If you can deal with all of the popups and junk (I'm not a member of iFilm..) then it's not a bad thing. Their format has changed drastically in the past couple of years and for delivery, I think its clunky and cumbersome but they need to pay the bills somehow. Atom Films has gone the same way too.

Truth is, people use iFilm quite a bit so chances are your film will at least get seen.

well my films are all 60 minutes plus, so the actual film cannot be listed at iFilm, they refuse all films over 45 minutes which makes them a short film site

Luckily I have a 9 year old distribution network already, we operate over 300 content sites with several major genre's

One of our main genre's is the paranormal, and we have over 30 sites developed or that genre

Several are the main sites in the world for specific para topics, like Nostradamus, UFOs, etc

We've been selling memberships and books on these sites for years, so we have an extensive client base that wants para related items, that's why we started making para films, to add to our content base.

So my trailers for these films have been seen by hundreds of thousands of people, the movies for now are seen by people that pay 9.99 to 19.99 to download them or on DVD or eMovie CD (a CD made to show a full screen .wmv file)

I'm looking for the best ways on-line to gain more viewers

Right now I don't see any 'great' Indy Film distribution points, iFilm can't show full lenght films, MovieLink is owned by the major studios

I have an eMovie site that gets some traffic from people looking for trailers, I guess I can develope that to showcase some of my stuff, but my para network already pushes the films and they are very, very busy sites. So most of the people going to my emovie site are coming from network already via links and such.

I was hoping to find sites doing strong distribution for Indy movies, there doesn't seem to be any, maybe I'll start one. I already have the traffic, so maybe I'll push some traffic to a new site just for Indy features.

Maybe when I have 10 films in my catalog instead of the five I have already

I kinda of like the 8 minute concept at iFilm, show people the first 5 or 8 minutes of a film, then I guess you try to sell the rest.

The main concern with any movie site is bandwidth issues, I can get all the bandwidth I want since I'm on a large OC12 pipe line, but if I just start letting everyone see a full screen 720x480 wmv for even 8 minutes, you're talking about 100mb in bandwidth per viewer, and that's if they only watch one 8 min film

So I guess the freebies would have to be smaller 320x240 renders, that way a busy site won't kill you with bandwidth

I just thought the Indy distribution network would be a little more developed by now

The tools exist to put out a high quality product (720x480 wmv file is the best imo)

Bandwidth is cheap enough so you can sell a 700MB movie download now and have it cost almost nothing to deliver

The only problem I see is keeping pre-sale bandwidth low enough so you can make money when a sale comes through, the net takes a lot of traffic to convert to sales, it always has and always will, every year conversion ratios get worse

Paying conversions of 1/100 used to be great, now 1/1000 might be considered 'good'

Imagine having to give 1000 people 100MB of freebies to sell one 700mb movie for what a few bucks

That's 100Gig of bandwidth on freebies to make very little

There are some rack server companies that sell 700Gig of bandwidth for 100 bucks but they aren't that fast

So 100 Gig costs at least 13 bucks and a movie download is what 4 bucks at most sites?

I'm happy I get 10 bucks for most of my downloads and one gets 20 bucks

Right now I sure don't have to give out 100G of bandwidth to sell a movie

Anyway, that's how I see it now, you can deliver great content cheap, but it takes a ton of bandwidth to try to sell downloads

Starting up a site for Indy movies has the obstacle of traffic as well, most sites spend a ton on on-line marketing to get eyeballs to their sites

So the big hurdles are

1. traffic
2. conversion ratios to sales
3. bandwidth costs

Right now the only site I see with big potential for downloads is movielink since all the majors are involved, they have tons of content to offer, so once they get a customer the question is how much will the spend each year

I don't know how the studios will allow another company to do downloads, since how do you really control it? Do the studios get a percentage of each download, what type of auditing system can you have to make sure the studios get their correct percentage. MovieLink eliminates that problem, the distribution point is run by the studios.

If you go through all the expense of building a distribution point and only have a few items to sell, you don't get repeat business, that is the key to having a viable distribution network for films, you have to have returning customers and a diverse product line

The majors control content people want to see due to theatrical release buzz

I guess if a few larger Indies got together they could have enough product to do a movielink type venture

Anyway, iFilm isn't the place for anyone with a movie over 45 minutes

Maybe we should start a thread about creating a viable Indy distribution network, the people here are all creating content, and there needs to be a good way of getting it out to the public where the creators of the content make money

the ufo stuff doesn't really fit with indie movie material, it's a specialized genre, just like what i do with race cars... you need to work on driving more traffic to your sites, not putting content in places that people aren't looking for it... targeted search engine tactics would be one really good approach.

there are other options... peer to peer networks that'll download off of each other, with a digital rights management server to issue licenses, is one thing i want to do really badly... ever hear of videora?

totalvid.com has a business model that looks interesting, but they are too expensive.

Is there any good new UFO footage? Or is this all that "Sightings" footage rehashed again. (just curious as theres been no real news on TV the last 3 or 4 years.)

most people have a passing interest in ufos, they might not be hard core reseachers, but most people have some interest in the topic

i run some of the busiest ufo sites in the world, you put UFOS into any major search engine my sites are at the top or first page

i get thousands of people per day to these famous sites

at this point I'm only interested in marketing my stuff on niche marketed shows or channels, sci-fi is an obvious channel we would advertise on, radio like coast to coast etc

as to new material, yep theres new material, we have the FBI photos of the Roswell UFO

we have the first photos of real UFO pilots, they humanoid looking not alien at all

we put forth the idea that major sightings occur where major tragedies will occur

so our UFO film is a major new source of info

it has a ton of the famous ufo stuff, but some real good new info presented in a logical format

Hmmm. I don't get it. Between A&E, The History Channel, History Chan Inernational, the 5 or 6 Discovery Channels, Sci-Fi Channel (the Travel Channel?) and all the regular network and independent stations, you'd think they would be clamoring to get some new material. The thing that scares me is that most of those cable/satellite channels seem to somehow be affiliated and keep rehashing a lot of the same programs on a seemingly different (above) channel.
When 3 years passed between the Mexico city sightings of 1991 (17 separate videos of the same UFO) and not a single mention in any news report anywhere here, until it had to be shown on 'Sightings', which has the reputation of "The Weekly World News" and no one takes seriously, then I became very suspicious of Cover-up and a silencing of the air waves including 'Coast to Coast', which was doing extremely well until something happened to ruin that show too. (the timing of the ruinization of Coast to Coast was eerie. It's still good but it lost its momentum.)