Choosing A Virtual Festival Platform Based on Vision, Features & Costs

With COVID-19, many festivals have gone virtual, and there have been a variety of platforms to choose from. There are us at BingeWave, but also other platforms that are becoming popular such as Festivee, Filmocracy, Xerb, Eventive, Seed & Spark, Festival Scope, Elevent and many others to count.

We are writing this article from a neutral perspective. We want festivals to think about the features that best fulfill their vision, the cost of those features for that vision, and most important is understanding the likelihood of profitability that will determine the risks of working with each platform.

To view other articles on film festivals, visit our Film Festivals Blog. To test the festival platform, please visit https://distribution.bingewave.com/l/festival.

Vision Of Your Festival

Start with the vision of your festival. Do you want it video-on-demand? Live only? A mixture of both? Do you want to be deeply involved and connect with your audience? Or do you want it to just run automatically? Do you need the Virtual 3D meeting lounge? Do you want to have a limited physical event with a virtual option?

One mistake to avoid is choosing the platform first, and then coming up with a vision to fit that platform. It can end up being like putting a square peg into a round whole. The process should be to first come up with your vision, narrow down the platforms that can deliver that vision, and then you can think about the cost of your vision in terms of time vs money.

The Costs For Your Vision

To execute your vision is either going to cost time, money or both. Many platforms cost a good chunk of change just to get started. One festival organizer commented:

You absolutely can! For example, you can mix Eventbrite, with Vimeo, Zoom and other technologies. It’s going to cost a little bit of money but not 1000’s of dollars. The real trade-off is time. Imagine you use Eventbrite for ticketing, and then manually have to look at what each person purchased, and then send emails with the correct Vimeo + Zoom links to maybe 100s of attendees. After all the work, how do you stop them from sharing those links with others?

That’s a lot of time and problem solving! A platform that is worth paying for should make something like that seamless. It should give you back your time so you can focus on other parts of running a festival. If a paid platform is not making your life easier and giving you back time, its not worth it. But is the cost of some platforms going to allow you to be profitable?

How Festivals Make Money

Without the overhead costs of a venue, festivals can be big money makers, generating anywhere from $1k to $1 million upwards depending on the size and brand of the festival. 6 common income streams for festivals are:

1. Submission costs for filmmakers
2. Ticket Sales (passes, single tickets, etc.)
3. Grants
4. Sponsorships
5. Vendors (sometimes combined as sponsors)
6. Merchandising

Most festivals make a good portion of their revenue through sponsorships that pay 10ks to 100k worth. This money is often vital for covering the costs of the venue, as ticket sales alone are often not enough to cover the expenses. But that is changing with virtual festivals

Sponsorships Are Lacking For Virtual Festivals

With many festivals forced to go virtual because of COVID-19, they face new double edge swords. They are no longer required to pay for expensive venue space to host the festival and, therefore, save thousands of dollars. But the sponsorships that once supported the festivals are no longer present.

In the article Virtual Festivals and Sponsorship, we talked about how sponsorship is lacking for many festivals. In short of reading it, 63% of festivals hardly received any sponsorship this year.

In other words, platform fees will most likely have to be covered by submission fees and ticket sales.

Expected Ticket Sales

After surveying festivals and considering what we’ve known and seen from it, we’ve created a chart on ticket sales for festivals.

The results were interesting, as about 50% of festivals sold less than 50 tickets. When we dug deeper, we discovered that the results of poor performances were directly due to poor marketing. We’ve discussed several marketing strategies in Virtual Film Festival Marketing With Their Film Makers.

The festivals that had over 1000 tickets were well-established brands that had years of experience and a well-known reputation, or spent money on paid campaigns.

For the average festival, If you are correctly executing your marketing campaigns, you realistically should hit between 50 to 500 ticket sales, if not more. If your ticket prices are around $10, that’s $500 to $5k from ticket sales.

Biggest Mistake We See — Free Festival Misconceptions

There are two mistakes or misconceptions we believe virtual festivals make when pricing themselves for free, especially when paying for expensive platforms.

People Won’t Pay: There is a belief among some festivals that people will not pay for tickets, and, therefore, should have free festivals. We’ve seen people paying upwards of $50 for passes and $20 for single tickets. DO NOT UNDERVALUE YOURSELF & YOUR AUDIENCE. If you provide value and experience, they will pay.

Future Sponsorship Deals: Regarding sponsorship, we’ve written a whole article about that in Virtual Film Festivals and Sponsorship. Given the change in the way festivals are run and how online sponsorship differs from in-person, there is no guarantee that sponsors will pay. Furthermore, festivals are getting global audiences and free events have no barriers; these will not likely be the same people that show up to your in-person festivals in the future.

Overall, there is no evidence to support that free festivals will lead to future sponsors, and that your costs for an expensive platform will be covered in the future. Be very careful with this notion.

Choosing A Platform In Relation to Vision and Expenses

Now that we have an understanding of a vision, features, and expected revenue, we can dive into expenses to execute visions.

Features Of Each Platform

Stepping out of character, I’m a software engineer. As an engineer, we use the 80/20 rule(good article on it), where 80% of users will only use 20% of software features. The same rule will apply to you and your users. Just because a platform has more features does not make it a better platform for you. A good question to ask other festivals is:

“What features worked well for you, and what did not? What did and didn’t your attendees use?”

For example, having a virtual 3D VR room for networking may sound good in theory, but did attendees actually use it? Do you need voting with the add-on costing $50, or could you use something like SurveyMonkey for a vote? There is no right or wrong answer, but figuring out what features you need can help you choose your software.

Costs of Features vs Expected Revenue

Next is taking those features and thinking about the costs for the features against revenue. For example, if your festival has 10 films, you only want a VOD solution, $5 per ticket and expecting 50 attendees with no sponsorship, that’s $250 in expected revenue. A platform like Xerb might be a good fit for you. Or if you’re expecting 200 attendees in an expectation of making $1,000, and want more customizable tools while remaining VOD, Festivee might be a better choice. Or Filmocracy states they will set up your festival which alleviates your work, but they take 35% of ticket and sponsor revenue. Does their feature set meet your vision and is the higher revenue share that saves you time worth it?

Let’s say you want a live virtual event. BingeWave is a great choice because we only focus and are very good at live virtual events as we offer live streams, live Q&A, and live chat. And because we are timed based on screening, we work well with simultaneous in-person events. We are a self-serve platform, we don’t do VOD, so if your vision is VOD, then we’re not a fit. In regards to our costs, we only do a $1 surcharge per ticket sale. If your ticket price is $2, your margin working with us will be 60% vs your ticket price $9, your margin with us is 90%. Is our feature set, self-service, and live approach a fit for your festival? The right answers depends on your vision and your ROI.

With any platform you choose, you should know the cost, the value the platform is give you, but most importantly know your profit margins!

Hidden Costs, Questions To Ask & Margins

Every platform has a different pricing structure. Some are very straightforward, others are complicated based on multiple variables. Questions that an organizer should be asking in terms of should include but are not limited to:

1. What are hidden costs?
2. What are tiered costs? (pricing that changes based on usage/volume)
3. Is there a refund of any sort?
4. Are there any add-ons I have to pay for?
5. Is there an activation fee?

For example, a service might show movies in 720P resolution for free but then add extra fees for 1080P and 4k streaming. Are those costs worth it? Is this feature important? How well does having a 1080p align with your vision?

You should also consider other operating costs. For example, some festivals are using paid promotions, such as the image below.

When these costs become intertwined with platform costs, what is your profit margin afterward? Is it something you still feel comfortable with and pay yourself and your partners/employees?

Going Forward

Hopefully, this article has given you more insight into choosing your platform in relation to the costs and the features you need to complete your vision. To recap you want to:

1. Have a realistic understanding of your revenue streams ranging from sponsorships to ticket sales
2. Have a vision for your festival and what features you need to accomplish that vision. More is NOT better.
3. Be creative with your platform features. Sometimes feature can be integrated from other platforms that work better and are far cheaper
4. Talk with other film festivals; ask them how their margins were, what worked well for them, and what didn’t

BingeWave is live streaming, community building and revenue generation platform for filmmakers. We serve everyone from web series, documentaries to features, and champion diverse narratives.

For information on hosting your own festival visit https://distribution.bingewave.com/l/festival or obtaining live/cinematic distribution, please visit: https://distribution.bingewave.com/