Mashable reports about a site called Dailymotion which allows indie filmmakers to post and stream their indie full-lengh feature films. Cool. As far as I know, there’s not a lot of places to do this (except for, e.g., Jaman). But I can’t access from Hong Kong the one indie feature Dailymotion has, Red Without Blue. I get a “We’re sorry, this content not available for your country.” Uncool.
I’m not sure if this is a restriction which DailyMotion imposes on all their streaming films, or which the filmmaker’s choose to apply to their film. If someone is putting their own content/film on the web and streaming it for free, I don’t why they’d want to restrict its viewing to particular national boundries–all this does is frustrate and turn off the people denied viewing. E.g., my appetite to investigate this product further is quashed. I (and many others) want a YouTube-like service, available anywhere around the planet, streaming feature-length films in high-def. Undiscovered indie filmmakers could post their films on such a service (without getting financially compensated). Their worst enemy is obscurity, not piracy–to paraphrase Tim O’Reilly. Wait ’til your famous until you worry about foreign distribution, split rights and such.
One good thing about Daily Motion: most of the videos that are available in Hong Kong seemed to be 565 x 315 pixels (pretty high res) and streamed well without stuttering.
