What are your thoughts on Filmhub moving from being an aggregator with no upfront fees to a film distribution company with tiered levels of access? Do you have a movie in distribution with them? Any extra noticeable differences since they changed? I am thinking of using them for a movie or two but getting user feedback is a helpful deciding factor.
Distribution : A Bit Late But…. by Richard Gemmell-Thrift
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I haven’t heard much about FilmHub lately. I know that they raised another round of venture capital last year and are looking at ways to be profitable, hence the new tiered access.
I’m not sure what you mean. I have a film there and what I notice is they’re charging extra for certain statistics like more granular Amazon streaming stats. We don’t pay for that, and we’re doing fine.
Mike Boas they were an aggregator and now are a full distribution company. So I wanted to hear how the changes have affected people with movies with them. Are they now exclusive as when they were an aggregator they had a non exclusive agreement.
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Richard Gemmell-Thrift They don't market your film in any event, in fact require a streamer to pay for access to their catalog, of between $5k and $10k reported to the Independent Producers Guild in the last year. Which means that most all independent streamers will never see your title. Also... when they get something that actually is getting traction, they can pull it from other streamers and monetize on their own. My personal interactions with the founder lead me to believe that is what they would do.
Hard to say if they’re using the term distributor in the true sense of the word.
We have a non-exclusive deal with them, which we signed up with about a year ago. It was their standard contract.
Shadow, can you give me some examples of “independent streamers”?
Mike Boas If you open an account on FilmHub, you can see a page of the logos of many platforms they claim to deliver to. Most of them those are "independent" and most of actually DON'T take Filmhub content, not least for the reason I mentioned... They're just listed there because... FilmHub does that. However, here are several independent distributors, who are NOT owned or controlled directly or indirectly by MPA studios or affiliate distributors: MUBI, The Criterion Channel, OVID.tv, Kino Now, Kanopy, Film Movement Plus. Not to mention FilmPod which is coming operational this summer.
Mike Boas Also no, they're implying they are a distributor because that permits a greater take of revenues and implies a certain insider relationship. Their business model is that of an aggregator, like TAG or Distribber who went bankrupt when Netflix cut them off in 2017. Though in FilmHub's case they offload most of the deliverables prep to the filmmaker as part of their onboarding.
I’ve always viewed Filmhub as an aggregator, like Distribber before it. At least Filmhub doesn’t insist on upfront fees like Distribber did.
I’m not trying to defend Filmhub. Just stating the facts, that they got our film into Amazon and Tubi, which is what we wanted. So far no problems with getting paid.
I will say the process of ordering foreign language captions was confusing and not carried out well.