Hi All! I'm excited to announce that after completing our indie golf comedy BIRDIES, and fielding several offers by distributors (some good, some bad), we have decided to do what we know is best for this film and self distribute it using an OTT platform directly to audiences. We will be supporting this release by making the film available on Vimeo and Amazon as well as on our website before expanding into further markets (foreign & other aggregator-controlled options like Tubi, iTunes, etc).
I am interested in anyone else's experience self-distributing your own films, the successes, the failures, things you did wrong, things you did right? Any insight you might be able to provide is greatly appreciated. Thank you!
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Don't forget Google Play and Youtube are popular for transactional VOD. Thing is, you will have to drive your own marketing campaign to get people to those pages where you have the film embedded. That can cost more than the movie in most cases. Sawyer Studios and Brigade offer alacarte marketing services for indie filmmakers on a budget. Check em out.
It can take many years to recoup when you go right to an AVOD like Gravitas or Tubi. All depends on your budget. Don't forget Kanopy and Hoopla and the other digital public library systems out there. You can get up to a dollar a stream on Kanopy for anyone who watches over 5 min of the film. Double check with them if that's current and correct.
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Any chance you could clue us in about what the offers were and why they were unsatisfactory? Just curious as a comparison...
Most of our offers had no MG, the terms were too long (7 - 10 years), the marketing expenses were too high & their "marketing plan" was just to use the same marketing plan that WE pitched them! Some had fees for representing us at the film markets, which was absurd. There were a couple with shorter term lengths and the potential for capped expenses, but when I reached out to filmmakers who had done deals with those companies most had not had a great experience or were so inexperienced themselves they seemed happy just to have a film in release.
I will say, we had one viable offer which was through an actual distributor (not aggregator) and they were offering a license fee plus an MG, and we know that their platform is very popular. Unfortunately we could not agree on term length (10 years, we wanted 3-5), and a few other smaller points. It really came down to the fact that we know our audience for this film, we have done some research to find out how wide this could go, and comparatively even our best offer couldn't compete.
It is not lost on us that we will be forced to use aggregators of one kind or another to eventually reach our full market potential, but the reality is we just don't need them yet. We have faith our film will make a splash with or without their help, and once it does, then we will capitalize on that momentum by putting it "everywhere." Until then, we are maximizing revenue the best way we can: focusing on a few platforms we can distribute to directly (including Amazon and our website), with the goal of exhausting all potential there before going wider. It's the VOD version of a platform release, basically. Thank you for everyone for your thoughts and help.
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I have not gotten to distribution yet but I do know a few indie filmmakers that have been very successful mainly on Tubi and some on Amazon Prime. I believe they used Film Hub for their distribution.
I also wanted to thank you for sharing your experience with your distribution offers and how and why you handled them the way you did.
Thanks Angel! Yes, we will eventually be putting our film on Tubi and Amazon Prime, potentially through Filmhub or Bitmax. However we are not currently looking for AVOD offers in order to maximize our revenue before "opening the flood gates" to the masses, so to speak. Basically, those opportunities will always be there for us. We just want to see what we are capable of accomplishing on our own first.
Also, for anyone who is wondering, we have partnered with Seer (seer.la) as our OTT provider who will be bringing not only the platform (& their analytics!) but also their marketing expertise to help us reach as wide a customer base as possible. We decided to do this instead of a more traditional route like Vimeo (which we are also using, just not through our website) because of the additional services Seer provides that Vimeo & other OTT platforms do not- from not having to create a vimeo account (or an account of any kind) before watching the movie, to being able to gather email addresses from our customers (which you can't do through Vimeo or Amazon) to the plethora of analytics and data that will be provided to us about our customers, which through their marketing they can create copycat profiles to target similar customers in a seamless distribution/marketing workflow. We are excited to partner with them and definitely recommend other filmmakers checking them out as well!
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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j8Gfe-zzDY8
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I saw it live! Thanks David!