By Roger Jackson
Previously: Hard Work, Innovation & Blind Alleys
$45 Billion VOD Market
This is an amazing — and inspiring — forecast. Research company Markets and Markets predicts global video-on-demand (VOD) revenue will grow from $21 billion last year to $45 billion in 2018. They define this as the combined revenues of all VOD outlets, worldwide — essentially digital (online) VOD plus cable & satellite VOD. Huge numbers, but actually not a particularly high compound annual growth rate (16%) to get to the $45b number in years. Figure roughly half of this revenue flows to content owners and half to the VOD outlets.
Got Spanish Content?
We just closed a deal with Spanish VOD outlet CineClick and have already started delivering movies to them. For films to be eligible they must either have Spanish language dialog, or Spanish subtitles or dubbing. For most Kinonation filmmakers, the best solution to make your film eligible for Spanish and Latin-American outlets is to invest in Spanish subtitles.
New Kinonation
Last week we launched an all new, re-designed Kinonation website. More modern, cleaner, spiffier. Still a work in progress, we’re big believers that the perfect is the enemy of the good. i.e. get it launched and out there and then constantly improve and add. We’d love your feedback.
The Joys of Scale
The Kinonation team is small — we’re a start-up after all. Between us we get well over 1000 emails each week, which chews up a LOT of time. Many of these emails (plus phone calls, Facebook comments, tweets, etc.) ask the same questions over & again. Like most sites we had an FAQ, but it was never nuanced enough to provide comprehensive customer support. So as part of the new website we implemented the Help Center solution from ZenDesk. We call it the “Knowledge Base” — an ever expanding resource for filmmakers to find answers & solutions. So for example, when someone uses the knowledge base to submit a request, the system suggests resources & articles that have already addressed the issue. Not perfect, but faster and more efficient for all concerned, and it get better as it grows each day. And leaves us more time to provide personalized support to filmmakers who need it.
Launching this week…video tutorials
We’ve just started shooting short video tutorials to supplement the written knowledge base. First topic covers our #1 marketing challenge — movie poster art. Often these one-sheets look fantastic at, well, poster size. But crunched down to VOD format (think IMDb thumbnail size) and that beautiful artwork can be reduced to a barely readable title, unreadable logline and press quotes, and a full quarter of the poster space wasted with end credits. More on this topic to follow…it’s critically important.
We Want Your Film
Kinonation wants your film to distribute to video-on-demand outlets, with no cost, no risk and 100% integrity. Click to Get Started.
Next Up: Post # 45: (scheduled for Tues March 4th)
Roger Jackson is a producer and the co-founder of film distribution start-up KinoNation. He was Vice President, Content for digital film pioneer iFilm.com and has produced short films in Los Angeles, documentaries in Darfur, Palestine and Bangladesh, a reality series for VH1 and one rather bad movie for FuelTV. You can reach him at roger@kinonation.com.
