26 posts tagged “distribution”
I was browsing through my Amazon recommendations when I saw the Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog DVD. It's being sold for $10.49 and it's No. 21 in Amazon's Movies & TV.
Number 21 out of all the DVDs Amazon sells.
Within the Movies & TV category, it is No. 1 in Musicals & Performing Arts, No. 1 in Action & Adventure/ Superheroes, and No. 1 in SciFi/ Comedy.
As you know, Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog started out as a free webisode online. What's whacky is that it is STILL available on the net FOR FREE.
WOW. Go Joss Whedon.
Welcome to the New Economy, where banks give out bailout money as bonuses, houses in Detroit sell for a dollar, and free webisodes sell like hotcakes for $10.49.
So there you have it folks. There's your answer to the billion dollar question of how to monetize your web videos...
1) release your videos on line for free ... 2) then make sure to call yourself Joss Whedon...
Susan Ee
www.feraldream.com
Interesting article in Time regarding festival online distribution: The Film Festival Comes to Your Living Room.
Beet.tv had an online video roundtable this week. The videos of the roundtable are online if you missed their live streaming. They also have a liveblogging session of the roundtable, broken out by minutes.
Sounds like the biggest news is that blip.tv has figured out a way to serve up ads on ipods/iphones and keep track of them. Monetization, of course, is a major issue at these events.
If you missed it and you're interested in seeing one of these things live, there's one going on tonight called "The Next Generation of Advanced Media" in San Francisco hosted by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Cheers,
Susan Ee
www.feraldream.com
Comscore released some interesting data re online video. 44% of all videos viewed online are off YouTube. The second most popular site is Fox Interactive at 3.9%. Next come Microsoft and Yahoo sites at around 2.5%. Hulu gets 1% of the views.
According to the WSJ, on average, the viewers spent 235 minutes watching online videos in July. And this is the most interesting part: they rarely spent 2.9 minutes on any one video. Something to consider when you're planning out your webisode.
Susan Ee
http://feraldream.com
If you opt-in to use their new video uploader, you can input metadata for your video, upload multiple videos at a time, and you get a new limit of 1G rather than the old 100MB. You can opt-in through here.
Susan Ee
http://feraldream.com
Variety put up an article last night on four online distributors: iTunes, Amazon, Jaman and Indiflix. Here's a highlight:
- iTunes has been recently making deals with smaller indie distributors such as New Video. Their deals are with distributors unless you're a Sundancer, Joss Whedon, or NBC.
- Amazon Unbox uses Createspace to let filmmakers upload their movies and sell downloads via Amazon. Filmmakers get 50% royalties.
- Jaman offers 1/3 of revenues to self distributing filmmakers. 90% arthouse or international films.
- Indieflix offers 70% of revenues. It's a one stop DIY shop and offers various forms of movie delivery including downloads and DVDs. Nonexclusive arrangement.
Susan Ee
http://feraldream.com
Check this out. It's an interesting hybrid of novel and short films. From Publisher's Lunch list:
"Creator and executive producer of the CSI television franchise Anthony Zuiker's series of three suspense-thriller "digital novels" (every five chapters readers are given website codes to access two-minute films that bridge to the next five chapters) beginning with SQWEEGEL, about an former FBI forensic investigator who retired after his whole family was murdered but continues to work a variety of grim cases, to Brian Tart at Dutton, at auction, for publication beginning in fall 2009, by Dan Strone at Trident Media Group (world)."
Variety says "Zuiker will write a 60-page outline for each book, then supervise a novelist who'll turn it into a 100-chapter book. Zuiker will write and direct 20 "cyber-bridges," the two-minute video segments that supplement the pages."
Sounds awkward to me but kudos to them for trying something new. I'm guessing that if it was sold at auction, we're talking a six or seven figure advance. And the guy hasn't even written it yet! Must be nice to be famous...
Susan Ee
http://feraldream.com
PS - Variety says it's a 7-figure deal.
Had coffee with a producer from Hollywood yesterday. She and her business partner were up in the Bay Area scouting out how business is done around here. She has commitments from writers, talent and crew most of us can only dream about. We had a quick chat about the differences in culture between LA and Silicon Valley. What the money folks up here are looking for vs. what they look for down in LA. The basics of how Internet startups work. Stock option culture. Online distribution analytics. Stuff like that.
I know that Hollywood is in a world of hurt right now -- the ongoing actors' contract negotiations, the repercussions from the writers' strike, the tiny number of studio films being shot in LA. And of course, the valley has plenty of startups cropping up trying to deliver online video, but it's hard to deliver the goods without the goods. This is all adding fuel to the fire of LA and SF Dating Attempt 2.0.
BTW, that Churchill event regarding this issue that I told you about? It was sold out! This LA and SF thing is HOT right now.
Susan Ee
http://feraldream.com
Here's what Stacy Parks of Filmspecific has to say about Prom Queen, a successful webisode:
Take Vuguru for example, Michael Eisner's year and a half-old
production company set up expressly to produce web content.
They have a big hit on their hands with PROM QUEEN, a 90 second daily
soap averaging over 200,000 viewers a day. The show was recently
picked up for a traditional DVD distribution deal by a major
company willing to experiment with this new medium. They are
packaging 2 seasons worth of shows together, adding in a ton of
never-seen-before footage, cast interviews, vlogs, and other
extras - and introducing it to the market to see if customers
are willing to actually buy a DVD of something, that they can
essentially see for free on the web.But that's why all this 'extra' material is critical to the
equation....In any case, PROM QUEEN is broadcast on a few different web
outlets including it's own PromQueen.tv, You Tube, and My
Space among others -- but to date, My Space has been the
biggest outlet, and with the thousands upon thousands of
registered My Space friends PROM QUEEN has, advertisers are
chomping at the bit to get in on this -- and thus is born
a very big revenue stream for PROM QUEEN.
Interesting, eh? After the first 2 shows, Techcrunch said:
There was a three second pre-roll ad for the upcoming Hairspray movie, a short ad for Verizon Vcast and then a fifteen second post-roll ad for Hairspray again.
After the first season, Washington Post said:
Each episode? Just 90 seconds. ("When we were watching online content, we noticed that we started looking for something else after 90 seconds," explained show co-creator Chris Hampel.) The full season, in fact, is just two hours. Air date? Seven days a week, since on the Internet there are no programming schedules. Commercials? Let's just say the characters drink a lot of prominently placed POM Wonderful and Fiji Water for a reason.
The Post reported that the budget for the show was between $100k-$150k but I'm not sure if that's per episode or for a whole season. I'm guessing it's for the season. It's a whole lot of money if it's coming out of your piggy bank, but it's oh, so cheap compared to the overwhelming majority of production budgets. And it's being reported as profitable. Of course, you do have the Eisner brand behind it which engenders a whole lot of confidence with the advertisers...
Susan Ee
http://feraldream.com
DIY Day was filmed, and some of the footage is on line on their site. Arin Crumley of Four Eyed Monsters did a terrific job MC'ing /moderating. It was quite an enjoyable and informative day. Here are some of the resources and interesting experiments I learned about:
Indiegogo allows filmmakers to raise money via their audience.
Tubemogal lets you upload your film in one place for download on various sites. It also has analytic tools to give you consolidated info across the various sites on which your film is available.
The Workshop Project has all kinds of info for the indie filmmaker.
Lost Zombies is compiling user generated videos about zombies to use in a zombie "documentary." Kinda like World War Z: The Oral History of the Zombie Wars, only in video form. (BTW, World War Z is pretty good.) Hard core zombie fans have collected on this site so if you have a short zombie video, this is probably a great place to get some fans.
Mobmov organizes spontaneous "drive-in" showings where people drive up to a wall and one of the cars projects a movie onto the wall. An interesting alternative/ addition to 4-walling it.
Millions of Us designs marketing programs for the virtual world. What I found particularly interesting about them is that their rep said the story usually comes first, then they go after the brand. For example, they came up with the idea of letting people submit photos of their neighborhood and then showing them what it would look like in the future (i.e. 2070). Then they approached the Terminator brand because that would be great marketing for them. I found that fascinating since most ad/marketing agencies take the opposite approach of getting the client first, then designing the campaign.
Kudos to the organizers for putting this great program together for the indie community.
Susan Ee
http://feraldream.com
