Black Flag TV Channels Have Moved in Roku's Catalog

I've just learned from the Roku admins that they made some important changes to their TV channels classification.

The "Internet TV" category, where Black Flag TV and Cult Movies TV were located, has been removed. All the channels from that category can now be found under "Movies and TV" category.

If you already have my channels installed on your device, nothing has changed, and they're still in your menu. But for those who are browsing channels on their unit or Roku's website, looking for Black Flag TV network, you will find it under Movies and TV.

Here, I'll make your life easier:

Thanks for joining the fun!!
(By the way, Obskura TV is coming very soon on Roku as well. Stay tuned!)

Cheers,

-Sv Bell

17 Things About The Movie Business Every Filmmaker Must Know

I stumbled across this great post by Ted Hope, a New-York based indie filmmaker, and president of the San Francisco Film Society. Though the article was published in May 2013, it is still pretty accurate today.

The film industry has changed dramatically over the past few decades, and many of us filmmakers are struggling to find a way to find money to produce films, make revenues out of the investment, and eventually 'make it in the business'.

1. Filmmaking is not currently a sustainable occupation for any but the very rare.
2. Presently speaking, artists & their supporters are rarely the primary financial beneficiaries of their work – if at all.
3. The film industry’s economic models are not based on today’s reality.
4. Film audience’s current consumption habits do not come close to matching the film industry’s production output.
5. The film industry has not found a way to match audiences with the content they will most likely respond to.
6. In order to reach the people who might respond to a film, the film industry remains dependent on telling everyone (including those who could not care less) about each new film.
7. Digital distribution is an emerging market and will continue to evolve over the next decade.
8. Predictive value of films is primarily currently determined by an incredibly imprecise method:“star value”, a concept that grows less predictive by the day.
9. The “fair market value” of a feature film’s distribution rights in the US that multiple buyers want has dropped astronomically.
10. International territorial licensing of American independent feature films has dropped by approximately 60% over the last decade.
11. Everything that has ever been made, has also been copied.
12. Competing options for film viewing have diminished the comparative value of theatrical exhibition.
13. The film business lacks a long-range economic model for exhibition.
14. The film industry foolishly rewards quantity over quality.
15. Movies have a unique capacity to create empathy for people and actions we don’t know or have not experienced.
16. Movies create a shared emotional response amongst all those that view it simultaneously.
17. There has never been a better time for most creative individuals to be both a truly independent filmmaker and/or a collaborative creative person.

Read Ted's full article.

Is Youtube really making money?

I've been saying it for years, streaming business model does not work. For the simple reason that expenses grow at the same rate as the users growth. No limit, no cap. The more users you have, the more expensive it is to operate. Ask Spotify. Ask Youtube.

Youtube, with a billion users every month, more or less break even with their operation expenses:

http://www.techspot.com/news/59869-youtube-remains-unprofitable-despite-earning-4-billion-dollars.html

(Article published in The Wall Street Journal)

sv bell

Don't buy a car to go get bread at the store

I'm getting frequent messages like: "Man, I LOVE your channel, and I do have a film in the making. As soon as I have money, I'm buying a camera and make it happen!"

That's awesome, go for it! I can only encourage anyone to make their dreams come true.

Where I see a problem though is when someone tells me they're going to buy equipment to make a film. In many situations it's not really a good move.

Chances are, you want your film to look professional, right? And pro cameras, usually, aren't cheap. Your best option is to rent one. Rent from friends, from rental outlets, but don't buy. Don't buy if it's only to make your movie. After all, you will be filming for 3 weeks, and spend the remaining of the year in the editing room. While your camera will gather dust on the shelves. Not a good investment!

When will you make another movie? Technology moves really fast (too fast) so chances are that next time you will produce another film, your equipment will be outdated and you will want to work with the latest toy.

Renting fixes all that. Cheaper, and always up to date technology. Let the rental outlet to struggle keeping pace with the latest gadgets.

But you know where the fact of renting will really benefit to your film's production? When you'll finally get to the filming day, you will be much more prepared. Planning a film shoot is critical. When you rent equipment for a certain date, you plan things ahead, much more carefully than when you bring your own stuff. And it makes a huge difference...

sv bell
 

So you want to launch your own VOD?

Back in 2009 when I started to look into having my films available online, I considered a couple of avenues to make them available for video on demand. There are tons of options, from Vimeo, Youtube, Ustream, Filmon and many others. But none of them offered everything I needed, or if they did, it wasn't cheap.

We both know how much indie movies generate, right? The last thing indie filmmakers want is to spend big bucks for a streaming presence on the web. Or have someone eats all revenues an indie film can make.

That's how I decided to build my own streaming solution, and not use any of these platforms. It's not that hard, believe me. I don't have an IT degree or a training in broadcast engineering. If I could make it work, anyone can.

The key of the system is to have a good CDN (Content Distribution Network). That is where you will host your media files, and the provider have a solid distribution engine. The usual platforms I mentionned above already offer that, you'll say. Yes, they do, but what they don't offer is the direct access to the output stream. They give you a player, and you are stuck with that player. Any feature you want, you are being charged for it.

If you have access to the output stream, you are free to do whatever you want with it. Build your own player, integrate a paywall, send the stream to your own website, manage your own subscribers via Paypal, send the stream to Roku, Amazon, output to your own iPhone app and so on. You need to have access to the output stream for that.

I tried many options (including running my own dedicated server and a license of Adobe Flash Media Encoder and Wowza, but I wouldn't recommend that. Managing the server itself is quite a hassle. Adobe's streaming suite will cost you around 3 grands, Wowza is about $50 a month, and you still have to take care of everything.

The CDN provider is the best option. They take care of the hardware, give you a certain amount of bandwidth (and storage), and you control the content, stream in and stream out.

Some of the best streaming services I used recently include DaCast, CDN77 and ScaleEngine. They offer a solid platform, excellent support, and affordable packages. ScaleEngine is probably the most flexible of the group, but the platform itself and management console is a bit confusing. The techs are very helpful though.

The CDN I'm currently using for Black Flag TV, Obskura TV and CultMovies TV is MetaCDN. For me it is the most cost-effective provider, considering I'm broadcasting live, 24h a day.  That means a lot of horsepower, and a lot of bandwidth all together for a low price. And also Roku support. Not all the above providers support Roku HTTP streaming. MetaCDN also offer the option to build your own custom player, with your own splash screen, and clickable links overlayed on the video.

So once you have uploaded your content on the CDN host, in your console you will find your stream's URL. This is the URL you need to send your stream wherever you want. Building a player is straightforward (likely the CDN has options to build it), and you place that player wherever you want. For instance, on a paid member section of your website. If you're concerned about having your player shared, and people watching your films for free, you can ask your CDN to get a token. Having a token means you can 'lock' the stream to a certain domain. Outside the domain, the stream just won't play. So the player can be stolen and shared, it just won't work.

Managing the subscriptions isn't too complicated either. DaCast offer a paywall service built in the player. Other providers don't but you can make your own using Paypal's IPN service.


Once you're up and running, promote like crazy and bring people to YOUR site. That's the beauty. You work hard to bring people to you, I always found it's a shame to send them to someone else's website. You work hard to gain your fans, bring them to your own website, not on a third party platform that will monetize on your content, and charge you a fee at the same time...!

sv bell

The Streaming Time Bomb

Like many others, you may think streaming TV is the future.
Maybe it is.
But maybe it's a time bomb that will blow in our face in the very near future. Here's why.

Heard about the cord cutters? These are the folks that cut cable TV and turn toward streaming television. Watch TV via the web, and save big bucks on their cable bills. It certainly is an awesome option, after all cable TV is damn expensive. Can't blame cord cutters for sure!

Slowly but surely, more and more people abandon cable TV subscriptions, leaving these providers with lesser and lesser revenues. Who cares, they make billions, right? Time for them to give up and disappear from the face of the earth, right?

It's not that easy sadly. Because, see, these cable TV providers are the same folks giving us high speed internet. High speed you need to stream video. What happens in a situation where everyone moves to streaming TV, and the providers end with much lesser revenues to maintain the network?

Maintaining a nationwide content delivery network requires a lot of investment, and that money comes from the cable TV providers, from your cable TV subscriptions. These societies need to make money, they are public companies, listed in stock market, they have investors buying shares, they have banks investing money, and so on. If revenues shrink, the value of the shares shrink, and investors, banks, everyone take back their investments before it's too late. That is how large societies collapse in a matter of weeks.

Cable TV providers are not exempted from that scenario. If cable TV business goes down, the streaming TV business model will go down too.

The Google network.

You probably heard about Google running cable network in some select US cities, and offering low cost internet access, with options for people who want to watch TV via streaming. Basic packages start at $0, but if you add all the same services you get from current cable companies, unlimited internet, phone, basic TV and ala, you end up with pretty much the same price, roughly between $80 and $120/month.

Maybe, after all, the pricing of today's cable companies is right, and it's really what it costs to maintain a decent service.

sv bell

Black Flag TV 2015: moving to computerless environment

What's really annoying when extensively working with computers and softwares, it's the only thing that's certain is that everything is unstable. Or at least it doesn't remain stable for very long.

There's always something, somewhere in the process, some tools or hardware parts you need to upgrade, to update, to replace, and so on.

Technology evolves very fast. Faster than the time you need to recoup an investment. Programmed obsolescence is also very frustrating.

My goal for 2015 with my TV channels is to move everything toward a computerless, softwareless environment. There are standalone streaming decks available, that do not require a computer to stream media to the web. Depending on the capabilities, these decks don't come cheap. But looking at it on the long run, they still come cheaper than the sum of video routers, computers and software updates/upgrades that are required to run a TV stream on the course of a few years.

By the end of March, I will begin to stream one of the TV channels without a computer, see how it goes, make adjustments and eventually move all my stations to dedicated standalone streaming decks. Just like the big boys over at those real TV networks out there...

Wish me luck!

sv bell