Bollywood are evident. Given the challenges of access for such content, piracy often becomes a habit. Increasingly, world cinema that is shown at the film festivals, Cinefan by Osian and MAMI, based in Mumbai, runs to packed auditoriums. These films travel from across the globe, ranging from Iran, to South American nations, to East Asia and Europe. Watching them is top priority for the keen Indian cinephile today.

myNK, the OTT platform from MinersINC firmly focuses on filling this gap between demand and distribution of quality world cinema. Utilizing Blockchain technology, it ensures a safe, assured distribution platform for filmmakers to access a whole new audience that has only just begun consuming content on smart phonesand hand held devices. Currently, approximately 299 million people use smartphones in India. Over time, this number is expected to grow to 499 million as Reliance Jio expands access to high-speed data at very low prices. This is a market for movie consumption that simply has no match in terms of reach and numbers. The Hollywood Reporter has argued in a well-researched column that OTT giants like Netflix and Amazon PrimeVideo are battling it out to grow their share of the Indian video on demand market; simply because the numbers of video in India are mind boggling. In a scenario when mobile phones will often become access point for one’s personalized entertainment choices, myNK’s offering of critically acclaimed and quality world cinema offers a never before opportunity to access content for cinephiles.

Rapidly evolving digital technologies and declining costs of filmmaking equipment has led to a growth in the number of filmmakers worldwide. Rima Das, as explained, provides the perfect example. Finding an audience for these films though holds a real challenge. Additional problems that emerge are, firstly, a shortage of screens. India has just 10 screens per million people. When films don’t get released, they run the risks of getting pirated.Combined with high costs of acquiring distribution for a film often leave the film producer with no profits. Aside from this oligopolistic distribution model controlling content that makes it to a film theatre, marketing, sales and publicity for films are huge additional costs. Adding to the woes of the creator, there is a huge market of illegal downloads. Lopsides royalties and revenue distributions further reduce a creator’s earnings.

Conventional distribution mechanisms work in silos, somewhere incapacitating filmmakers and producers financially. Blockchain technology, as used by MinersINC, can help in resolving this opaque situation making a radical positive change by empowering creators in the long run. Blockchain technology naturally extends to the fundamental framework of how digital media gets distributed. It is a peer-to-peer decentralized network that brings the filmmakers in direct contact with their consumers without passing through the archaic distribution system. It gives leeway to filmmakers to bypass the costly distribution mediums and distribute their films directly to consumers. It has the potential to liberate the filmmakers by putting them back in control of their work and gives them complete autonomy on how their content gets distributed and priced. Parellely, consumers are empowered as they get the freedom to chose from a global library of films.

myNK, a product created by MinersINC envisages creating an entertainment ecosystem that will liberalize the industry from oligopolistic distribution practices, revenue dilution across middlemen, piracy, revenue leakages, copyright issues, breach of contracts, lost monetization, non-transparent earnings and unjust right attributions. Apart from addressing the current set of challenges, myNK aims at achieving greater goals by weaving the entities and components together in a fabric of trust and transparency, work on business models that make value sets more direct, less intricate and more rewarding.

In the long term, myNK aims to use blockchain technology to build an autonomous marketplace for creators to discover the real worth of their creations based on market governed dynamic pricing principals and community-driven curation. Consumers would have a significant role to play as they would act as a prudent community who will be collectively responsible for reviewing, rating, distributing, recommending and doing intelligent curation of content.

myNK empowers the creator and the consumer in Indian entertainment. Focused on bringing independent, recognized quality films from across the world, it will encourage interactions within the community, creating social media that has a definitive purpose. For those who love and live cinema, this platform is a valuable new opportunity to access worthy content while adding to a democratic, fair and collective voice for quality over hype in entertainment.

The Film Collaborative has had little or no success with its American or European indies in India but is now trying again with a curated selection to be distributed via MinersINC. Here’s hoping! And we will write again to update about changes in the India VOD market and with respect to Blockchain distribution.

Orly Ravid February 4th, 2019

Posted In: Blockchain, blockchain, Digital Distribution, Distribution, Documentaries, International Sales

Dan Habib, director/producer of INTELLIGENT LIVES, is the creator of the nationally broadcast documentaries Including Samuel, Who Cares About Kelsey?, Mr. Connolly Has ALS, and many other films. His films have been broadcast internationally, nominated for Emmy awards, and translated into 17 languages. Habib was appointed by President Obama to serve on the President’s Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities from 2014-2017.

Let’s be honest. Most documentary filmmakers dream of having our films projected on big, beautiful theatrical screens across the country, with gorgeous 5:1 audio and packed houses, sharing the experience as one.

But only a very small fraction of the thousands (tens of thousands?) of documentaries produced each year receive a national theatrical run. As I wrote in a blog last year, my last two feature-length documentaries were self-distributed and had solid film festival runs, extensive college/conference tours, financially successful educational and individual sales, and were broadcast on public television and internationally.

I never seriously pursued a theatrical run for those films because a) traditional theatrical distribution seemed highly unlikely, b) getting the film into theaters without a distributor seemed daunting and expensive, and c) there were several alternative distribution options to achieve our goals for positive social change.

For my new documentary INTELLIGENT LIVES, we took the plunge: we added a limited theatrical distribution plan onto our established hybrid release strategy as a way to:

Dip our toes into theatrical release
Reach new audiences and expand our “Opening Doors” social impact campaign
Expand the national buzz for the film
Make the film more attractive to distributors and broadcasters
Give people around the country a fairly simple mechanism for hosting screenings and discussions of the film, and;
Maybe even bring in some revenue (more on that later).

We decided to simultaneously release and self-distribute (for now) a robust INTELLIGENT LIVES Education Kit (containing the film, five short companion films, and extensive educational materials) concurrent with the event theatrical campaign—a decision that has paid off, as you’ll see below.

Building an outreach and distribution team.

I worked with a wonderful national outreach strategist, Lisa Smithline of Cultural Front Productions, who had worked successfully with Tugg and Gathr, two of the major “Event Theatrical” (Tugg’s language) or “Theatrical on Demand®” (or TOD, Gathr’s language) companies on other projects. Lisa and I also worked with consultant Jon Reiss of Hybrid Cinema, who has extensive experience in event theatrical. Jon helped us make many crucial early decisions about our overall distribution strategy. We also received key early input from Jeffrey Winter and Orly Ravid at TFC when we came on board as a TFC “Conspirator.”

We spent months researching our options and went with Gathr largely because of their filmmaker focus and support. The model for TOD is similar to other event theatrical platforms: a person or group of people need to step up and host a screening in their community (Gathr calls them “Captains”) and then they need to do the grassroots work to make sure enough people reserve tickets in advance in order to ‘tip’ or ‘greenlight’ the screening. That ticket number can range from a few dozen to close to a hundred, depending on the minimum cost charged by each theater. There are other costs that are factored in before a screening tips, including the DCP rental and delivery cost, and virtual print fee (VPF).

We are now three months into our Gathr TOD campaign, and the film has screened in 60 theatres across the country to date (which includes 16 theatrical screenings as part of a traditional run in a Pacific NW chain), with dozens of other communities holding screenings using our Education Kit. Here’s what we’ve learned so far.

For successful TOD, as for any hybrid distribution strategy, you have to create buzz, credibility, and take financial risks.

Like nearly every other filmmaker, we spent lots of time and money pursuing film festival acceptances, with mixed results. Although we weren’t accepted by the “game-changing” festivals like Sundance or Tribeca, we were given primo slots in 20+ fantastic festivals including Ashland IFF, IFF Boston, Bentonville, & Cleveland IFF. Our film stars and our Executive Producers (Chris Cooper, Marianne Leone Cooper, and Amy Brenneman) traveled to many festivals and special events with us. These fests helped us create strong social media buzz, generated news stories and local reviews, and gave us a credible collection of laurels for our website, poster, etc.

Our publicist, Emma Griffiths, counseled us to take a financial risk and 4-wall a NYC theatrical week, assuring us it was the only way to get national reviews. It’s not cheap (10K and up) and we never expected to recoup our costs. But we were able to line up two underwriters who cut our costs in half. We’ve heard that the NY Times declines to review about half the films that open theatrically in NYC, and we fell into that shunned half. But we received a wonderful review in Hollywood Reporter, and more reviews and articles in Salon and a dozen or so other trade publications. Our Rotten Tomatoes score holds steady at 88% Fresh from critics and 100% Fresh from the audience.

Just before our NYC run, we released our trailer on Facebook and it went viral (at least by our measures), with 300K+ views and 5,700+ shares to date. We brought on social media consultant Sheri Candler who helped us create and execute a serious but affordable strategy for paid and organic social media.

You need to reach A LOT of people for a successful TOD campaign: Develop a network of outreach partner organizations.

All of my film work touches on disability rights and inclusion, and over the past 10 years we’ve been building alliances with national partner organizations that have overlapping interests. We strengthen and refine that network with each film, and we are partnering with more than 30 Outreach Partners for INTELLIGENT LIVES. More than a year before our launch, we held a daylong national strategy summit in Washington, DC with the leaders of these organizations, and during part of the summit we briefed them on the concept of a TOD campaign. Discussions at the Summit led to the name and content of our “Opening Doors” impact campaign. We had commitments from these organizations to regularly share updates about our project with their network – expanding our reach to millions of people, without paid advertising. Many of our TOD “Captains” found out about the film through these networks.

Make it easy and fun to host a screening.

If you assume that people will start hosting screenings just because your film is listed on the Gathr/Tugg website, THINK AGAIN! You need to recruit, support, and nurture screening Captains each step of the way.

As a team, we spent about 80 hours writing and designing our Host a Screening PDF Toolkit and a wide array of related images and resources. Lisa Smithline, Sheri Candler, and Gathr staff helped us determine what assets needed to be created, and shared examples from other films with us. Probably the most important team members on this front are our freelance designers, who created the PDFs and images we share with all TOD hosts through this Dropbox folder.

We created a 2-minute host-a-screening video that emphasizes the impact of live screening events, and briefly walks them through the hosting process.

Gathr also launches a Screening Captains Facebook Group for each film. Lisa has been actively engaging the Screening Captains every step of the way. She is continually answering questions, pointing people to resources, and having one-on-one conversations with Captains by email, messaging, and phone. Lisa spends an average of 20 hours a week on communication with Captains, which often includes moral support and cheerleading. The Gathr team also monitors the FB group and weighs in as needed. Don’t underestimate how much guidance your Captains will need to successfully host a screening, as this process is likely to be new to all of them, and it can at times be confusing.

Find theme months or other organizing strategies to build enthusiasm.

We set up our campaign so Captains could start hosting TOD screenings on October 1, 2018 – the start of Disability Employment Awareness Month. Our Outreach Partners heavily promoted the film beginning in mid-August (it’s best if Captains have a minimum of 3-4 weeks to tip a screening), and we also created a Facebook ad campaign, targeting people that have either visited our website and/or expressed an interest in disability rights and special education. These efforts seem to have worked – dozens of theatrical screenings occurred in October. Some other distributors, like Richard Abromowitz, have opted for a much more narrow time frame, engineering successful one-day screenings of films.

Make in-person pitches at every event and festival.

My fulltime job at the Institute on Disability at the University of New Hampshire (a 501c3 non-profit) is to make documentary films, as well as travel and show/discuss the films at national and regional conferences, universities, and school districts. The screening/speaking fees we charge make up a significant portion of my project’s annual budget. During the Q&A after these screening events and festivals, I always try to tell – and if possible, show – the audience how to host a screening of the film, pointing them to the Host a Screening page on our website. I explain how easy it is to host a TOD screening in just a few clicks – and emphasize that there is NO financial risk for them, but they do need to rally their community to reserve tickets. I also tell them how to host a non-theatrical screening using our Education Kit.

“Tipping” will make the screening happen, but selling out will make you money.

One of the misconceptions we had for our TOD campaign was that if a screening ‘tipped’ (i.e. enough tickets were reserved to greenlight the screening), we would make money. Not so fast…tipping just means that enough tickets were reserved to cover expenses.

As of this writing, we’ve had 46 TOD screenings around the U.S., with an average audience of 82 people per screening. Not bad turnout numbers, right? But most of those ticket sales went to cover the base expenses, so our average net income is $150 per screening. When screenings barely tip, our net profit may be $20-30, or in some cases even result in a small loss (after Gathr takes their cut of every screening that ‘tips’). Gathr will tell you that selling out screenings is how you can make real money through TOD. That’s true! One sold out screening netted us about $1,000. But from my point of view, it’s just not very easy for Captains to sell out their screening, and many take an understandable breather once they’ve ‘tipped.’ We are working on more incentives (beyond cheerleading and peer pressure) to get them to keep pushing until they sell out.

So overall, we are not making a ton of money through TOD, but we are not losing money either. And most importantly, we are getting the film seen by more people, while also collecting names and email addresses through the Gathr platform and expanding our film’s reach into new communities all over the country. And film Captains are usually flying high after their screening, excited to share photos and anecdotes from the discussion. Many expressed interest in purchasing our Education Kit and continuing to promote the film in their communities.

The numbers.

So, what’s the upshot? I’ll give you some real numbers and you can be the judge.

$6,900:Net income from Gathr screenings from October 1, 2018-December 31, 2018. The estimated box office gross for that time frame was $44,000, and the major expense by far is the costs charged by the theatres. Note that this does not take into account the up-front costs like the master DCP creation, the cost associated with the design of our Host a Screening materials (about $1,000), or the cost of our outreach consultants. Keep in mind that many of these expenses will be incurred in any sort of hybrid release strategy.

$36,800: Net income from Education Kit sales from September 1, 2018-November 30, 2018 (which represents an average of $16,000/month in gross sales through our Institute on Disability Bookstore). These kits are being used to host dozens of screenings in non-theatrical settings like schools, universities, community centers, places of worship, etc. Education Kits from my previous films have been used for thousands of screenings across the U.S. and internationally.

$160,000: Our project’s income for my speaking/screening events around the country tied to INTELLIGENT LIVES during our current fiscal year (July 1, 2018-June 30, 2019). At almost all of these events, I also sell the film’s Education Kit, as well as related products, and in many cases, I also can reach attendees with follow-up communications.

1,514: The number of names and emails we’ve accumulated to date (via the Gathr ticket sales platform) from the people who have attended TOD screenings, bringing our e-blast list to more than 22,000 people.

So, you might be thinking, would I do this again? The answer is…probably. Our TOD run has strengthened our position for expanded distribution. Our plans include:

Transactional VOD and an individual DVD
National broadcast (we are close to firming up a deal) with limited streaming rights
Partnering with an educational distributor to reach additional markets, like public and university libraries
Language translations and international distribution and sales.

But next time, I’d do some things differently:

Produce a promotional ‘Host a Screening’ video before we go live with TOD (see this strong example from filmmaker Laurel Chiten of JUST ONE DROP).
Make it clearer to prospective Captains that there is a mechanism for Gathr screenings to also serve as fundraisers for a local organization.
Create strong incentives to sell out the house as soon as a Captain initiates a screening.
Explore corporate sponsorship to subsidize some of the tickets for each show to lower the tipping point and enable more low-income people to attend.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me if you have follow-up questions!

admin January 14th, 2019

Posted In: case studies, Distribution, DIY, Marketing, Theatrical

Tags: DIY, Gathr, independent film, social media, The Film Collaborative, Theatrical, Tugg

In the previous two posts, I wrote about changes I think most independent filmmakers should be aware of when it comes to using Facebook and Instagram for their marketing efforts. This post will talk about Twitter. Is having an account here still necessary?

Twitter

With 69 million monthly active users in the United States, 267 million worldwide, Twitter is one of the top social media sites that brands still actively use. We can’t go a day without hearing news of a certain someone ranting on the platform, and without a doubt, Twitter is the number one social media platform for breaking news. But is that helpful for the average indie filmmaker?

While it isn’t likely that filmmakers will post breaking news that is of interest to a broader public, one great reason to use Twitter is for video sharing. Over the last 12 months, tweets containing videos perform the best in terms of reach compared to posts with links, images, and GIFs. Filmmakers need to be able to produce a regular supply of short videos, ideally less than 1 minute long (Twitter mainly allows for videos of 2 minutes 20 seconds in total), with the first 3 seconds serving to capture thumb-stopping attention (thumb-stopping-causing someone on a mobile device to pause scrolling through their newsfeed). Give some thought to the kind of clips and trailers you will post to social versus what you would make for a theatrical experience (where the audience won’t be scrolling on their phones). Also, don’t forget to make these videos square (600 by 600 pixels) or vertical (600 by 750 pixels), instead of horizontal, to optimize for mobile viewing.

In 2018, Twitter has been grappling with slow user growth and has deleted thousands of fake and bott accounts, lowering follower numbers on most accounts. If you have seen a slight drop in followers, likely you had a few of these accounts following you.

A recent update to the Facebook Platform Policies ended the ability to automatically post Tweets to your Facebook profile or page. This was never a good idea as audiences on the two platforms are different and it was a lazy way of marketing. But for those who did connect their Twitter accounts and Facebook pages, a more manual process is now needed for posting to the different platforms.

As of September, Twitter has re-enabled the ability to see tweets in purely chronological order, if you change your settings. Two years after phasing out this ability in favor of top-ranked or “curated” tweets, Twitter gave back the functionality that most people loved about the platform. But you have to make a change in your settings, by unchecking the box that says Show the Best Tweets First. In a world where it seems your newsfeed is programmed by an algorithmic guess, finally having the ability to see news according to the time it was posted is refreshing.

Like Facebook and Instagram, Twitter has instituted its own political content policy on advertising. The platform considers ads that advocate for legislative issues of national importance to be governed by their new policy and in order to advertise, advertisers must go through Twitter’s certification process (https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/restricted-content-policies/political-campaigning/US-political-content/how-to-get-certified-issue-ads.html). Most likely, if you are making a documentary with an issue of national significance at its core, such as abortion, civil rights, climate change, guns, healthcare, immigration, national security, social security, taxes, and trade, you will need to register your account in order to use Twitter advertising in the future.

Getting back to the question of whether indie filmmakers still should be using Twitter, it all depends on your ability to handle multiple social media accounts and what you want each account to do as far as your goals. If connecting with Twitter influencers, or perpetuating a campaign hashtag, or reaching a global audience outside of the U.S. are some of your main objectives, Twitter is still a great place to do that.

Sheri Candler December 31st, 2018

Posted In: Marketing, Social Network Marketing, Twitter

Tags: digital marketing, film marketing, independent film, Marketing, Sheri Candler, social media, The Film Collaborative, Twitter

by Max Hacker

Nathan Apodaca, also known as 420doggface208 on the popular social media video site TikTok, recently announced that he was selling an NFT of his virally iconic skateboard-riding, Fleetwood Mac-lip synching, cranberry juice-swilling 2020 TikTok video. Bidding for the NFT starts at $500,000. If you’ve seen the video, you may be surprised to learn that Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” and Ocean Spray’s logo are absent from the NFT version.

Unless you’ve been living under a digital rock, you’ve probably come across this somewhat new form of digital collectible. If not, you can learn more here, here or here. It’s clear from the $69 million price tag digital art piecerecently fetched, NFTs provide a way for creators to capitalize on a seemingly insatiable market. Calling the crypto craze a “digital gold rush” is not far-fetched.

Proclamations abound that NFTs are a massive untapped revenue source and are here to save the arts and entertainment industry. While the financial upside for sellers (copyright owners/licensors) is tremendous, it’s uncertain how the smart contracts that form when an NFT is acquired will impact those purchasers (NFT owners). Are the restrictions in the smart contract consistent with U.S. copyright law or are purchasers at risk of facing punitive measures beyond copyright protections? Transactions on a blockchain are immutable, so do NFTs open the door for harsh penalties enforced on NFT purchasers who are never put on notice of what terms they violated?

First-sale doctrine

One specific issue to monitor is whether NFT smart contract terms reach beyond the first-sale doctrine. The first-sale doctrine, codified at 17 U.S.C. §109, establishes the clear right for purchasers of copyright works (e.g. songs, albums) to sell copies of that work without seeking the original seller’s consent. In other words, the copyright holder can control the initial sale by setting the price and choosing distributors to sell copies of their copyrighted work. However, for example, once I buy Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours on vinyl (which this author can confirm he does indeed own a copy of), I can freely transfer that copy. No need to get consent from Mick, Stevie or (most thankfully not) Lindsay to sell my copy to a friend or a used record store.

But imagine in a not-too-distant future in which the Mac releases an NFT version of Rumours. It’s possible that the smart contract controlling the purchase bars me from selling to certain sellers, via certain platforms or otherwise restricts my transfer rights in an overreaching or even hostile manner. One of the intoxicating elements to the crypto craze in general is the wild, investment-like nature. Purchasers are seeing large returns within weeks of their initial investment. However, if smart contracts controlling NFT sales are more prohibitive than my first-sale doctrine right to sell my vinyl copy to my local record shop (don’t worry, I’d never sell my copy), potential purchasers may start to shy away, and industry skepticism may set in.

IP licensing for NFTs

Back to 420doggface208, why didn’t he include the song or the logo in the NFT if he was allowed to include it in his TikTok?

For the song, TikTok has a license to use the song and that license allows users of TikTok to upload songs for use on TikTok. That license is likely very narrow; TikTokers do not have the right to take their TikTok videos w/ songs included and then sell it in some other medium or version. Fleetwood Mac no doubt loved the resurgence in their streaming numbers, but apparently not enough to let Apodaca use “Dreams” in the NFT (more on this later).

As for the juice, despite Ocean Spray’s public embrace of Mr. Doggface, his use of the logo in the NFT without consent is trademark infringement, a clear attempt to profit off of the brand’s logo without any license to do so. Or so a lawyer for OS may claim.

What does the future hold?

As the NFT market grows, many artists and creators will benefit from a hot, emergent revenue stream. Works of digital art and music are selling for eye-popping figures, and we haven’t yet scratched the surface regarding licensing revenue. NFTs have the potential to breathe new life into older works, presenting an ocean of new licensing opportunities for use within third party NFTs. Despite the fact that smart contracts have been designed to simultaneously and instantly kick all interest holders their piece of the pie, significantly reducing transaction costs and delays in receiving payments, it appears no such licensing deal was struck here for “Dreams” or the wave logo. Once intellectual property holders grasp how relatively quick blockchain-based payments are triggered, the aforementioned proclamations may come to fruition. Soon, they will realize that like any gold rush, it’s best to be the one selling the picks and the shovels.

Max Hacker is the owner and founder of the Law Offices of Max H. Hacker. Max earned his J.D. from Southwestern Law School in 2013 and is licensed to practice in California and New York. His practice includes representing individuals and businesses in transactions across the digital media, TV/film and music industry landscapes.

Orly Ravid December 18th, 2018

Posted In: blockchain, Blockchain, Digital Distribution, Legal

In the previous post, I wrote about changes I think most independent filmmakers should be aware of when it comes to using Facebook for their marketing efforts. This post will talk about Instagram, owned by Facebook, which has been growing exponentially since its debut in 2010.

Instagram

The preferred platform of choice for the millennial set and no longer just a space for image-sharing. In the past two years, the convergence of Instagram and Facebook has made them extremely similar in that they share an ad platform, both have Stories capabilities and increasingly product sales capabilities.

With over 500 million daily active users, Instagram skews more female and most of its users fall between the ages of 13-29 yrs old. If this is an audience you need to reach, Instagram is a must have platform for your marketing efforts and you need to start thinking how to optimize for it.

Like Facebook, the platform is constantly evolving and this makes keeping up with the changes a challenge. Instagram also has instituted a political ads policy and now account administrators must register their accounts through their Facebook Business Manager’s Authorization section (find this section in Settings>Authorizations) in order to place advertising that has a political or issue of national interest topic involved. As discussed in the previous Facebook blog, this is a wide range of topics which can be seen to advocate on legislative issues such as abortion, civil rights, climate change, guns, healthcare, immigration, national security, social security, taxes, trade etc. If you are a documentary filmmaker, this advertising policy is likely to be something with which you have to contend and if your page is not authorized, you will not be able to place any form of paid advertising on your posts (including boosts) unless you have gone through the verification process.

Algorithms on all social media platforms are constantly changing. Instagram is no exception. The news feed algorithms determine who actually sees the content you publish and who doesn’t. Instagram has shifted the feed from strictly chronological to showing users “prioritized” posts and takes signals like an account’s relationship to the consumer (if someone takes actions on your posts, they are more likely to see more of them in the future), a consumer’s past interaction with similar topics (this relates to the kind of content you share and the associated hashtags being used), and how recently a post was made from a specific account (accounts need to post on a regular basis in order to have their content seen). Continual engagement from your followers is now more important than ever for both Instagram and Facebook success, especially since it can earn you one of the top spots in their feeds.

Increasingly, paid promotion is needed on Instagram in order to reach a bigger audience and gain more of a following (only through paid promotion can you add an action button such as Watch More or Learn More with a URL to click, otherwise the only link that is clickable on Instagram is in the bio section). One great use of paid promotion on Instagram is to grow your following. You can promote a post that has done well in the past, target the kind of audience that should relate to your content, and select your CTA (call to action) as Your Profile. When consumers view the content, they can click through to follow your account. In my experience, Instagram does not drive off site traffic very well so if you are going to pay to get in front of an audience, you may as well build up your following within Instagram.

In May 2018, Instagram paired up with a number of booking sites (Atom Tickets, Fandango and Eventbrite) to enable ticket sales directly on those platforms through your Instagram profile which can be handy when your film starts its theatrical launch. In order to add these to your Instagram account, you must have a Business Account and have an account or URL to link your action button to. Learn more HERE.

You may have noticed that while the run time for videos on Instagram remains at 1 minute, a new service was launched in June that allows for longer run times. IGTV made its debut this summer, featuring vertical videos with run times between 10 minutes (for Instagram accounts with less than 10,000 followers) and 60 minutes. The jury is still out on whether consumers will flock to IGTV, but it is a great place to experiment with video.

Filmmakers may have a more difficult time adjusting as videos will need to be formatted for 9:16 rather than 16:9. Follow examples from Jimmy Fallon and NASA (who definitely has video originally meant for widescreen, yet somehow edits to optimize it for IGTV) to see how they are optimizing their videos and connecting with audiences on a platform that is too new to be competing with thousands of videos yet. Buzzfeed and Instagram have started an initiative called VerticalU to help video creators learn about making optimal videos in a vertical format. First round applications closed already, but click here to learn about the course and see if they will have a second round of applications.

The Stories format on Instagram originally started with Snapchat, but now Instagram’s Stories sees 400 million daily users as opposed to Snap with less than 200 million users in total. The Stories feature is meant to be ephemeral marketing in that a story only lasts 24 hours and then disappears. It is possible to archive a story, but consumers must come to your profile page to see the archive rather than having the story at the top of their news feed.

Think about using Stories to give a snapshot of an experience (like a festival or theatrical premiere) or to tell mini stories in the world of your film (things that are not in the actual film, but help set the stage for the story or extend the storyworld beyond your film). Instagram Stories can also be shared to your Facebook page to make a Facebook Story, but the functionality on Facebook is not the same. On an Instagram story, URL links can be added if the viewer swipes up on their mobile phone, but this function is not possible on Facebook. Things like polls or Spotify music links can also be added to Instagram Stories, but those functions do not travel over to Facebook if the same story is transferred.

Advertising can be placed within Instagram Stories as long as you are working through Facebook Business Manager. Short videos and images can be inserted to the Stories of other accounts in order to reach a wider audience. For more about using Instagram Stories advertising, click here.

Next time, I will take a look at Twitter, a site that has seen flat user growth in the last year and has been plagued by numerous spam accounts and bots. Is Twitter still worth your time? I’ll let you know.

Sheri Candler November 15th, 2018

Posted In: Instagram, Marketing, Social Network Marketing, Uncategorized

Tags: film marketing, independent film, Instagram, Instagram Stories, Marketing, Sheri Candler, The Film Collaborative

If there is one constant rule in social media marketing, it’s that things are always changing. What might have worked a year ago, six months ago, possibly even yesterday, is not working today. Each social platform is continually trying to stay relevant to followers and increasingly trying to improve profitability for shareholders and business users.

At a recent all-staff meeting for The Film Collaborative, I was asked to present recent changes to the main social platforms most relevant to marketing independent films and to advise on how to take advantage of these changes. Here are the trends and changes I think most independent filmmakers should be aware of when planning for their marketing efforts. This is a multi-part series with the first part focused on Facebook, the biggest social network (by FAR) in the world.

Facebook

Reports of Facebook’s demise have been circulating for many years, yet despite all the controversy and concerns over account hacking, user privacy and election rigging, Facebook as an enterprise has continued to grow in the past months. Worldwide, there are over 2.23 billion monthly active Facebook users as of Q2 2018, an 11% increase year over year. In fact, a recent study projects that “Facebook will command 24.5% of all video ad spending this year … and be the top social media platform with an estimated 87% share of U.S. social media video ad spending.”

In order to optimize their profitability and relevance to Facebook users, as well as implementing their commitment to better policing the content that is distributed on the social network, changes are constantly being made to the platform which affect business pages. Here are the recent ones:

Introduction of Admin Registration: If a Facebook page or Instagram account you administrate is going to pay to boost or advertise ANY content of a political or national legislative interest persuasion, you will not be able to place ads unless you are personally registered with Facebook. This entails a scan of your driver’s license or governmental photo ID and a letter which will come in the USPS with a code that you have to use in order to register.
Admins may register and carry all pages they administrate under their registration. Admins who do not register will be unable to place paid ads on content that is deemed “political” and this is a broad list. Topics like education, immigration, environment, abortion, civil rights, etc.are all deemed political and in need of permission and labeling. See the broad list here. I would imagine that many documentaries will need to be aware of this rule. All “political” ads will be cataloged into a Political content database for anyone to search.
All active advertising is now publicly visible under the Ads and Info tab on any public Facebook page: From the Info and Ads tab, people will be able to view the active ads a Page is running across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network, even if they’re not in the target audience. Any clicks on the ads do not contribute to the click count and clicks are not charged against the advertising budget. For more info on this go here.
Yet another change to the newsfeed algorithm. The new algorithm puts more emphasis on data points that show active interaction. That means comments, shares and reactions (in this order) are crucial. Also, personal posts are more valuable than business posts so if you want to do well in the newsfeed, strongly encourage individuals to post for your film organically. In order to create meaningful interactions, pages need to share things that are meaningful to their followers, not just to themselves. Only if followers engage emotionally and personally will they feel the need to comment, share or interact with your content. However, Facebook will actively demote any posts that explicitly ask for actions such as “tag a friend” or “leave a comment below” so try wording your posts as questions or use words, images or videos that elicit reaction. You might also ask your followers to set your page to See First so that they will keep seeing your posts in their newsfeed, even after an algorithm change.Probably the most important advice filmmakers should be aware of, with Facebook and all other major social media platforms is embrace the power of PAID REACH!
Pay to play is not new on Facebook. It has been happening for at least three years and still filmmakers are putting so little into it. With Facebook further de-prioritizing content from pages and brands, its time to be educated and more prepared for paid advertising in order to reach targeted audiences in the newsfeed, among many other places. Education is especially needed for using Ad Manager rather than just boosting posts. Ad Manager gives much more precise control over where ads appear, who can be targeted, cost per click, links where traffic will go and creative to be used, but it does need practice…or working with someone who uses it. Ad Manager also is constantly evolving, so taking a crash course will only begin to cover the basics.
It is important to note that paid Facebook advertising DOES NOT just encompass Facebook. It stretches to include Instagram, banner ads on Instant Articles and Facebook Audience Network, Messenger, Instagram Stories, and Facebook Stories. Perhaps IGTV will be coming as an ad platform in the future. For those who think their target audience is not using Facebook, likely you will be reaching them through Facebook Ad Manager on one of the many other places they are visiting online, so do not discount Facebook as an ad platform.
Create mobile first content. This is especially true for videos being posted to Facebook, but also to Twitter and Instagram. Filmmakers need to stop creating only one trailer, in a 16:9 aspect ratio. Most likely your trailer is not going to be shown on TV, so start thinking about how to optimize it for mobile viewing. Mobile viewers now do not turn their phones, and often do not watch with the sound on so provide caption overlays.

Videos on Facebook perform exceptionally well, so lots of compelling video clips and stories should be created. The chart below shows all of the different formats possible and filmmaking teams should bear these in mind when editing for social media use.

As examples, reference these clips, featurettes and trailers:

Colette

Lizzie

Love, Gilda

As I hit Publish on these updates, doubtless something new will be cropping up that will either expand your ability to reach new audiences or curb that ability in some way. It is important to keep up with the the changes or work with someone who handles social media marketing on a constant basis so that the efforts you put in to reaching audiences aren’t a waste of time, labor and money. Social media is the most cost effective and measurably impactful way of putting your work in front of those who will love it, but as with all forms of marketing, it takes a budget and consistent testing to perfect the right messaging and content that will capture attention and cause an audience to seek out your full work.

My next post will cover one of the next biggest social media platforms, Instagram, and take a look at what is changing and how to optimize your efforts there.

Sheri Candler will be participating on a panel at the New Heights Arts Symposium called “Top Marketing Tips for Indie Filmmakers.” The FREE, full day symposium will be held in Santa Clarita, California on October 20. Details here.

Sheri Candler October 16th, 2018

Posted In: Facebook, Marketing, Social Network Marketing, Uncategorized

Tags: digital marketing, Facebook, film marketing, independent film, Marketing, Sheri Candler, social media, The Film Collaborative

« Previous Page — Next Page »

Subnavigation

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love The Cloud: Exhibition/Distribution Technology 2020

The Lowdown on Tax Credits

Recent Blog Posts on Distribution

New Blockchain Distribution Platform in India

Light of the Moon Case Study

Making Distribution Choices with Your Film

Intelligent Lives Case Study

Education Market (Outcast)

Blockchain Articles

Social Media Articles

Bunker 15 Films brings a modern tech twist to Indie Publicity

VOD Distribution in India + New Blockchain Distribution Platform/Service

Legal Issues with Blockchain Technology (Part 3 of a 3-part series on Blockchain)