Reversing The Distribution Paradigm

While film/content delivery formats, methods, and settings for watching them have evolved considerably over the last 100+ years, the core approach to distribution and for connecting the content with its' viewers have remained essentially unchanged since the opening of the first cinema in 1905 by John P. Harris and Harry Davis. These partners set up chairs and a screen in a storefront in Pittsburgh charged five-cents-admission and called it Nickelodeon, which set the style for movie theaters. They relied on the time tested ‘barker’ extensions, in print media (e.g. posters and ads), to introduce their films and to motivate (e.g. ‘pull’) people to fill the Nickelodeon’s seats. This business mandate became known as P&A (prints and advertising), which remains the most effective approach, but the cost can now run from 30% to over 100% of the film's production budget.

The digital revolution and the advent of online distribution have provided significant advantages for distribution and viewers alike.  However, it is the contention of this article that to date, only the most obvious benefits of online distribution possibilities have been exploited, most notably, the potential cost savings to distributors and the convenience of moving access to watch a desired film from a ‘brick and mortar’ setting (theatre or video rental store) to an online destination, just finger clicks away. Additionally, this migration exponentially leveraged the costs, efforts, and benefits of promoting massive selections of content, rather than individual titles, to intensify the 'pull' appeal and brand of the destinations.

The trend towards offering multiple film options at a single destination to increase the ‘pull’ appeal and leverage (P&A) cost actually began shortly after the introduction of the first cinema theater, when two adjacent cinemas were combined to share a single entrance. Over the years, this trend grew to offer several screens (Cineplexes) at a single destination, with Kinepolis-Madrid Ciudad de la Imagen megaplex in Spain becoming the largest in the world offering 25 screens and a seating capacity of 9200.

Online destination, pulling from the playbook created by Cineplex and video rental establishments, increasingly invested promotional dollars to ‘pull’ people to their destination, rather than P&A in individual films. In fact, the trend has extended to the point, where destinations are creating content in service of building their destination brand and pull appeal (the implications of which for film producers will be addressed in another posting), but the basic model remains one of ‘pulling’ people to the content/content destination.

As alluded to above, perhaps the most unique and valuable contribution of online distribution has yet to be exploited, namely the ability to ‘push’ as well as to 'pull'. In other words, the Internet allows for bi-directional exchanges, which can not only ‘pull’ people to a content/ content destination, but can also ‘push’ the content to the viewer. To date, this 'push' capacity has primarily been used to push promotional materials to pull people to the content.  By this I mean, push marketing has been used with links to the content destination, with the goal of still pulling people to the destination where the content can be seen.

Our efforts to develop an alternative distribution paradigm over the past few years has been motivated by my contention that pushing content to people, (e.g. having the content finds its viewers) rather than pulling people to the content offers a valuable, cost-saving and effective alternative for connecting content and people, especially for content lacking significant P&A funding, and/or special interest content, which may have a significant audience, but they are spread out widely all over the world. The bi-directional interaction capabilities on the Internet and advances in AI enables this unique and potential for content to be ‘intelligently’ pushed to its’ target audience wherever in the world they may be online.

Embracing and exploiting this yet untapped distribution paradigm potential made possible by the World Wide Web and related tools and technologies enables the reversal of content distribution practice over the last 100 plus years, e.g. ‘pulling people’ to the content to one where the ‘content is pushed’ to find its’ market is what I am calling Distribution v2.O. 

Guided by this agenda, the first such product we created is the SWIGIT (described at www.SWIGIT.com). To ‘push’ the content, with some intelligence, to find its’ target audience, we harnessed the propellent function of social networks and the marketing impact of recommendation from friends.

A follow-up article will describe in greater detail the functions and tools built into the SWIGIT ‘push’ solution, along with our efforts to create additional ‘push’ solutions which will further enhance the effectiveness of the ‘push’ distribution alternative.

Please feel free to contact me with questions, comments and/or suggestions ([email protected])