How Virtual Film Festivals Should Structure Their Blocks
When hosting a film festival, typically, about 70% of your submissions will likely be short films. This number is likely to increase for virtual festivals because of the fear of feature films being pirated online. Depending on the sizes of your festival, this might leave you with 100’s of short films to screen.
Many short films are screened in blocks, in which multiple films are streamed together in one segment. The goal of this article is how to structure your shorts into blocks that maximize both engagement and revenue.
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.
Maximizing Engagement
At BingeWave, we focus on audience engagement around film screenings, and we constantly measure what formats and pricing models get the best engagement. Below is a chart we’ve come up with, measuring the time attendees stay per block:
Per the blocks’ information, keeping your blocks around 60 minutes will hold most attendees’ interests. At 2 hours in, you will have nearly lost half of your attendees. And above 2 hours, only the die-hard fans that want get their monies worth for the block will remain. The overall take away is to think about the length of your blocks vs audience engagement when creating a block.
Maximizing Revenue
Festivals can have a variety of pricing structures, but the most common three for virtual festivals are:
- Pricing Per Film — charging for each screening or film that occurs in your festival
- Pricing Per Day — A day pass to attend or watch any for that day
- A Festival Pass — A pass to watch everything at the festival
Charging for individual shorts is not the best way to deliver value to your attendees. Who really wants to spend $5.99 or any price to watch a 10-minute video? The natural answer is the creation of blocks, packing multiple short films together. How can we maximize revenue with blocks?
Taking the above engagement chart into consideration, let’s say you have 10 titles, which equate 120 minutes of a particular genre, for example, horror. You could show all 10 titles in one block, or you could make them 2 blocks of 60 minutes each.
Now the purchaser has the option of buying 2 blocks of that genre or maybe buying a day pass so they can watch those blocks and others for one price. You’ve incentivized the attendee to buy more, but also are creating blocks with a higher level of engagement. Thus a win-win situation for the festival and overall attendee happiness.
Future Structuring Of Your Blocks
When planning your festival, think about structuring your blocks both from a user engagement perspective and a revenue generation perspective. The same concept of structure blocks and levels of engagement can also be applied to weekly/monthly screenings and mini-festivals.
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/
