Finding a VOD strategy for your indie movie: What we did right.
Or: A good indie filmmaker gets direct access to their audience through VOD.
When it comes to Video on Demand distribution you have to take tough decisions: Should you give all the rights to one distributor/aggregator, should you keep all the rights and aggregate your indie movie baby by yourself to all the major platforms (e.g. itunes, amazon) or should you consider a different VOD marketing strategy for your indie movie?
Keep the rights of at least one VOD platform!
We decided to give away the worldwide exclusive rights for VOD distribution of our first movie The Old, the Young & the Sea to one distributor. I have to admit that by now this was not our smartest decision in our short career as filmmakers. BUT: We kept the rights to host our movie on Reelhouse — a young direct from creator direct to consumer video on demand platform (VHX is another one). And this was a damn right decision.
Reelhouse has a couple of advantages against the big boys (e.g. itunes): The platform offers plenty of powerful tools to you to promote your movie of which creating coupon and discount codes are just two. Aggregating your movie is free of charge and you pay a very fair fee to Reelhouse for providing you with a rock solid download and streaming service.
If you aren’t on iTunes your movie does not exist at all.
Everybody will tell you the same: If you aren’t on iTunes (fill in every other major platform) your movie does not exist at all. It’s true that you should aggregate your movie to at least one major platform. But keep in mind: Aggregating your movie to a major can be expensive, it’s not easy to do by yourself and if an aggregator/distributor does it for you, you have to share a big chunk of your revenues for the lifetime of your movie — just for the one time service of aggregating your movie (disclaimer: We heard about distributors who do great work in promoting their movies but we haven’t found the right one for our genre). And not to forget: You also feed the major’s mouth (iTunes eats up around 30% of your revenues).
Just being on VOD platforms is not enough — promote your indie movie baby like hell!
So you had been lucky and have aggregated your indie to iTunes or similar. Bravo! And what happens next? Very often nothing happens if you don’t market your movie like hell. At least this is our experience and has been confirmed many times by fellow indie filmmakers.
Who will care about your beautiful movie on Amazon, iTunes or Hulu if nobody has ever heard about it? How high are chances that anybody will ‘discover’ your movie when you compete with hundreds (thousands) of blockbusters with big advertising dollars? Rather Zero!
So you will spent all your sweat and blood to bring your audience directly to the big platforms. In the first place your efforts will make your aggregator/distributor and the big platform guys happy. They just host your movie — you do all the work. You might be satisfied with the results — hey there is at least some dollars flowing to your bank account! But soon you will figure that you don’t know anything about your audience and that you don’t have direct access to them (Try to send just one ‘Thank You’ to a happy downloader on iTunes!). There is no chance to get access to your audience now and in the future. How will you promote your next movie to your iTunes audience??? You won’t be able to do that. You start all over again.
Get direct access to your community
Reelhouse, VHX and Co on the opposite end of the VOD market give you all the access to your audience that you need for now and for the future: insights, metrics AND personal data: name, country, email. They share information with you from which territory you get the most downloads etc. Having direct access to your audience is more powerful than you would think. It’s the fountain of your life as a filmmaker.
Side note and disclaimer: We are by no means compromised or sponsored by Reelhouse. We are just very happy with their service, tools and their approach to help filmmakers to bring their precious work to their audience.
