IFH 074: How to Make Money TODAY Selling Your Indie Film with Amazon Video Direct!

Welcome to the Indie Film Hustle Podcast Episode Number 74.

“Unless it’s a temple, a sequel, remake or an over the top comedy. That’s all the studios are doing. If kind of admitted that they’re not in the business of doing anything else the slightest level of irony or intelligence and boom, you’re out of their league. You’re done.” – Richard Linklater

Broadcasting from the back alley in Hollywood. It’s the Indie Film Hustle Podcast where we show you how to survive and thrive as an Indie filmmaker in the jungles of the film business and here’s your host Alex Ferrari.

Welcome Indie film hustlers to another episode of the Indie Film Hustle Podcast. I am your humble host Alex Ferrari. Today’s episode is sponsored by Video Blocks. Now Video Blocks is a subscription based stock media company that has unlimited amount of stock footage that you can download and it is super affordable. I use this on all of my projects. It is my go to place for stock footage. They have over one hundred fifteen thousand HD video clips, after effects templates, motion graphic backgrounds and cynic graphs and on average most people spend about a dollar per download over the course of the year.

It has the same amount of content, same kind of footage that is available on other more expensive platforms and the best thing about it is that is one hundred percent royalty free even if you cancel your subscription you have unrestricted usage of it for your personal or commercial projects that means films, commercials anything you want to use it for and you keep the download and maintain all usage rights for ever. So it’s completely unrestricted guys. So if you want to get a Indie Film Hustle discount head over to videoblocks.com/podcast and you can get an entire year for ninety nine bucks. That is an insane value guys. So definitely check it out.

While my friends making money with your film online has become much much easier after today. Amazon Video Direct. Amazon has announced that they are going to allow individual creators and filmmakers to upload their projects directly to Amazon and share in either revenue, ad revenue or subscription based revenue. This is huge guys. I can’t express to you how huge this is. It is knocked out the middleman for filmmakers. Now you can directly upload your short films, your web series, your feature films. Anything you want to upload you can.

You have to have some technical requirements which I am going to go over to in a minute but I was so excited when I heard this. I had to shout it from the top of the mountains because I was so so so excited about what Amazon’s doing. Basically what Amazon is doing is trying to go after the YouTube’s of the world. They’re trying to become their own version of a YouTube/Netflix. But allowing filmmakers to upload their projects directly. Just like you to without any sort of oversight or approval process.

You’re basically getting access to the entire Amazon Marketplace which is arguably one of the largest marketplaces if not the largest marketplace in the world. Now currently Amazon Video Direct will be played in the UK, the US, Germany and Japan and they will be growing to different regions of the world as they grow but this is huge. I cannot express to you how huge this is to have a complete, basically a distribution outlet without having to go to a middleman, without having to pay obscene amounts of money to a distributor or to anything else. You

have complete control of this. Now how this is going to affect other distribution deals I don’t know. It would be a non-exclusive. You know if you’re going to go out to get another distributor for a traditional distribution deal but if you’ve got short film, if you’ve got a feature film sitting on the shelf doing nothing. Why not upload it to Amazon Video Direct.

Now according to Amazon you’ll be able to rent, sell or create a subscription based of any of your work or all of your work and you get a split fifty fifty with Amazon which I think is extremely fair and if you choose to upload it to the Amazon Prime Video distribution. You’ll earn fifteen cents per hour streamed in the US and six cents for other territories and that’s kept up at around seventy five thousand dollars per year.

My God if you get that much streaming you’re doing really really well. And in addition to this. They’ve also launched the Amazon Video direct Stars program which is a bonus pool of a million dollars per month to be rewarded to the top performing video creators and gives them an incentive to add more of their content to prime video. They’re really going after YouTube guys.

They are going after YouTube and Netflix but YouTube specifically because you know now you’ll be able to upload your content and get paid for it and be able to sell it directly to a huge marketplace. I can’t express to you enough. This isn’t a smaller you know this is Amazon. Everybody on the planet uses Amazon and to have direct access to direct distribution access to Amazon without a middleman is crazy.

So let’s talk about the technical things that you’re going to need to upload your film. Now if you have a short film, feature film, web series whatever I think this all will count the exact same way. You go through the catalog listing, you put in your information synopses John.

Rating if you have one and you have to create key art, you have to create a sixteen by nine, ninteen by twenty by ten eighty piece of key art and also for background image and then you have to create a three by four or a twelve hundred by sixteen hundred key art which is basically a movie poster. To upload there you add in your cast and crew, any of that stuff. So if you have any stars or anything like that people searching for the stars will have these things come up and then for as far as video assets are concerned.

You’ll be able to upload MPEG4 and H264. I’m going to have a link in the description for the show notes at indiefilmhustle.com/074 . Direct links to their technical requirements, all sorts of links that discussing things about Amazon Video Direct.

As far as audio specifications, you need to either have a one channel mono, two channel stereo left and right, six channel five one or eight channel five one mix and the big kicker and this is where a lot of people are going to have issues but it’s going to be worth it. Especially if you have features, shorts or other things. Is you have to close caption everything. Everything has to be uploaded with a closed caption file because that is part of the rules.

Now I know closed captioning is a pain in the butt but you can now afford fairly easily online you can get closed captioning for about a buck a minute if not sometimes cheaper depending on how much you do so for a dollar a minute you can get it close caption with the proper file formats, the most common of those file formats is a .SCC file. And you could do in a CPT file or an XML file, DFXP file or an iTunes ITT file but I would suggest SCC file is the most common used one in the industry, you should be fine. All frame rates as well. I’m not going to drop all those kind of tech specs are if I’m getting too geeky guys.

I’m just gonna laying it all out and again you get all this information on the show notes. Now what they’re accepting is standalone films or stand alone videos which are features, shorts or documentaries are all considered Standalone titles and episodic. So you can have a television show, a web series, things that have a much different episodes on. You can do that.

A series, you could upload a full series, you can upload full seasons. All sorts of different content that you can upload there so. It is pretty remarkable what you can do guys and its automatically you’re able to start generating revenue streams. If you have an audience and even if you don’t have an audience, people searching for your stuff, even if you just put it up there. You can see whether people find it on Amazon.

But if you can drive some traffic to it even more so giving people options and on top of it all you can connect everything with Create Space. Create Space is Amazon’s kind of like make your DVD on demand kind of thing. So you can offer DVDs of your movies as well without any upfront cost. Now mind you not going to make a whole lot of money.

You’ll make more money selling it digitally but if somebody wants to buy a DVD, it’s better some money than no money and it allows you to do that all instantly. So for independent filmmakers this is a huge huge game changer. This just was released last week and that’s how quickly I wanted to get out to you guys.

So again head over to indiefilmhustle.com/074 and I gave all the information, download links, everything you need to get hooked up with Amazon Video Direct. It is a game changer for everybody guys. So definitely check it out. Please let us know what your experiences are. Hit us up on our Facebook group and you can talk about that. I’m going to be talking about that in our Facebook group which is indiefilmhustle.com/Facebook . Go there. Sign up and we can talk about your experiences with Amazon and this is just one revenue stream guys.

We did another episode called how to create multiple revenue streams for your Indie film that was episode 44 and you can check that out. I will put that in the show notes as well but this adds to that multiple revenue stream. There’s so many different places where you can start creating multiple revenue streams for your film digitally online. It is a brand new world and it is something that you have access to things that you never had access to before.

So definitely check this out if I haven’t said it enough. I’m really a big fan of Amazon Video Direct, the concept of it at least. Let’s hope it pans out. But it’s, you’ve got nothing to lose. A little bit of time to upload some stuff and you are rocking and rolling. It’s fairly straight forward guys. So as always head over to filmmakingpodcast.com and give us an honest review of the show.

It really helps out a lot. And don’t forget to go to our YouTube channel has a ton of free content, video tutorials all sorts of great stuff and we upload new videos every week so head over to indiefilmhustle.com/YouTube . As always guys keep that hustle going. Keep the dream alive and I’ll talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to the Indie Film Hustle Podcast at indiefilmhustle.com . That’s I N D I E F I L M H U S T L E .com.