Friday, March 18, 2011

Places to Sell/Market Your Indie Film Online

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but I will try and add to this as I come across resources and will comment when I have more info.

1. Createspace.com - created by Amazon, this is the granddaddy of on-demand. You can reach a huge marketplace through Amazon. However, they charge about $4 per disc - not terrible but not great (see below).  The on-demand feature may be cool, but you have to send them a DVD which they encode from on their end, meaning you will end up with an SD streaming version instead of HD.

2. Kunaki.com - This may be the coolest, greatest thing EVER for indie filmmakers! Kunaki is a bare bones print-on-demand company that only charges $1 per DVD - that's right $1! Customers can pay with credit card OR Paypal. You design a full-color DVD sleeve AND color printed face! Here's the catch: NO customer support, except via email. You have to upload your files via PC (not Mac) to their server. If you are a Mac person like me and have mostly friends that are Mac, this is a HUGE pain in the ass! The upload kept stopping and starting and I have to babysit this thing for SEVERAL DAYS to get it finally completely uploaded. That caveat aside (PC users should have no problems) this looks like it may be the best option, at least for sales directly from your website. They even send you a free DVD for your evaluation, how cool is that?

3. Film Baby - this looks like a companion/offshoot of CD Baby. They charge $40 to get you up and running and charge $4 per DVD and have other non-exclusive distribution options. If you use Kunaki (above) that eats up about $5 of profit per DVD - again not terrible especially if your DVD can retail over $10. (Most DVDs on the site are priced in the $15 range.)

4. Flixfling - This seems to be an indie film alternative to Netflix. You can contact them about carrying your movie and they will ask you to send them a DVD.

5. Casimero - this site offers to stream your film for a monthly fee to Facebook.

6. Film Club - Just stumbled on what could be a cool way to network your movie. I'm thinking you can search for film clubs that might be interested in screening your movie.

7. Meetup.com - here's another idea: type "indie film" and your zip code and find film groups that might be interested in screening your film.

8. Withoutabox.com - This is the the behemoth that controls most of the entry process into the various film festivals in the world. Sure, you can pay $50 a pop (and up) to enter your film in Sundance et. al. but I suggest using the search engine to find fests that don't charge anything to enter.

9. Don't forget your hometown newspaper! In addition, AOL has created Patch.com - which focuses on hyper-local news for each of its many "patches." The La Mesa Patch did a great article on The Great Intervention.

10. Tubemogul.com - this site has a free service that helps you distribute videos to the many different sharing sites across the web. This can help you place preview videos on sites you never knew existed. Using the site, however, has proved pointless and frustrating, as none of its stats seem to work for me.

11. Openfilm.com - This looks very enticing! For as little as $2.95 a month you can get your site on Boxee and other TV/Web hybrid systems. I use Boxee, and if you could get a video on their service they say you are now in 11 million homes. You can turn on and off your movie as well, in case you decide later to sell the rights or whatever. Upon further investigation, I could not find an Openfilm app within Boxee. I emailed them to find out what was up and they said that some of their films are located in the the user's Movies section and that the app is "coming soon." We shall see.

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