Sites Specific: Can Streaming Save Indie Film?

A look at the companies setting Antonioni and Linklater free online and who's paying for it.

IndiePix’s existence may also be threatened by an outdated model — charging for films. People don’t like to pay to watch things online, notes The Auteurs’ Cakarel: “So pay-per-view is not the right model. We all need to wake up and smell the coffee.”

At the same time, online advertising alone isn’t enough to pay for content either, which puts web sites like these in a difficult bind. Cakarel says the answer is a two-tiered model: premium pricing for what audiences value highly, and free for everything else.

But who will shell out for indie films hardly anyone has heard of? As SnagFilms’ CEO Rick Allen says, “Most nonfiction films haven’t had the luxury of a [print and advertising] campaign and tend not to be known, so you can try to sell those films in an e-commerce model, but it’s hard to do when people don’t know your film.”

For that reason, SnagFilms, unlike IndiePix, The Auteurs or Jaman, doesn’t charge anything. “We wanted to reduce the barriers to exploration,” says Allen. “You don’t have to register, there’s no player, and you don’t have to wait. You can just sample the movie and then know enough to make an informed decision about it.” (Babelgum doesn’t charge for content, either, but lacking in a clear-cut identity — its film section mixes a hodgepodge of random foreign and indie films, with shorts and trailers — the site lacks market penetration.)

On the other hand, the top-watched SnagFilms movies have been seen hundreds of thousands of times, according to Allen, boosted by the company’s “widget” application, which allows films to be inserted into Web pages like an ad. For example, smack dab in the middle of an Associated Press story about police in the Sudan beating women protesters, posted on AOL News, is the SnagFilms widget for “The Art of Flight,” a doc about Sudanese refugees. “We’re far more able to penetrate a broad swath of consumers,” says Allen, “and put these films in front of audience that’s passionate about the subject matter.”

SnagFilms has another ace in the hole: Leonsis’ long-standing relationship with Internet giant AOL. If most indie film sites can’t rope in big-time corporate advertisers, SnagFilms has its ads sold by AOL as part of a package that includes AOL-owned film sites like Moviefone and Cinematical. For filmmakers, unfortunately, only a paltry amount of those Fortune 500 ad dollars makes it back into their pockets, according to industry sources, but at least audiences get to see their movies for free.

In this way, SnagFilms, like industry leaders iTunes, Amazon and Netflix, may be better situated to deliver indie content as part of a larger, more corporate-subsidized model. While this may be disappointing to those looking to patronize the mom-and-pop movie shops of the Web, the fact remains that it’s always hard out there for an indie, whether the films themselves, or the companies that distribute them.

[Additional photos: "L'avventura," Janus Films, 1960]

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