CES 2012: Two approaches to indie movies for connected TVs, devices
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Netflix, CinemaNow and Vudu seem ubiquitous on the smart TV sets and set-top boxes on display at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, but they’re not the only companies bringing films on demand to the TV, tablets and smartphones. Among the others trying to drum up business here have been two smaller, evolving competitors, Film Fresh and Bigstar, each of which brings something unique to the mix.
Film Fresh began as an outlet for downloadable international films, which it made available for sale or rental. It eventually added films for sale from selected Hollywood studios -- Sony, Warner Bros. and Lionsgate -- because ‘we learned that you can’t sell the long tail without the short-tail films,’ said founder Rick Bolton. ‘You need familiar films.’
This week Film Fresh relaunched its site, switching to a more widely compatible format (dropping DivX in favor of Windows Media) that’s more acceptable to the bigger studios. The switch enables Film Fresh to make those studios’ movies available for rent, not just for purchase, and it opens a pathway to more devices. It plans to launch on Android tablets in a few weeks, followed eventually by Apple devices. It also opened a store this week on Facebook.
The company also added a nifty mood-based recommendation engine called ‘Film Finder’ (pictured above). The first set of suggestions comes from the company’s staff of film buffs, and the rest are generated by technology from The Filter. The recommendations help users navigate the company’s library of nearly 6,000 films, most of which are titles you’d never see promoted on a bus or in a theatrical trailer. ‘For us, the holy grail is discovery,’ Bolton explained, adding that Film Finder is designed to give the site a ‘corner video store vibe.’
With CinemaNow owned by Best Buy, Blockbuster owned by DISH and Vudu owned by Wal-Mart, Film Fresh is promoting itself to device makers as the Switzerland of online film retailers. ‘We’re the last independent film download service with independents and Hollywood content,’ Bolton said. Miami-based Bigstar, meanwhile, is offering unlimited movie streaming for a monthly fee of just under $5 -- the Netflix model, only cheaper.
It can afford to do that, founder Xavi Dalmau said, because it works only with indie film studios and distributors that are willing to forgo guarantees and advances. Instead, the site pays its 150 content partners half the revenue it collects from subscribers. (Most of its more than 4,000 titles are included in the subscription price, but a few hundred are available only on a pay-per-view basis.)
Bigstar has only about 5,000 paying members at this point, despite having attracted 300,000 potential subscribers over its history. It’s had much more success winning a place on connected TVs and set-top boxes; it is or soon will be available on TVs by Samsung, Sony, Toshiba and Vizio, Roku players, iPads and devices that run the Android operating system.
As a result, only about 10% of the site’s streams are delivered to Web browsers. ‘Our top platform is the iPad and the iPhone,’ Dalmau said, adding that the segment with the fastest growing usage is connected TVs. And unlike many of its competitors, Bigstar has the rights to stream most of its movies globally.
‘We felt that the independent world was a way for us to prove our model,’ he said. The company hopes to gradually add deals with bigger studios, but not for blockbusters. The hits don’t fit into a business model built around $4.99-a-month subscriptions. Instead, Bigstar is focused on overlooked titles -- for example, indie movies that make a splash at film festivals but don’t go on to a wide release. That’s a common fate for festival fare, most of which never makes it to the multiplex, Dalmau said.
‘All along we wanted to make the platform to give it to the filmmakers to be able to show the great movies that they make, year in and year out. A curated library has always been one of our goals. We spent a lot of time figuring out what to put in and what not to.’
The privately held company’s not making money yet, Dalmau said, but it hasn’t been trying to. Instead, it’s been building its platform and acquiring content, albeit ‘without spending the millions and hundreds of millions of dollars’ on major Hollywood fare. With a huge supply of long-tail films gathering dust in archives, along with unheralded foreign films, documentaries and shorts, ‘there’s a lot out there that we can get our hands on that we feel people want to watch,’ Dalmau said.
[For the record, 1:10 p.m. Jan. 12: The original version of this post stated that Film Fresh had just been added to Roku’s set-top boxes. The company says it is talks with Roku with the goal of having its app on the device later this year.]
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-- Jon Healey
Healey writes editorials for The Times’ Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him @jcahealey
