Indie 2.0

Scott Kirsner (of CinemaTech blog) has a good article in Variety which gives gives the cold hard facts on a frustrating phenomenon: online distribution of indie films isn’t happening in a meaningful or profitable way yet, for indie filmmakers:

“…while more success stories are starting to be seen, the indie download business is still having problems gaining traction. The power of the Internet was supposed to level the playing field on which independent filmmakers and studios compete for audiences. So what happened?

A decade after the dot-com boom, when the Web promised to make any piece of content globally accessible to any interested viewer, a dominant online destination for indie film has failed to emerge — though many have tried.

Earlier this year, San Francisco-based Caachi quietly shut down, and world cinema purveyor Jaman let go most of its staff. Two of the first sites to try to connect cinephiles with streaming and downloadable indie films, GreenCine and Intertainer, have since exited that business.

And while Hulu.com, a site geared to mainstream TV and movie content, is reaching more than six million unique visitors a month, SnagFilms, a site dedicated to independent documentaries like “The Future of Food,” is barely reaching 100,000, according to the Internet traffic-monitoring service Compete.com.”

A few people wrote in to correct Scott, saying it’s not quite as bleak. But Scott is right on in the main. For the moment, most talk about profitable long-tail distribution of small indie films online is wishful thinking. Prescriptive talk, not descriptive talk. One further piece of bad news which Scott doesn’t even mention is: iTunes, Hulu and Netflix are not available in most of the world outside of the U.S. anyway. So, for example, a whole generation in Asia, with zero opportunity to pay for online content (either indie or Hollywood blockbuster) is turning to Bit Torrent, and being conditioned to think illegal downloads are “OK”.

The sweet spot is this: the ability to sit in your living room, after 3 glasses of wine over dinner, and use your remote to buy for US$3 and download (on an AppleTV like device) a movie which has gotten good reviews (a la eMusic)  and ratings by both professional reviews or bloggers and “wisdom of crowd” raters in a Ning-like community site (like Amazon.com reviews, where in addition to the 1-5 star rating, readers of the rating/review answer “Was this review helpful to you?”)

Somebody needs to do this. It’s coming. The problem is, you need to be the platform, the one to aggregate the wise crowd, the one to ride the swell of Metcalf’s Law.

I’m not sure why iTunes doesn’t take this up as a potential revenue source. I’ve heard from my contacts at Red that it has something to do with the cost associated with caching the content and providing speedy downloading. This seems odd to me: most viewers would be OK with “speedy downloads” for Hollywood content and “good enough normal broadband speeeds” for everything else. (So maybe that means picking your indie movie before dinner and having it download during dinner. Or even picking it the night before.) In any case, as reported in Scott’s Variety article, the navigation in iTunes sucks. And there is no good rating/social networking element in iTunes.

But distributor Freyr Thor, of Vanguard Cinema says, in Scott’s Variety article:

“Just because these specialty indie platforms haven’t succeeded, that doesn’t mean one cannot succeed. There’s a patience factor and a money factor that have been missing.”

Some of my filmmaker friends have told me I should be the one to start this platform. No thanks. I know that only a single (or two, three at the most) aggregator will win in this niche (just as Facebook and LinkedIn did) while hundreds of other contenders went bankrupt or floundered. And if the smart and funded folks at Jaman couldn’t make it happen, I’m not going to try. I’d rather make films. And then distribute them on the “winner” platform which emerges (I predict) within 3 years.