Cutting Checks, et cetera
Diary of a film startup part 37
Cutting Checks
We’re now cutting checks to filmmakers for Q2 2013. Very satisfying. It takes a while, since VOD outlets tend to pay 60-90 days after the end of the quarter that the film made money. And then Kinonation has to process the cash, take our 20% and PayPal the rest to the content owner. Not simple, not fast — but we’re doing it and this month will see payments to some of our amazing filmmakers. How much can you make? It’s hundreds at a minimum if you do nothing or if your film just isn’t very good. It’s thousands if your film is good, genuinely impressive. It is tens of thousands if your film is outstanding. And that’s the bottom line — how do you make your film, and the marketing & distribution of your film — outstanding rather than just festival average?
New Outlets
We’re busy signing deals with VOD outlets around the world. And we’re just getting started. Cineoo in India is quite impressive, and they have access to every Kinonation film — meaning they can Select or Decline films as they wish. Then there’s LOVEFiLM in the UK and IndieReign in Australasia and Youku in China…and so on…dozens of outlets that American indies can be available to. We’re closing a deal with the strangely named — but huge — Wuaki.tv in Spain. And so on. Bottom line: there are 200+ international outlets that your film should be exposed to — that’s the Kinonation mission. Give us time to make deals (the easy part) and then set up for automated delivery (the tough part.) And be in it for the long haul.
Software Stuff
Prepping films for video-on-demand was (is) labor intensive, rather tedious, and prone to mistakes. It was (is) a person in a room full of equipment, unwrapping a hard drive from a filmmaker, fixing problems, encoding the film & trailer, authoring metadata, fixing images…and finally QC’ing these finished assets and sending off to iTunes. Tomorrow, start the same process for Hulu. And do Amazon the next day. Expensive, inefficient, hard work, prone to errors. We’ve created software that does 95% of this automatically. Meaning we’ve crunched down the cost and the challenge. I won’t bore you with the details — suffice to say that’s what we live & breathe, every day. Making this “software stuff” scalable and global is a big challenge. It’s non-trivial engineering, hugely complex to automate…we’ve already invested 1/4 million dollars, and we’re writing new code and adding new features every day. To be continued…