That's probably the "right" answer. Not sure it's theirs, but it's how I would answer the objection if I were them.

I guess what my argument comes down to is this: if I were an indie director, given the choice, I would prefer to get my movies seen by more people, and make less money (at least in the beginning), than set a price and make people pay, which will inevitably decrease viewings. I think the best way to accomplish the former, would be to put it on youtube and promote it. Yes, casual browsers would be lost. But, with the pay-per-view model, we are not getting too many casual browsers anyway, since they have to pay. So, perhaps the best way to do such a thing would be to have a youtube for indie movies and just let them be free.

Further, I also see problems with the distribution model. If we store these movies in the cloud, you need internet to watch them. That kind of sucks. If you store them locally, they take up a ton of space. That also sucks. If we can delete them after we watch and then download them later, that still necessitates an internet connection, and kind of sucks anyway.

As a final note, I guess I haven't convinced myself either way, so thanks for playing along.

b) Your point about giving away films for free is actually what indie filmmakers are saying. The person I consulted with specifically asked if I could let people pay what they want, and I've heard filmmakers on the internet talk about giving away films for free for exposure. This is also an example of the nuances to distributing online that I was talking about, that I will try to resolve for indie filmmakers.

So on the platform, you can set your price to free if you wish. And one of the other features we want to offer is cross-upload (of trailers and promotional material) to Youtube/video sites. This way your film will get exposure to Youtube's userbase, but you retain all control of the full length film on our site.

There are a lot of problems with definitions and such. What's an Indie movie? Is it different than the usual YouTube amateur dreck? Who is really the customer, the watchers or the producers? How does reputation, goal-seeking, and game mechanics fit into the usage model? Why would I come back to the site? What kinds of real-world strategies are going to get you around (and make you attractive as a pickup for) big-time distributors? What are the distributors afraid of? What can't they master? Lots of loose ends.

I love movies, and I'd love to see some good Indies, but the signal-to-noise ratio would have to be abnormally high for me to be a regular participant. Videos, shorts, and movies are a much different art form than, say, music or blogging.

It's a neat overall idea. Like everything else, though, the devil is in the details.

Now the main target of this service, at least initially, is to find an audience for and distribute the films that

a) can't find even a direct-to-dvd distributor let alone Fox

b) have found a direct-to-dvd type distributor but have found it unfulfilling/unsuccessful

Like I've said before, I believe the internet will allow films to find audiences they may not have if it only went to DVD or on Netflix, or Blockbuster online. For this reason initially we want to target the low end of content on the quality spectrum, charge them to try to distribute their films using our platform online, and go from there. So their goals may not be to get picked up by a big time distributor. Our goal is to simply let them get some sort of return, or exposure, for their film (or web series).

One of the directors I'm consulting with had found a distributor, but has decided that looking back he would have self-distributed. He still has the internet download rights to his film so he is planning to use the service when it goes live.

If you have any specific concerns, please ask so I can alleviate your concerns, or revise my ideas. I've thought this over a lot and am perfectly comfortable revealing my secrets.

You are looking to distribute marginal-quality videos to the maximum number of people possible. This allows people with unseen work to get noticed (forget follow-up revenues here) As a distributor, then, you are going to have to have some hoops directors are going to have to jump through -- you interest in in your value chain, not in content or indy providers. That means you need to come up with a quick way to vet/categorize indy movies in such a way that the maximum number of people will get to see each one.

Oddly enough, this might not be a volume play. Or in other words, you might be better off "showing" one movie a month rather than trying to get as many as possible. In fact, the more indy movies you get, the worse it may actually get for you -- remember you are not YouTube -- unless you have some easy way of engaging users and directing them to appropriate content.

Neat business idea. Lots of cool little twists and turns in there. Good luck in the execution!

I am in the distribution business, but with a focus on indie films and web series. This means helping them as much as technically possible with features to aide in promotion (without promoting it for them).

So the focus is to bridge the technical gap for indie content producers looking to distribute via the internet.

Marginal quality videos will be the main focus, because it's the group that will likely have immediate need for this service.

>That means you need to come up with a quick way to vet/categorize indy movies in such a way that the maximum number of people will get to see each one.

Not necessarily. I'd like to eventually have a content discovery platform, with content worth discovering, but with marginal quality content, I think the best way to approach this is to first provide them the means to distribute their work, and work up from there. So they will be able to easily obtain a means for distribution that's more targeted for their purposes, with a low barrier to entry.

Let's say you want to run a trucking business. Your job is to take groceries -- any groceries - from point A to point B.

This makes you a storage and movement (warehouse and transportation) business. Your differentiators will be how easy and fast you can deliver whatever goods there are. Your customers are people who need to move all kinds of groceries, whether on the producer side or consumer side. You don't care. You're making your bucks on volume.

Let's say that instead of just trucking, now you are selling doughnuts. You paste a big sign on the side of your truck that says "Doughnuts!" You don't make the doughnuts, you just get them to people.

This puts you in the distribution business. This is much different than the trucking business. In this business, people care about quality of product and whether or not you're delivering the right kinds of doughnuts to the right people. Your ability to find the right doughnut and get it to the right person is what is going to make your business work (or not) Everything you do should be based around targeted quality delivery to the appropriate recipient. Volume doesn't matter as much any more. Targeted delivery does. You're not just hauling groceries from point A to point B, you're figuring out which exact thing needs to be where at what exact time. Much tougher (and potentially more profitable) problem.

But they're completely different business models, with different customers and different drivers.

It's just an analogy, of course. I hope that made my point clearer. I think you guys are in for a wild ride if you can get the details worked out.

So yes, we aren't acting as a distributor, we're simply providing the tools to make self-distribution via the Internet more attractive, and with some features to help marketing, the other big challenge, to be more easily overcome by an indie. And with Internet, marketing is made significantly easier.

There are people who scour the Internet for indie films. This usually takes place in scifi, horror, and documentary genres. I'll agree that most people wouldn't go around looking for indie films otherwise, especially if there is no price difference between a low budget indie and a hollywood blockbuster. However my main goal right now is to provide a service for the smaller indie films out there. Making commission off sales is an added bonus, but the main monetization effort is to provide a service for indie content producers, big or small. Now hopefully when we've built something great enough to make self distribution more viable option, hopefully better more mainstream-popular type films can make their way onto the platform. That's when it would be ideal to roll out an iTunes type store to let people discover content, and profit largely off of commision.

I think YouTube is a great example of letting anyone find their audience. And I believe that if indie filmmakers go digital, they too can find a larger Audience, especially if we go social like YouTube.

People will be able to download DRM-free videos, and storing in the cloud is simply a backup to their purchases. There are several ways I've come up with to try to make this model sustainable. I won't go into that unless requested.

Also the reason I emphasize DRM-free is that it's quite clear to me that it would be impossible to compete with other DRM-enabled services with another proprietary DRM system. THis would mean lock-in to a small unknown service. But DRM-free video is universally compatible and not locked into any specific platform.

They seem to be working on a similar idea, though focused more on screenings.

Arin Crumley (one of the founders) did quite a nice job with the distribution of his film Four Eyed Monsters.

Right now, most of their cost is in the DVDs, but already many movies are offered with a streaming option. The next step would be to offer a streaming-only option for long tail content. They would appear to have no barriers to doing this any time now, and a formidable user experience model behind it.

But I also believe that Apple and Netflix aren't in the business of selling a service to indie filmmakers. They are more in selling a service to the end consumer. And because of this it's in there interest to not have their libraries polluted with 90 minute long low quality videos.

My focus is on providing a service to filmmakers first, and to simply provide a usable platform for the end users who purchase it (hence the DRM-free videos).

If that's what you are offering, then I don't think it will do very well. Isn't the premise that there is good content to be found? Otherwise, why would anyone pay to view it? I know you're charging the producers, but if there's no end market, then the service isn't really legit. Am I missing something?

I'm not really an iTunes customer, but I do use Netflix, and they are set up very well to recommend long tail, otherwise unknown, independent content. IMO, they can do it without dragging down the quality of their service. They have a best of class recommendation engine. Also, because the service is flat rate, with no penalty for browsing, the viewer can have a great experience sampling unknown indie films. A pay-per-download model discourages exploration, doesn't it?

Edit:

> They are more in selling a service to the end consumer.

I guess I'm also missing how your service adds value if it's not also performing this function. Otherwise, as a filmmaker, what am I paying you for?

We're simply providing a means to self-distribute, customized to the indie filmmaker's flavor.

The 90 minute low quality content is an extreme. I'm saying these guys have put effort into something and they will look for a way to distribute. They will try, even if they know their content doesn't have much of a market, and there will always be these films and people who make these films. These films will probably make up the majority of films produced. So this is simply one monetizable group.

This is in fact Lulu.com's business model. Lulu.com wants to sell a service to low quality content. Of course my ultimate goal is not just to cater to these people, but to target this service to content of all quality, and then create a marketplace later of higher quality content (once they come). I believe that with the internet, and with the speed of communication, managing marketing and distribution is accomplished much more easily.

So yes in a sense our immediate revenue model isn't too legit, because we don't really care if films succeed in making money, but our goal is to charge them very little, hope the volume makes up for the difference, and rely on the mass of new films that just don't make it to resort to our service.

Initially it will be do-it-yourself service for films that aren't good enough to be distributed otherwise, but the long term goal is to offer better films a more profitable distribution method.

And who knows, maybe one of these 90 minute low quality films that everyone ignores turns out to be a smash hit (http://www.theroommovie.com/).

Also, attacking this idea from another angle, it should be noted that small-scale content producers are suffering badly in the current environment, and sites pitched to them are pursuing a market where there is, potentially, very little money.

When I was at Bluewallllc.com we started working on iHanuman.com, which sells yoga videos. Although yoga videos represent a very small niche, the goal was to eventually reuse the technology to build other niche focused sites - an infinite range of them.

The ihanuman store offers some basic services to yoga teachers who have videos to sell:

http://www.ihanuman.com/store.php

We worked on iHanuman for roughly 5 months, from April of 2007 to August of 2007. After it launched, the site was written up in Yoga Life magazine. It attracted some traffic and developed a small but steady stream of sales. I stopped working with Bluewall in late 2007. I think they may have had one week where sales got up over $1,000. The site was never well publicized or marketed.

I think the project cost roughly $70,000, but it would be tough to say for sure, since the project was one of many projects that Bluewall was working on, and it would tough to say which expenses belonged to Bluewall and which expenses belonged to iHanuman. At its peak we had 5 people working on the site:

a designer

a PHP programmer (me)

a Flash programmer

an HTML/CSS specialist

a project manager

The site runs on a dedicated server from RackSpace.

The ultimate goal was to build a backend that would allow any yoga teacher to upload their videos and sell them. I think the revenue split, at that time, was 50/50. We got the frontend working nicely, though we never finished the backend.

There was some really cool technology on that project. The Flash programmer was Starrie Williamson and she did an impressive job, utilizing a lot of what was then cutting edge ActionScript 3 techniques. The Flash player could function as a widget on other websites, reading RSS feeds off of the iHanuman site (the RSS feeds were full of data from our database). In other words, it could be embedded, a lot like the YouTube player. Last I heard (early 2008), they were working on adding the ability to sell videos through the player. Very cool stuff. Anyway, if you ever need a really good Flash programmer, Starrie can be reached here:

http://www.linkedin.com/profile?goback=.con&viewProfile=...

Some of the yoga teachers sell lectures as MP3s, and we knew we wanted to also use the same software for online music stores, so the Flash player also plays MP3s, and the PHP code handles the sale of both MP3s, FLAC files, and videos.

We also ported the software to the Monkeyclaus.org music store (also owned by Bluewall), and we added in the ability to import hundreds of MP3s at a time, using their embedded meta tags to fill out the info in the database. Out of all the code that I wrote for this software, almost a full year of my life (if you include the time spent on the monkeyclaus music store), this import code is the code that I am most proud of.

The management problems on that project were epic. The owner/designer and the project manager, who were boyfriend/girlfriend, had some strong disagreements with each other about what direction to go, and how much funding was appropriate.

There was, at one point, talk of pursuing a white label strategy, where Bluewall might sell the software to others. However, the code, as I left it, would not sustain a white label strategy. I wrote this code at breakneck speed. There is considerable technical debt. I was told that as soon as the site launched there would be time to clean up the code, but in fact, as soon as the site launched all development on the project ended. Also, Bluewall was very sloppy in its legal affairs - they never sought a copyright agreement with Starrie regarding her Flash player, so she still owns the copyright on it (or at least she did the last time I talked to her, which would have been the spring or summer of 2008).

The PHP code was written using a framework I developed during the period 2003-2007. I have since abandoned that framework and now I use Symfony for all PHP work. If I were going to do a project like that again, I'd probably build it in Symfony (or, if the JVM and Tomcat are acceptable to the project, Groovy/Grails).

Now, this particular project went nowhere, largely due to misjudgements on the part of those in charge. However, my point is that a lot of entrepreneurs have been looking at this space for several years now. There has been a lot of investment. The competition is intense. It might be wise to assume that there is no real profit to be made in this space, since no clear winner has emerged yet. Or you should assume that creating a winner for this space is going to be very, very hard.

I do believe that targeting niches is the correct way to move forward in this field. I do think that targeting indie filmmakers is an interesting and exciting niche. I have a friend who recently finished a documentary about the culture of the workers who worked at a somewhat notorious parking lot, in Charlottesville, Virginia. I'm aware that she is looking for distribution channels. But here is the problem: most indie developers will either be broke, or they will get funding, and if they have funding, they may not need this site.

So I would be wary.

All the same, if someone can go into this field and create a hit company, then they have my admiration.

> But here is the problem: most indie developers will either be broke, or they will get funding, and if they have funding, they may not need this site.

You're right. Most indie filmmakers are extremely strapped for cash. So I was hoping to charge very little (in fact beat out existing services in terms of price), and depend on volume. However one indie filmmaker I know is cash-strapped, but had funding. They still had to find a means for distribution after production, which is where a lot of the money goes to.

I'm banking on being open to anyone, and any video content, and having an ultra-low if not completely zero barrier to entry.

Then you're a video storage service, like YouTube. Video storage services don't care about content, knowing that the more they store the more people will use their service for various long-tail reasons.

You can be video storage, or you can be an internet indie distributor. But I don't think you can be both.

I can imagine that cooking might be a niche that would work. My mom watches a lot of cooking shows. I could imagine her following certain cooks that had videos to sell. But before I would go after the cooking segment, I would find a cook with these attributes:

has some videos to sell

is charming

is ambitious

believes in the idea of the site

If I could not find a cook with those 4 attributes, then I would not go into the cooking niche. I'd look at some other niche instead (skiing? tennis? fishing? hunting?).

I do regard this whole idea as more a marketing play than a technology play. Nowadays, web technologies are so mature, the tech side of this would be relatively trivial, compared to the marketing side of things.

I am surprised that chrischen is "only looking for technical founders". I really think the tech will be (relatively) easy. The marketing will be hard, especially in 2010.

yoga

cooking

travel

political protests

car races

horse races

fixing cars (how to)

fixing up your house (how to)

There is a huge range of niches. To try to do a generic service in 2010, I think you'd $10 million to spend on marketing. But if you take a niche approach, and you do a good job with the code and interface, then you can rely on word-of-mouth among enthusiasts to spread the word.

If I was doing this again, I'd actually pursue something of a franchise model. The core team should mostly focus on the technical stuff: code, interface, servers. The marketing team should consist of 1 or 2 people from the niche that is being targeted.

I said above that iHanuman had poor marketing. Really, its only marketing came from Tilak Pyle. It was crucial that he was part of our team. And it helped, very much, that he was also a yoga teacher with a video to sell:

http://www.ihanuman.com/albums.php?id=48

Since he is basically non-technical, he made a great beta-tester, telling us what would be non-intuitive to a non-technical audience. And since he himself was selling a video, he wanted to see the site succeed, so he went out and tried to spread the word. And because he was a yoga teacher, he brought instant credibility to the site.

The site would have gone nowhere without him. What little success it had was largely due to the marketing he did (though note that my info about the site ended in early 2008).

So, I would take a niche approach. And I would look for the equivalent of Tilak Pyle in each niche that I decided to go after.

If a cook wanted to sell his videos online, what advantages would a cooking themed video selling site have that a generic video selling site not provide?

Why "target" any specific niche. The way I see it, you're selling videos in the end and you'll want to market them, but in the end any targeting is probably going to sum up to just changing the theme of the site.

That being said my main focus right now is a niche: independent films and web series. Although theoretically any video content can be sold.

As for people trying to find niche content, a themed website would certainly help, but that's assuming I'm trying to build a marketplace. And even then, categorizing videos should suffice. At this point I'm simply building the platform: the set of tools to enable people to sell, and the set of tools customized for indie films/web series. The way I see it, people who would discover the content sold on this platform will do it through traditional new web means. Word of mouth, facebook, twitter, Youtube. That's why I want to make it easy for these films to cross upload and maintain their social presence, so they can use the instantaneous communication speed of the internet to help word of mouth spread their films.

I also think focusing on any of the niches you suggested would just narrow the potential customer base (considering content producers as customers), even though it may make stuff easier to find for end users.

As for why I'm looking for a technical founder, just because someone's technical doesn't mean he/she's incapable of other things. But more importantly, having a technical founder frees me from those duties, and allows me to focus more on implementation.

Additionally I know some indie filmmakers. I've worked on an indie film as a production assistant, and I've invested in an indie film. I've also wanted to be a filmmaker since I was 10ish. I didn't simply choose something to start a business with. Creating a service for indie films/web series was the most natural course of least resistance for me.

Amazon's CreateSpace has a 20-minute length minimum. So unless the Yoga videos are each longer than 20 minutes, this would be a barrier. On top of that I'm pretty sure Amazon takes a 50% cut, and their videos can't be downloaded to a mac because of DRM restrictions.

This is in fact an example of an area I'm trying to improve. You'll get great distribution platforms, but they're bottlenecked by a lackluster post-sale customer experience. So while the mechanism is there for someone to sell a video on a generic site, the mechanism is clogged up with gunk.

So I believe there was a misunderstanding. I'm not creating a marketplace. Not yet at least. So marketing is not my concern. I'm only trying to provide the tools to sell online, make marketing online easier, and a platform that will encourage people to purchase without being tied down to proprietary DRM. I also want to tailor this tool specifically to independent filmmakers. A publisher will create a film, but after they finish it, they're going to want to find a way to get it seen and probably make a return on it. This is where my service steps in. I will provide them an alternative to their current options, and I will provide the alternative via the internet. Already I have several advantages over traditional physical distribution: instant gratification, less overhead from packaging and using a distributor, easier to market because word of mouth spreads at electron speed. And if after all that work creating something and they can't find a traditional distributor, they still have to get it out there somehow. I want to catch those potential customers.

"So marketing is not my concern."

That is an astounding thing to say. How can you possibly launch a new business and not be concerned with marketing?

Obviously marketing the site itself is going to be done. I'm targeting it towards indie filmmakers. I was planning to use my connections in the indie industry to spread a word of mouth campaign.

You wrote:

"I'm not trying to sell films for these producers."

but up above you wrote:

"This includes a digital distribution platform Which let's end users keep their purchases in the cloud and let's producers sell their work online as downloads."

You will be in the business of selling videos, regardless of whether you are doing the selling directly, or whether your customers are doing the selling - which means you are indirectly helping them sell. Either way, you are in the business of selling videos.

You wrote:

"I'm only trying to provide the tools to sell online".

That is what I understood your goal to be. That was our goal at iHanuman - we were giving the yoga teachers the tools to sell their videos online. And, of course, we had plans to roll that software out to other markets, and give a lot of other people the tools the sell their videos online.

2 years ago we were using nearly identical marketing text to woo a cook to consider doing a cooking-oriented web site, using our software. Really, this is almost verbatim what we said then:

"A publisher will create a film, but after they finish it, they're going to want to find a way to get it seen and probably make a return on it. This is where my service steps in. I will provide them an alternative to their current options, and I will provide the alternative via the internet. Already I have several advantages over traditional physical distribution: instant gratification, less overhead from packaging and using a distributor, easier to market because word of mouth spreads at electron speed. And if after all that work creating something and they can't find a traditional distributor, they still have to get it out there somehow. I want to catch those potential customers."

We used all of those lines: instant gratification, speed-of-light distribution, world-wide reach. We told them that we were the green alternative to creating DVDs and mailing them out, since we used less resources. Less packaging. Consider some of the text used on the Join page (which hasn't been updated since launch):

http://www.ihanuman.com/join.php

If your service is radically different from that (other than the focus on yoga) then you should explain yourself more clearly.

I think I understood the gist of what you were saying. And, as I said before, it is a very tough market.

Indie filmmakers usually have their own websites. They probably don't need a community to sell their films to. Even if they do, they can target those communities themselves.

Hey thanks lkrubner, I think I just got my answer to the "What are you making?" question.

It's an interesting idea. I wish you luck.

The gap between free and 1 cent is long and wide, and this will serve as a natural filter blocking youtube style video content.

So I guess I shouldn't have said zero barrier to entry.

I targeted Linux (or Linux like) users: Ubuntu, Fedora, Android. I leveraged existing working and well tested infrastructure used in Linux. It is simple and working well (for Linux users), but I have no money to push it forward any more...