The Sundance/Youtube Experiment Post Mortem

Over the past few weeks, many blog sites and journalists have been quick to declare the day-and-date Sundance/YouTube rental experiment a failure. With just a little over $11K in revenue split between the 5 titles, and only about 300 views per film, it certainly seems that way on the surface. However, it took very little digging to reveal another frustrating, yet also more optimistic story. This is what I discovered:

1-Poor Accessibility. When I first read about the Sundance/YouTube deal, I was really excited that I would be able to watch The Cove and Children of Invention, two films that I'd read a lot about. However, I had a very maddening experience trying to find these films on YouTube, one that mirrors the experience Brian Newman had while at Sundance (well, minus the partying...), and that of many of the commenters on the YouTube blog. My cursory search on YouTube site yielded no links to the films' rental page, and my Google search for "YouTube Rental" was also for naught. I also couldn't find any readily apparent links on the Sundance page. After about 5 or 6min of this my patience was maxed out. For an experiment that had received so much press leading up to the launch, I was baffled that it was taking me so long to access the films. Why it wasn't more clearly advertised on the Sundance or YouTube homepages, I'm not sure. Why the Sundance PR dept didn't make more of an effort to include it in every press mention is also unclear. It's no secret that people's attention spans have grown shorter in this era of entertainment on demand. If content is not easy to access, then it is going to suffer limited viewership, no matter how many places its been publicized.

Another big frustration was the lack of accessibility to The Cove documentary by foreign audiences. For the lucky few who successfully navigated to YouTube's rental page for The Cove, those with non-US IPs were rewarded with this message: "Video contains content from Lionsgate who has decided to block it in your country". Why would Lionsgate draft an exclusive contract for the US? Did they think the rentals were going to negatively impact other foreign revenue streams? For all the comments on The Cove's Facebook page, on the YouTube blog, and other websites, I was unable to find an answer from Sundance, Lionsgate, YouTube or Google (the corporation nor the search engine).

2-Rental window WAY too brief. The rental window was only open from January 22-January 31. As pretty much any independent filmmaker knows (or will soon discover), profit never (if ever!) comes quickly. And it certainly doesn't come in just 10 days. These movies aren't Avatar or Batman; they require a lot more time than 10 days to successfully pervade the psyche of the film-going public. The fact that these movies made ANY money in such a short period with so many accessibility issues is a pretty impressive feat. Think--with clearer advertising, improved accessibility and a longer rental release window, these films could have made four or five times what's been quoted.

So the good news in all this frustration and disappointment is that the problems are not insurmountable.  Like Brian Newman says in the end of his post on the same subject, "Kudos to Sundance and YouTube for trying an experiment, and to the filmmakers that went along for the ride, but next time, put some more resources into implementation and marketing - you know, like good distributors do."