The fantasy that technology will put distribution in the hands of filmmakers and magically get customers to buy your film persists. Conferences abound. Pundits project. Get the report from the frontline here!

[And a special Thanks to Kyle for this great techno icon!]

There’s a persistent fantasy in some circles that new technologies will appear that somehow “democratize” distribution - by which the enthusiasts mean that apparent advantages that accrue to large organizations are reduced or eliminated, enabling each individual filmmaker to present his or her film to eager audiences. This kind of fantasy comes in many variations and colors, choose your own. But first, let’s get a report from the frontline of techno-consumer video entertainment distribution.

The Consumer is King: Let’s Not Forget!
Technology is interesting and there are a lot of smart people working on new ways to send video. But if there’s no one on the other side, it’s not “distribution”, is it? And there are two things to keep in mind …

The consumer will choose. John and Mary Doe and their kids around the country will choose from among the alternatives offered them the things that fit their budget and lifestyle. Someone will choose any new idea that comes along. Large markets are built when many people choose the same general kind of alternative; and many many small alternatives will exist and contine to survive.

Choices driven by lifestyle and budget take time. There are two examples of relatively fast consumer entertainment changes - consumer purchases of direct TV satellite dishes (beginning in 1975); and consumer purchases of DVD players (beginning in 1999). But let’s not get blinded - almost nothing happens in less than 7 years. Just look at how people around you live, and then think how long it will take for large numbers of people to coalesce around a particular market.

Free is Good, But It’s Hard to Make Money That Way
Free things work — YouTube. Consumers like “free”. So YouTube quickly builds to huge numbers of daily videos posted and even larger numbers of daily video downloads. Because it’s free. That’s “distribution” in a sense, but it’s hard to make a living on it. Or pay for your film.

Free things work - BitTorrent. BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer sharing networks do enormous volumes of file transfers, many of them video files, and many of those are files that are otherwise for sale as DVDs or television programs or feature films. They are pitched as “free”, but they aren’t really. It’s just that the costs of operating a peer-to-peer network are distributed along with the files, and each person in the network ends up paying a little bit of the distribution cost because of the wear-and-tear on his own computer or the use of his internet connection which he is presumably paying for.

Some Free Things Come With Ads
Advertising is one way to make viewing “free” - just like “free” television (whether over-the-air or delivered by cable) is “free”. There are several services that offer free-to-the-consumer, advertiser supported programming, and they offer good splits with content providers. But to make this work, their audiences have to be in the millions. Ads pay at $30 per thousand viewers, for example; so to make any money, you’d have to have 10 ads playing to a million viewers - then the ad revenue would be $300 thousand, and after expenses and splits, the content portion would be around $100 thousand.

But one million viewers is a really big, on-line audience right now. Maybe in time viewers will congregate around these television like services on the internet. Until they do, however, the benefit to the filmmaker is limited.

People Like to Know What They Are Buying
When a consumer buys a DVD (sort of old fashioned, if you listen to the pundits and prognosticators, but still a one billion units per year business in the United States alone), the potential split to the filmmaker ranges from $1 or $2 per disc (on a studio type deal) up to $10 per disc (on an IndiePix deal). So all you have to do is sell a bunch of DVDs and the content provider can actually make some money, maybe enough to offset his costs.

In general, however, people don’t buy what they don’t know - or let’s be positive about it: people like to know what they are getting when they buy something. The statistics on DVD purchases bear this out - almost everyone who buys a DVD for themselves (ie, not as a gift) buys it because they have previously seen the program somewhere (in a theater, on an airplane, rented from a video store, or some other sampling venue, perhaps a free site on the internet).

So if you have a title that you’d like people to buy on a DVD, it’s a good idea to make sure that it has been seen or can be seen by your potential buyers somewhere, right?

So What’s The Point Of The Technology, Then?
IndiePix’s view of distribution technology is straight ahead. We want to sell DVDs and create a profitable split with the filmmaker.

To do that, we’ll couple an aggressive DVD distribution capability (on-line, in stores, and wherever DVDs are sold) with a comprehensive visibility campaign that will utilize all the high tech tricks the internet and others can offer. We believe that the visibililty campaign helps build our purchase audience and thus benefits the filmmaker.

And to the filmmaker, we’d add: don’t fret about the “torrents” and “free” channels. They are not cannibalizing the possible sales of your title. They are building the audience for it, some of whom will buy it because they wouldn’t have known about it any other way.

The business formerly known as “the media” is changing dramatically right now, and filmmakers are in the middle of it. The best thing right now is to latch on to real revenues in the traditional markets and use the new technologies to build your audience.