The distribution business is a very valuable part of the American economy. Railroads are in the distribution business. UPS is in the distribution business. Trucking companies are in the distribution business. People that make movies are not in the distribution business. Let’s talk about the difference in detail.

Distribution happens when you move something from point A to point B. The way you do that, if you are a trucking company, can be very sophisticated. You can have major loading docks and distribution shipping points. You can have full load and partial load (LTL – Less Than Full Load) shipments. You can back the truck right up to the dock at its destination. In the US economy, physical distribution is so efficient that in many respects and for many product types, it rivals electronic distribution. (It is a lot cheaper and even faster to ship a terabyte drive than to try to ftp the same quantity of data to a partner, for example!) And your product (a DVD for example) can appear simultaneously in stores and shops and in mailboxes uniformly around the country.

This totally has parallels in the electronic network business. You can have points of origination. Along the way their can be routers, and switchers. You can have repeaters and intermediate storage points (like Akamai). And yes, your program can appear simultaneously on screens everywhere around the country (where the bandwidth is high enough and demand doesn’t overwhelm switching capacities).

But that’s not what the filmmaker means when he says: “I want distribution for my picture.” The DIY people are the worst at this! “You can distribute your film yourself!” they say. I guess if what they mean is that you can call up Fex Ex and ask them to pick up a disk from you and take it to your Aunt Mary, that’s right. Or I suppose you could drive it over to her on a Sunday afternoon. But that’s not really what the filmmaker meant. Or wanted.

All those filmmakers at Sundance who are furtively going from meeting to meeting, having earnest and whispered conversations with agents and companies, are not looking for trucking! What they really want is a marketing and sales agreement that, in the first instance (marketing), will raise awareness and interest in their work, and in the second (sales), convert that interest into a ticket, or a DVD purchase, or a paid stream. They actually don’t care that much about how the transaction takes place, how the delivery really works. What they are really hoping for is that someone will raise interest and awareness in their work and then sell access to it through whatever means to those who want that.

What about the filmmakers who dumped their films on YouTube day and date with Sundance. I’m sure that all of Google’s electronic apparatus was successful in moving files from point A to point B when they were asked to do so. So those folks did in fact get distribution. But did they get marketing and sales? Over 13,000 people watched the trailer for the touted short film “Bass Ackwards”; 355 people paid $3.99 to watch it. “One Too Many Mornings” has 269 paid views. “Bramble” (in HD) has 9 views. (As of Feb 1, 2010.)

Let me emphasize: distrtibution does not equal marketing and sales.

In our view, distribution technology does not add up to marketing and sales either. But … they may give you a new selling platform if you have the marketing and sales campaign to go with it. And technology can be very helpful there.

Here at IndiePix, we have our distribution technologies: we have our “Burn-to-Own” offering that let’s you write a commercial quality DVD write at your computer. And we have our “On-Demand” that let’s you watch on your computer or TV set right when you want to. That means we can offer you different price points — $24.95 for the DVD with all the extras; $12.95 if you download it and burn it yourself; and $4.99 if you stream it to watch right now. Three different ways to be involved in the offering of a film; three different price points. That’s marketing and sales. Distribution helps us make the point about marketing and sales.

Sometimes the terminology gets so messed up and confused that it’s hard to sort things out anywhere. But hopefully now you won’t confuse distribution and selling, trucking and advertising. They all work together, but they’re vastly different.