Production continues on Signe’s new feature “My Love Affair With Marriage” - with a target completion date in early 2021. But what will the distribution market look like once the film is finished? Someday we’ll all be telling our grandchildren about how we survived the Great Streaming War of the early 2000’s - and really, right now it’s just getting started.
In Part 8 of my Studio News, I talked about internet spammers and scammers, comparing the internet to a modern version of the Wild West, where everything goes and there are no rules. Well, if the internet is the Wild West, then the streaming war is like a giant battle in outer space, with one side of the galaxy fighting against the other - and a small, independent feature is like a tiny planet in the outer rim that doesn’t want any trouble, and certainly doesn’t want to get blown up by either side in the galactic war. If that planet is smart it will sign an allegiance with one side or the other, or if it’s lucky it won’t get noticed at all. But the point of making a film is to get it noticed, so that people will watch it, right?
As you probably know, things have changed dramatically in the distribution arena since Signe completed “Rocks in My Pockets” in 2014. Back then, the only real places to show your movie electronically were iTunes and YouTube, and Signe was doing everything possible to keep her films OFF of YouTube. One of my first recurring tasks for her was to patrol YouTube for unauthorized postings of her films, and file DMCA complaints to get them taken down, even if they led to scam sites that didn’t feature her film, and were just trying to drive up their web traffic. I think 2014 was so far back in the rearview that Netflix was still sending out DVDs by mail then, having only recently killed off Blockbuster video, more or less. (There’s one Blockbuster store left now, in Bend, Oregon, and I wonder if movie fans make pilgrimages there to see what renting movies in the 1980’s felt like…)
But before long Netflix realized it would be much cheaper to stop buying physical DVDs and mailing them out and instead just stream movies straight to their customers’ TVs and computers. And somehow they managed to convince the majority of their customers that this was a better system, too - and this was really the opening salvo in the streaming wars. After just a couple of years, we had Hulu and Amazon Prime competing for the same customers, and this year we added Disney Plus and Apple Plus TV, also now there’s Tubi and DailyMotion and Crackle and Yidio and Kanopy and CrunchyRoll and Shudder and Mubi (and I swear I didn’t make any of these names up, though it was certainly tempting to…)
Interestingly, “Rocks in My Pockets” ended up flying under Netflix’s radar. Why? Have you ever tried to CALL anyone at Netflix? Good luck with that. If you’re an independent filmmaker you’ve got exactly ZERO shot of pitching to them, you’ll probably end up going through an aggregator of some kind - that’s a sort of a go-between who will bundle a bunch of smaller movies together and pitch them to Netflix as a package, and then maybe your film will get to stream on Netflix for a 2-year term, but good luck trying to get your money that the aggregator promised you. What will probably happen is the aggregator will come up with a long list of promotional expenses they incurred when pitching your film, and those will get subtracted from the quarterly payments, and you’ll end up with nothing. But hey, at least your film got seen by a few thousand Netflix subscribers, that’s still good, right?
So it may even be a good thing that “Rocks” didn’t make it to Netflix, instead in January 2015 Signe signed an exclusive contract with Yekra for streaming, downloads and DVD sales. “Rocks” co-producer Sturgis has told me that Yekra sent sales reports and paid monthly, he and Signe had visited the Yekra office in L.A. and found it easy to get in touch with their sales agent. But in June of that year, Yekra lost their financing and suddenly closed down, giving their employees just three hours to clear out their offices. Filmmakers were left in shock as the streaming wars had claimed another victim.
After the fall of Yekra, Signe and Sturgis contacted Distribber, which is one of those aggregators I talked about earlier, to get the film on platforms like iTunes and Amazon, who don't deal directly with filmmakers. That experience turned in to a real nightmare, when quarterly payments didn't happen it often took half a dozen e-mails to get paid. And after a couple years, those payments were getting wiped out each quarter by a bunch of mysterious fees – eventually Distribber folded, too, owing hundreds of filmmakers money for the sales on iTunes and Amazon, plus the payments that were wiped out by “creative accounting” and jacked-up publicity fees. (Seriously, once the film is streaming, how much publicity needed to be done? Subscribers can just scroll through a list of films to find something they want to watch...)
Thankfully, “Rocks in My Pockets” found a new home on the VHX and Vimeo platforms, which offered great deals for filmmakers, who could earn 90% of the proceeds. Fans of the film were re-directed to the new platforms, and a year later, Vimeo took over VHX, leaving just one streaming platform screening “Rocks”.. That's been a positive working relationship, with Vimeo paying promptly each month and alerting filmmakers whenever a sale is made.
Signe was also able to get her adult animated series “Teat Beat of Sex” on Vimeo On Demand, and she thinks it's the best place for it. After four years, the rentals are still happening there, which brings in money every quarter. But because of my dealings with Vimeo at my other job, I have some doubts about how long they’ll be around as a viable source for distributing movies. I tried to renew a contract for another animator, and it was impossible to get a human Vimeo employee on the phone to get the ball rolling on a renewal (were they following the Netflix business model?). That’s a bad sign for a company you’re trying to do business with, and we ended up just taking that film down from Vimeo, because why allow THEM to keep making money for renting the film if they’re not obligated to share it with the filmmaker?
At some point, a year or two ago, Signe was also contacted by a service called Kanopy, which streams films to libraries around the world. It’s a bit of an odd system, because people used to be able to go into libraries and watch movies for free - one of my college jobs was working in the media room at the Bobst Library at NYU, putting tapes into the VCRs behind the service desk so students could watch artsy European films for class with bits of nudity in them. And for a few months back in 2016, Signe had put me in charge of e-mailing all the college libraries around the U.S. that had copies of “Persepolis” in their collections. “Hey, we noticed you have a copy of THIS film in your library, so we think your students would also enjoy watching “Rocks in My Pockets”. Why not purchase a DVD copy today?”
But I guess over time libraries also realized that it was expensive for each of them to maintain separate DVD collections, replacing all the worn-out copies of “A Clockwork Orange” each year, or paying someone else to keep all their DVD players functioning properly, so a lot of libraries also transitioned over to some form of streaming. Kanopy is a service that streams movies to public libraries and school libraries, and the rental fees come from the library’s budget, not the viewers. If enough people watch “Rocks” at the same library, the director gets a certain amount of money. Signe then considered sending me around the country to sneak into different libraries and watch her film over and over, but it turns out that wasn’t cost-effective. I'm half-joking here, but it's obvious that the travel costs would outweigh the royalties gained in the process.
But if you're one of the many people in the world who has a library card (at either a public library or university library), you may be able to enjoy watching “Rocks in My Pockets” for FREE. You just need to find out if your library participates in the Kanopy system – if so, you can watch the film on a computer at that library, or on your own device if you're at the library and sign in to their services. You can also visit Kanopy.com and search by zip code to find out if there's a participating library near you, or search by school to find out if they use that system. Then you just enter your library card information or university details to create an account, find “Rocks in My Pockets” on their system, and enjoy on your smartphone, laptop computer, or internet-compatible TV. (They also have a few thousand other films you can check out, like “My Dinner With Andre” and “Donnie Darko”...) The relationship with Kanopy has been very positive, they always make their quarterly payments on time, which is how legitimate business should be conducted.
But really, the streaming wars are just getting started. Signe recently got contacted by some other streaming services that are starting up, one of them was Xerb.tv. Actually, she was contacted by representatives of the Santa Fe Film Festival, who were looking for material for their channel on Xerb.tv. The SFFF screened Signe's “Teat Beat of Sex” shorts back in the day (2008 or so) and they must have combed back through their old programs, looking for films that did well at their festival that could be streamed on their channel. So they e-mailed us the details about how to upload this set of 15 shorts to Xerb, and once they were uploaded and added to the festival's channel, the filmmaker would be eligible to share in a portion of the revenue that would come in the future from that channel's subscribers. And hey, anything that brings in new revenue from previous films is a good thing, right?
Signe was also recently contacted by another service, Filmocracy – this streaming site is in Beta testing right now, but they were similarly interested in the “Teat Beat of Sex” series, plus her short film “Birth”, and also “Rocks in My Pockets”. What's really great about these smaller services is that the contracts are non-exclusive, so you can submit the same films for consideration at several different channels, and as long as they're not really fighting for the same audience, it's possible to earn royalties from several venues and channels at the same time. I think once you get a film on Netflix or Amazon Prime, those contracts are exclusive, so you have to drop it from all the other services, except maybe iTunes. But at least when a film's Netflix term is over, you can shop it to other streaming sites – I noticed that a lot of films that I didn't get to on Netflix in time disappeared, and popped up on Hulu.
I've been tracking my own use of streaming sites, and of the 300 movies I watched in 2019, I figured out that over half were viewed on cable, and I watched another third (100) on streaming sites – by contrast, I went to the movie theater 9 times in the same calendar year, so there's no question that it's become an integral part of my viewing process. For me over half (58) of those streamed films were on Netflix, but I also watched 18 on iTunes, 9 on Hulu, 9 on Amazon Prime, and 6 on YouTube (where the films are often cheaper, or sometimes even free...).
There are still things about the streaming services I don't understand – like, why do the prices vary so much? I've seen films available on iTunes for $5.99 that are also on Amazon Prime for $3.99 and on YouTube for $2.99. Why would I pay the higher price if I don't have to? It can't be a conscious effort to overcharge Apple computer owners, because iTunes is cross-platform now, and Mac users can also get to those other services via the web. Wouldn't it make sense to lower the price on iTunes once a film is available on YouTube? Why would anyone pay more than they have to, just to watch a film in a particular way? It's the sort of reasoning that drove Blockbuster out of business in the first place.
That's partially why it's still so hard to predict what the streaming landscape is going to look like in 2021, after “My Love Affair With Marriage” is finished and ready for some form of distribution. At the moment, the Academy rules about screening films theatrically before any kind of internet release are still holding, so that's why you may notice films popping up in cinemas for a week or two, before becoming available on Netflix or Amazon Prime. As long a movie plays in theaters for a week first, it can qualify for the Oscars, and that just raises that film's profile when it's streaming to millions. You might notice that films that go directly to streaming are sort of passively admitting that they've got no chance at landing any nominations.
For the moment, everyone seems happy – people who want to pay movie theater prices and see “The Irishman” on the big screen can do that, and then a week later the people who want to see it on their home TV, or even on their phone, can do that too. The Academy members are still getting their DVDs in the mail, and I haven't heard lately about any films that wanted to qualify for the Oscars being turned down because they didn't follow the rules. But added to the process this year was the Academy Screening Room (aka the Academy Streaming Room), which allowed members to stream many of the nomination-eligible movies, so perhaps in the next year or two the physical DVD screeners will also fall by the wayside, like Blockbuster did.
More people are seeing more movies in more ways, and the bottom line is, that’s good for the industry. Perhaps there's a sort of fragile peace right now in the streaming wars, but I have a hunch that it will only last until someone creates the next big streaming site, or maybe a way for people to inject movies directly into their brains.