Distributing Independent Media: A Report From NAMAC's Online Salon
The concerns range from the preservation of 16mm and 35mm film formats to the development of DVD technology and digital delivery systems. Salon members were able to trade ideas on each of these complex issues, providing each other with insight on how to tackle them within their own organization. The interaction on the salon offered a good beginning towards addressing a major concern arising out of the general fervor of the new digital age: the fragmentation of communication and the resultant rise of a deeper competitive edge within the culture of independent media.
The expansion towards both a 500 channel universe and internet broadband has, paradoxically, occurred at a time of great consolidation of resources among the upper echelon of media. It is inspiring a greater conservatism in both producers and buyers, as the economic feasibility of niche markets becomes even harder to map out. The educational market is finding a dearth of appropriate pieces as more producers are pitching their work towards a broadcast model rather than a classroom-oriented pedagogical model. In news media and the cultural imagination, the idea of independence has become shackled to Hollywood - and the willingness of commercial theaters to show the token independent film or two has contributed to a greater occlusion of the rest of the independent media field. As Debra Zimmerman of Women Make Movies observed, the general information overload is causing buyers to focus more on the already successful titles while smaller titles are getting unjustly overlooked.
With this disturbing trend, part of marketing outreach during the next few years needs to concentrate on audience building. Both the lack of technological access by large segments of the population and the content filters that are already in place on the internet contribute to cultural fragmentation and a suppression of discussion. The promise of the 500 channel universe comes with an equal threat of dispersing what has been gained for noncommercial media - and that it is increasingly harder to reach the people who need to watch the work. As Desi del Valle of Frameline Distribution pointed out, "we've resolved our conflicts by separating into 500 channels, rather than the major networks giving more airtime to programs by and for people of color." This is not a successful model from either a social justice perspective or from the perspective of an independent media that wants to be active in its cultural surroundings. The challenge for distributors is to figure out how to develop the benefits of these new technologies while becoming active players in shaping what is to come.
The introduction of new technology has already created some definite successes for distributors. Most distributors have found that the introduction of an online catalogue has been their most successful venture in the new digital climate. While the compatibility of the Internet for the broadcast of video will be up in the air for some time, its usefulness as a marketing tool has been proven. Distributors with catalogues on the web have found not only an increase in business, but also an increase in interest for some of the traditionally more dormant titles. The exhibitors and buyers on the list commented that online catalogues have contributed to the ease of locating and purchasing independent media. The ability of distributors to list more information, such as awards, reviews and pricing, has been an asset for buyers.
By using added features like key word searches and category searches, buyers have also been able to explore catalogues more thoroughly. One aspect of the online catalogue that independent distributors are now considering is how to use video clips on their websites. Some distributors, like Video Data Bank, have already put up an extensive collection of thirty-second clips in order to provide customers with a "feel" of a particular tape. Although they have found this was an extensive undertaking, they believe that it has been rewarded with customers being able to experience a wider range of videos than they would otherwise order previews for. They believe that this enterprise has helped streamline the preview process by enabling customers to make preliminary decisions before ordering previews. Because the video clips are free, customers are also encouraged to explore videos they would not have normally chosen to preview.
While there was standard agreement about the necessity of previews for the selection process, there was disagreement among the nontheatrical buyers participating in the salon about how useful they found the video clips, compared to a website's textual information. Curators and exhibitors found clips more useful, because they were able to get the general information they needed for small-scale exhibitions. On the other hand, educational media-buyers tended to ignore the clips altogether. Their evaluation criteria - a piece's usefulness in a classroom setting - usually required the professor to preview the whole tape. Whether the usefulness of video clips justifies the labor and resources required to put them on websites is an issue best evaluated on a case by case basis.
The online catalogue is not the only way to market through the Internet. Distributors have found that word of mouth through listservs and discussion lists has gone a long way to create interest in certain titles. Although creating buzz is a nebulous proposition, there are many ways to encourage word of mouth reviews. Online news services that monitor the industry often have forums for discussion of articles and reviews. Many professors monitor listservs; encouraging our satisfied customers to post their comments may be advantageous to promoting new videos. Listservs like VIDEONEWS, which services educational purchasers, are even designed to allow distributors to post product advertisements for new educational releases. Producer-developed complimentary websites are another approach towards getting the word out, and are rapidly becoming substantial promotional tools. One of the drawbacks around an artist-developed website is that the artist may see it as an opportunity to self-distribute work, and inadvertently compete with their distributors. But with the proper discussion, an artist's website can serve as a good funnel to drive users to a distributor's catalogue.
Most distributors are still doing a a great deal of their marketing off line, and salon members shared ideas on some of the more traditional ways that they continue to reach potential clients. A good percentage of distributors still print catalogues or supplements to send out to interested parties. Directly mailing postcards is still one of the most effective ways to market single titles, because they are relatively inexpensive to produce and campaign results are easy to track. Postcards and flyers are also an effective promotional tool because they are easy for professors and programmers to file for future reference. Less directed mailings, through rented mailing lists, can be harder to trace, but some distributors get a good enough response from these lists to continue to use them. As challenging as it may be to figure out ways to market their work, many distributors are finding the interest in independent media is growing and often enough, that interest is being translated into sales.
A natural asset of the Internet is the capability to aggregate information from disparate sources via links. One of the positive outcomes of this salon was NAMAC's commitment to aggregate an online database of distributors through a portal or directory entered through the NAMAC website. The online discussion about portals was overwhelmingly favorable, partly due to the success of pre-existing portals like Media Rights.org and Docuseek.com. The major advantage of portal-like design is that it makes it easier for buyers to search a whole variety of distributors. And unlike resellers like amazon.com or mediasleuth.com, the portal refers the buyer directly to the distributor's site for the video they are interested in purchasing. This eliminates the need to provide discounts to resellers while encouraging buyers to further explore the distributor's site. Portals are also a powerful educational tool. They provide a recognizable and trusted market presence, and serve to fight information overload on the Internet. NAMAC is continuing to investigate funding and implementation for this distributor-member project.
While sales to the educational market are the non-theatrical distributor's bread and butter, there are still many difficulties with distribution aimed specifically at the K-12 market level. The two primary difficulties identified with the K-12 market were the dearth of appropriate programming, and the strain of marketing what is available to so many schools. The difficulty of finding solid curriculum titles partly stems from the size of the market producers feel that the educational market is not as lucrative - as broadcast sales, and they design their programs accordingly. Some distributors see the rise of interest in youth-produced media as a possible way to build programs for this market.
Another problem faced by K-12 distributors is the fractured market resulting from the dissolution of regional centers over the years. Individual schools have been more inclined to purchase their own collection of video work, rather than to rent from those regional centers. Without centralized buyers, distributors find it more expensive and less accurate to market their work directly to schools. This may change soon, as the regional centers have begun to renew their viability by concentrating on becoming "digital delivery centers." Many distributors see this potentiality as a positive change back towards a centralized system that would make marketing a lot easier.
One issue that comes up often in discussions about the educational market is "two-tiered pricing" - when the educational price is set higher than the individual or community price. Because distributors have started posting prices on their websites, this practice has come under intense scrutiny. Educational buyers are often frustrated by the apparent inequalities of two-tiered pricing. However, most distributors on the salon look at the higher price as the actual price of the tape - what it costs to market and distribute the tape. The lower price is a concession to community organizations and individuals to make the product more accessible - especially if the video or film is seen as an important educational or organizational tool. But it is not seen as a moneymaking proposition. The institutional sales at the higher rate are what distributors rely on to sustain their livelihood. Desi del Valle brought up the case of Tongues Untied as an example of a tape that Frameline sub-distributed for home use at a lower rate in order to get it to a broader public. However, they did lose the ability to monitor the sales, and it is quite likely that many institutions purchased the title at the lower rate.
After the distributor justifies the two-tiered system internally, the trick then is to present that system coherently to the buyers. Many distributors have used the term "public performance rights" to explain the higher educational price but, as Gary Handman, a media buyer for UC Berkeley, pointed out, educational institutions in the United States do not need public performance rights in order to use media as teaching tools in the classroom (this is not the case in Canada, where public performance rights are required).
US law has what is called a "face-to-face exemption" for educators, which currently includes only the classroom, but may be expanded by Congress to include distance learning. Although many media buyers are not informed of this, calling the higher price necessary to purchase "public performance rights" in an educational setting is misleading. If distributors wish to list both prices, rather than listing only the educational price and discounting it if they sense the purchaser is non-institutional, they should develop a better method to explain the two-tiered system. (There are a few bills before Congress right now). If they want to list the educational and grassroots/home use price in their literature, distributors should come up with a clearer explanation of the two-tiered pricing system in order to not be misleading.
The last few years have seen an explosion in formats that people use to produce and exhibit video, leaving the distributor in the middle of ever-changing demand. There's 16mm, 35mm, VHS, SVHS, 3/4", Betacam, Digital Betacam, miniDV, DVD, DVCam and DVC Pro. When you consider that online catalogues have opened up the market to European countries, there's PAL as well (provided distributors have European rights). With all these formats, the question becomes which ones are here to stay, and what to do with the formats that are being phased out.
With any look into the future, it is important to pay attention to the past. For distributors, this means preservation and restoration of their collections. In video, this is a critical issue as the older 3/4"s and VHS tapes are deteriorating rapidly. Betacam has traditionally been a better preservation option, but it also has a shelf life. The next step is to evaluate the archival options for formats like digiBeta and then whatever will replace that. The other disturbing result of the digital transformation is the collapsing 16mm film market. While 35mm has continued to be an important medium and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, the market demand for 16mm has plummeted to the point where distributors are financially unable to keep circulating copies in good condition, or are uninspired to strike 16mm internegs in the first place. This precariousness has been increased by both developments in digital projection, and the competition from the 35mm market where distributors, due to economies of scale, are able to charge a smaller guarantee for titles than 16mm distributors have to charge.
One of the more successful formats recently appearing on the scene is DVD. Not only have the sales of home DVD players skyrocketed, but the price of DVD authoring hardware has dropped to the point where it could be feasible to produce DVDs in small runs. There are still a lot of factors to weigh, but a few distributors are seriously investigating DVD as a possible format to include for rental and sales.
Despite the hype surrounding this new technology, DVD has many drawbacks. Aesthetically, the video image has to be compressed quite significantly, so the quality of image usually falls between the quality of a VHS and an SVHS dub, depending on how much continuity there is between frames. Since the current codec, MPEG-2, compresses the image by repeating still portions of frames and concentrating memory upon the changes between frames, the more erratic the image track is, the more difficult it is to compress well. Within the domain of artist video, the question becomes whether or not this quality loss disrupts the artists' intentions or whether it is an acceptable rendition of the image. In addition, authoring a DVD takes much longer than dubbing a video. Since DVDs are navigatable, a technician has to build an interface for each project. Once that is done, the final compression of the video image takes two to three times the length of the actual video.
There is a rumor that the next development in quality, to MPEG-3 or MPEG-4, will be incompatible with current DVD machines. This is a concern for distributors who feel that they will have difficulty keeping up with the rapid technological changes in the DVD market. Whether consumers will be willing to trade their DVD players for new models when the MPEG codecs change is something for the industry to figure out. Now distributors are wondering whether DVD technology will move too rapidly to keep up with. Authoring a DVD also poses immediate drawbacks: it takes much longer than dubbing a video, a technician needs to build an interface for each disk, and compression takes at least twice the length of the piece itself.
Yet there are also many advantages to DVD technology. DVDs have room to provide more information beyond the usual program materials. Educational distributors could use this capability to provide a greater depth of support material and make a more attractive educational package - with the grounds for a higher price. This is especially important as the DVD player becomes inexpensive enough to become feasible within a classroom setting. DVD also has good protection against piracy. Because the tools are a little more sophisticated than a VCR, DVDs are more difficult to copy than VHS tapes, and discs can be encoded with Macrovision or other anti-copying device to prevent piracy. The Lux in England has already started providing DVDs for installation pieces because of their durability and ease of use, their easy repeat function and their lack of video dropout.
The biggest question on the horizon seems to be the possibility of digital delivery, and no one seems to know when it will arrive and what possible impact it will have on independent distributors. The technology is developing quite rapidly, but commercial cinema producers are still waiting for a standard to be set. They want to make sure there are no cross-platform problems like those encountered with the introduction of digital sound. In addition, they are concerned about having an appropriate way to counteract any possible piracy. The prognosis appears to be that large-scale digital delivery will take awhile to implement, and then take even longer to trickle down to independent media groups.
With digital delivery still in development, discussions about whether digital delivery will turn distributors into direct content providers or whether they will still be supplying titles to the digital portals are still purely speculative. The technology will be expensive - both in acquisition of hardware and software and the actual execution of video-on-demand narrowcasting. That future is too far away to accurately predict, but distributors should be aware and involved in the development of the technology for when it eventually does arrive.
Television comes with its own conundrums, like the possibilities of HDTV and interactive television, which also make it difficult to plan strategies and develop resources. Because of the fluctuation of conversion plans for television and its possible absorption into the greater umbrella of "digital delivery", television was not discussed directly during the salon. There is still faith that the traditional model of selling to broadcast will continue to hold, but the big question that remains is how will programming change? The technological changes in television may force distributors to become content producers as well, in order to develop the extra resources that are part of an 'enhanced' television setting. The main allure of television continues to be the scope of its reach, as a broadcast rather than narrowcast medium, and that should continue to be an important factor in distributors' relation to it.
While there is still some time before most distributors indulge in full scale streaming, various universities and a small but significant amount of corporate sites have been exploring the potential of this technology. Most distributors tend to laugh away the iFilms and AtomFilms as frustrating competition who never pay for work in the first place, but the educational requests are a bit more complicated. Universities have the advantage of having some of the most powerful infrastructures, so they are using them to explore the options of setting up video-on-demand servers (to replace traditional closed-circuit television) or of streaming video through the Internet to distance learners.
As educational institutions move towards providing digital delivery within their own settings, the larger trends of technology raise looming questions about digital rights and policies. The multitude of technologies have allowed for a whole range of uses for independent media. Kate Spohr and Dan Bickley from the University of California Extension Media Center pointed out the need to be flexible in the face of, "a growing number of requests from our customers for multiple site licensing, a large variety of distance learning applications, duplication licensing, closed circuit transmission, converting videos to digital files for use in different types of computer-based systems, video streaming, and so on."
Those distributors who have begun to deal with distance learning requests have treated those requests similarly to regular purchases, with a few extra stipulations added on for protection. Julie Hatta from NAATA described how they handled two requests for digital rights. They charged the same fee for the license as they would have for a regular institutional VHS and lent a VHS to digitize from before being returned. The extra stipulation NAATA introduced was a three-year limit to the license to prevent the digital rights from being too open-ended.
The protection of digital rights and digital standards need to be hashed out over the next few months. The question is not only piracy, which has always been a problem with tape technologies and which may lessen with the development of encryption software, but also how to limit rights and properly monitor the respect of those limits.
The distributors on the salon considered a few options for the future of digital delivery. Software was discussed, such as MediaScaler, which controls the paid downloading of video and can be programmed to limit the time period a user has access to the downloaded file. Dave Kryzsik of Brainwash Movies advanced the possibility of organizing a royalty monitoring organization that functions in similar ways to BMI/ASCAP. BMI/ASCAP monitors music royalties by obtaining log sheets and spot-checking radio stations. It may be possible to transfer this type of monitoring onto computer logs.
Rather than developing a whole new organization to deal with these concerns, the distributors insisted that it was important for NAMAC members to come up with standards that they can all support for digital pricing and use rights. Towards the end of the salon, John Hoskyns-Abrahall from Bullfrog Films presented Bullfrog's full digital policy (see sidebar). The policy made room for recouping the cost of the Beta, assuring password protection and specific downloadability and transferring the responsibility of the actual digitization onto the customer (who may have specific requirements for digitization).
While not much discussion was given to the policy during the remaining days of the salon, Kate Spohr and Dan Bickley proposed that NAMAC member distributors continue to work together via email, using the Bullfrog policy to produce a standard "draft digital license." These licensing standards would then be presented at the National Media Market in Las Vegas in October 2001. The group could then take leadership on some of the critical decisions that will be made in the near future.
Through the salon, NAMAC was able to identify a few areas where the organization can immediately start developing resources. The first is to develop and promote a "Distributors Portal" on the NAMAC website, as elaborated above. The second is to bring back an online version of the NAMAC Film & Video Travel Sheet: a resource to provide information on media artists available to tour with their work. The Travel Sheet helps both distributors and exhibitors to facilitate and expand media tours to smaller, less well-funded places. Many salon members were enthusiastic about the benefits of a reinvigorated e-based travel sheet.
Additional areas of advocacy participants discussed included the continued push for more funding for film and video distribution specifically. Distribution has traditionally been one of the least funded areas of the media arts, and with the increasing technological strains upon the field, the need for increased support has never been greater. Another idea that came up was to offer peer-to-peer "resource consultancies." Advisors would be available to other distributors to address specific problems and to build our affinity network. Both most participants agreed that what needs full attention from distributors (and facilitated by NAMAC) is the development of digital standards to prepare us for the years to come, as well as providing leadership to the rest of the field.
Regardless of the shape of media distribution's future, it is clear that engaged mutual support will be important to the survival of independent media. While the commercial industry is also beginning its own tentative steps into the digital realm, it is important that organizations like NAMAC advocate for and even lead us toward the standards that we can all work by. Of primary importance is the necessity for increased communication among distributors in the coming years. As John Hoskyns-Abrahall of Bullfrog Films pointed out, "we are unlikely to see a plateau in technology from here out." Our frequent checking in with each other, and gathering both live and virtually through salons like these, will allow us to be better able to adapt to whatever lies ahead. ~ Bullfrog Film's Digital Policy
Bullfrog Films is unable to give blanket digital rights to all our titles. Owing to contractual obligations, we have to issue licenses on a title-by-title basis. (When the older titles were put under contract, digital rights were not foreseen. With newer titles, some producers are taking a wait-and-see attitude.
Having said that we do believe that we are able to offer digital rights to many, if not most, of our titles. The following conditions will apply:
1) The Licensee will buy at cost from Bullfrog Films a BetaSP master of the program in question from which it will make its digital master. Cost of the BetaSP is $120 per hour-long program; $105 per half hour (or less) program.
2) The Licensee will assure that all digital copies of the program are password-protected and not downloadable except at major servers at the state, district or high-school level, and not in individual classrooms.
3) The Licensee will not make the program available over the Internet unless it devises a secure mechanism, including (at least) restricting access to specified URLs.
4) Price for the license will be negotiated by Customer and Bullfrog based upon usage, service area etc.
5) The Licensee will have developed a copyright policy regarding digital programs that is well publicized in its service area.
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CHRIS KENNEDY is a freelance writer and the Distribution Manager at V Tape in Toronto.
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© 2001 National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture. All Rights Reserved.
