Why I built yet another streaming platform

Hi Hackers,

We just recently launched beta for https://filmocracy.com and thought it might be fun to share our story and how (and why) we’re going to change the (movie) world.
I worked for years as a sales and acquisitions executive in independent film. My job was THE BEST! I traveled to amazing cities to attend film festivals like Cannes, Berlinale, and TIFF (Toronto Intl Film Festival) and met with buyers from different countries and basically wined/dined/partied with my friends multiple times a year.
But as with all great things, they must come to an end. As DVD/Blu-Ray sales declined, so did the ability to fund all of the dumb action movies starring Nicholas Cage. But then the shining ray of light known as Netflix pumped life back into the industry by buying anything and everything. Not be outdone, Amazon and others joined the fray. Hooray! Film was saved!

But wait, no. Once they achieved a strong foothold, everyone pivoted to originals and focused on episodic content instead of film. All of the new players like Apple TV+, HBOMax, and Disney+ are collectively spending billions of dollars to keep rights in house. So here we were again. Except through all of this, the rate of film production only increased! Cheaper equipment, affordable editing software, more accessible talent, more films than ever before (50,000 in 2018) are being made.
But the problem remains. Where do all of these films go? And even if you get distribution, how will your film be marketed? (side note: there’s an amazing case study of a film called COLUMBUS which wrote about their decision to self-distribute. You can read it here: https://www.sundance.org/case-studies/creative-distribution/columbus)

For years I wrestled with this question. Amazing movies that win awards and praise at film festivals all over the world seemingly disappear once the festivals end unless you win Cannes (side note: go watch PARASITE- it’s AMAZING). I decided to do something about it. And Filmocracy is what we came up with.
In 2020 (wow that sounds futuristic), we’re bombarded with notifications, emails, texts, IG, Netflix, Tinder, cats, tweets, & Trump. There is no shortage of content we can consume at any given moment. So the only way to get people to pay attention to an indie film no one has heard about is through incentives.

We built a gamified movie streaming platform that rewards users for discovering and rating our curated selection of the best independent movies you’ve never heard of. Users get rewarded with popcorn, our virtual currency, that ranks them on a monthly leaderboard for a piece of 10% of our revenue. And any popcorn they earn can be spent on things like gift cards, movie tickets, and festival passes in our shop.

We don’t make any predatory licensing deals with filmmakers. They earn 50% of any revenue we earn with their film and they can back out of the deal at any time. If Netflix comes along and makes a better offer to steal a movie on Filmocracy, that’s a job well done for us.

In the future we plan to build a crowdfunding feature to allow popcorn earned on the site to be directly invested into new film projects (similar to Kickstarter) except in exchange for equity. By doing so, we’ll be able to completely bypass the traditional Hollywood system that relies on agents, guilds, studios, theaters, and being born with industry connections.

Just about every industry has been disrupted through technology. But mostly large corporations have benefited from all of the data exhaust that’s being produced. I believe introducing financial incentives to your community is the first step in reclaiming part of the value we create as users of these amazing products. Hopefully we’re the first of many.

Filmocracy is in beta and it’s far from perfect and doesn’t have nearly the number of features we want. But it works and needs to be used for us to improve it day by day. If you’d like to try it, please register at https://filmocracy.com
Thanks for reading 😊