Have you ever tried to sell your film, training or event video? Who's your audience? Will they buy? Have you ever tried to burn a DVD of said event? Even with the advent of tools such as Apple's iDVD, the machine to use it on can cost from $1500-$3300. Basic DVD Authoring can take days, and there's some black magic to know, from creating a menu in Adobe's Photoshop to calculation of proper bit budgets for MPEG encoding. MPEG? Bit what? And that's just the authoring part! Now, a new venture has surfaced that refines this process making it easy for anyone with a videotape master to publish it to DVD.
For less than the price of a cheap video camera (prices range between $49-$399) CustomFlix (www.customflix.com) will create an electronic retail web site for each title, burn the content to a DVD master, administrate the order process including packaging and credit card processing, ship the DVD to the customer and return any profits (after costs per disc) back to the author.
All content holders have to do is point their customers to their CustomFlix created e-store web site. Be it schools with distance learning content, IT departments with internal training videos or documentary filmmakers. There's no inventory to worry about taking a loss on, no costs for maintaining a retail account, and no crazy runs to the post office five times a week to mail DVD's. CustomFlix is one-stop shopping for the 90% + percent of filmmakers who don't get distribution.
To their point, film festival filmmakers alone are reason enough for the emergence of CustomFlix. This year, the Sundance Film Festival received 3000+ short subject submissions and over 500 features. Sundance will screen perhaps 100 titles, of those 25 might see distribution deals. Add the 400+ other domestic film festival submitters looking for distribution and CustomFlix begins to makes a lot of sense.
To break down the CustomFlix service, I took a look at their Pro Transfer top of the line version which starts @ $199 for a 30-minute transfer from 1 tape. Here's what they're offering in the package:
1) An Internet e-store that can exactly echo your current site. It's really a part of your existing site, via link, that just lives on a CustomFlix computer with a little CustomFlix branding at the bottom. They work in the background to provide the credit card processing, the order fulfillment and the code to build it all. You provide the graphical elements for consistency.
2) A high quality DVD authoring and encoding of your film from master be it Digibeta, DVCam, whatever. For the Pro Transfer they use a 2-pass VBR (variable bit rate) encoder, (I used to sell MPEG encoders, so I have some knowledge of this area) and high quality Matsui media. CustomFlix also packages the DVD, again using your graphical elements.
For the Pro Transfer the base cost per DVD unit is $9.95 + 5%. You can offer the your DVD to anyone via your site and e-store for that price and make nothing. It also costs you nothing. You could also consider charging say $19.95 and then at the end of the month, when you've sold 40 units, your profit is 40 x $9.50 or $380. You get the idea and CustomFlix cuts you the check.
Another benefit of the Pro Transfer service, they'll encode the QuickTime trailer for you, which lives in your estore page (or on the page you've already built) for viewing on your web site, and (for an additional monthly fee) they work to place your movie in the search engine hierarchy on Google, AltaVista and Yahoo engines. They will also get your film up on Amazon.Com.
All that's left is your responsibility to drive the traffic to the site for purchase. There's no quota or anything, if you want to tell people, tell them, if you want to let them find it on their own via the site...not an issue...
I think the idea of being able to offer the DVD via Amazon at the end of a screening is a good one...or pointing audience members directly to the titles site...it all makes good sense to me. This cost even at the CustomFlix top of the line is still far below costs of simply pressing 500 DVD's, never mind all the admin or the order process, packaging, et cetera.
And where the self-publishing of literature on sites like, Xlibris.com is empowering authors to skip the securing of a distributor all together, CustomFlix is a natural expansion of the Digital Video revolution.
In my humble opinion, I think it is a huge value added to the festivals I work with to be able to offer this service directly to filmmakers. Entry accepted or not...This is a reasonable way to get content distributed with quality and in a cost effective manner.
So you know, CustomFlix takes no ownership of content; you retain all rights to your work.
Oh yeah, and CustomFlix offers a referral program, so if you don't have your own content to publish, but know people who do, you can open a 'producers account' and get a referral code. Every time someone buys a title from someone you referred, you get .50 cents. So if you refer 3 people and they sell 400 titles combined for the year, that's an extra $200 to you as thanks.
As an aside, I used to work with these guys when I was at Media 100. They built a highly sought after product called Media Cleaner Pro, (Now Cleaner 6) which has been sold for a lot of money to 2 different companies. They're smart, reputable guys with a good product and history.