Prescreen: The Social Movie Finder That Wants To Shake Up Online Video | Fast Company #infdist

via fastcompany.com

Excerpt from original post by Kit Eaton Sept. 14, 2011:

"...Founder CEO Shawn Bercuson spoke to Fast Company to explain where the idea came from: He has a background in venture capital, and was attending the Sundance festival a few years ago, but noted that all of the industry attendees like filmmakers, producers, and distributors he spoke with were "talking about the fall of DVD and the rise of VoD" (video on demand) and this prompted him to look at how the industry could be innovated. His first thought was to look at a system like Kickstarter.

But he was driven by his urge to be "disruptive" and was drawn to the distribution system, after noting that of the 4,000-odd movies submitted to Sundance that year only less than 1% were successful in securing a distribution to theaters. According to Bercuson there was "no one in distribution, it was such an antiquated industry and people were still doing the same stuff they were doing 20 years ago" despite the fact that "we have these new exciting tools and technology at our disposal. Nobody was using them." Bercuson notes that while "Netflix and iTunes and Amazon are great, and they have a purpose--but there was nobody playing at the early stage of the game" and these new VoD systems were effectively acting as digital movie theaters, rather than working earlier in the movie-creation system.
Bercuson produced Prescreen to access this market, looking at the 4,000 movies from Sundance and all the other movies that are produced--"sometimes with big name stars"--that never get a launch because "distribution companies didn't want to take a risk on them" or they did get a deal but there wasn't enough money to promote them into good public sight. To this end, Prescreen also offers the opportunity for filmmakers to submit films directly to them for consideration in their service.

The idea was to "create signal out of noise" and thus take cues from companies like Woot and Groupon that promote many good offers and services in a way that makes them "easy to consume and really even easier to share." That's why Prescreen's team "scours through the 10,000-plus movies produced each year" and curates them into its service, avoiding the trap of simply crowd-reviewing movies because it's not as deep a form of social integration as service like Twitter."

Posted via email from Siobhan O'Flynn's 1001 Tales