Shattering Hollywood’s Barriers to Entry

Vuulr | The Future of Global Content Distribution

Democratizing film distribution of premium content for diverse audiences is at the forefront of this new company.

The demand for content is greater than ever before. However, the gatekeepers who hold the keys to access on the platforms which matter, often have not changed guards. The call for more diverse content creators has been made public, but such creators have often commented on the barriers to entry which still exist. 

How does one get their premium content on Amazon, Netflix, and the hundreds of other streaming platforms globally without falling prey to the whims of inscrutable film sales reps?

Enter Vuulr —an easy to use online platform which connects premium content creators with some of the best broadcast buyers on the planet, all under one roof. No upfront fees to the buyers or sellers—they make money when you make money.  

Although content providers on Vuulr include films starring Denzel Washington, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt and other A-listers, their specialty goes beyond mainstream with a long tail of niche programming as well.

As CEO Ian McKee says in my interview with him below, "Everybody—no matter who you are, what you are, where you are - has equal access to distribution" on Vuulr. Welcome to the future of premium content distribution.”

You had an unusual route leading you to creating Vuulr. Tell us about your background, and why you created your company.

Ian: I was originally born and brought up in the UK, I'm a Brit. I started my career as a tech person, working for companies like Sun and Oracle. In 2004, I decided to pivot; I wanted to do something more creative. So I started an agency, and it grew into the largest social media agency in Southeast Asia. One of our very first clients was the cable company in Singapore and then we quickly gained the cable company client in Malaysia. Other cable operators like Discovery came along and said, 'Can you help us with some of the marketing problems?' Then, Sony Pictures Entertainment came along, and we started doing work for them. Finally, we added UIP as a client doing weekly film launches. That's when I got the bug to be in the Industry.

When I was looking for my next challenge, I knew that it was a great time to be in the business of content. And yet the distribution function of the industry was still very low-tech.

While the consumer front end of what Netflix does—with the recommendation algorithms and adaptive bit rates, is super-advanced—the way the B2B industry goes out to look for content is still old-school. I thought we had an opportunity to build some tech, and deploy some cutting edge marketing to solve that part of the industry's problem.

For those who are unfamiliar with what exactly Vuulr is, can you explain it?

On one side, there are people who make films and TV shows; and on the other side, there are all the television stations and the new broadcasters like Netflix and Amazon, who need to buy content for their audience. What we do is we provide an online marketplace that allows the people who have the content to meet and transact with the people who want to buy (non-theatrical) content rights. 

We do the marketing, bring in the buyers from the broadcasters and provide the tools for the content creators to easily negotiate a price; we then take a 10% commission upon success from the seller.

The remaining 90% is retained by the seller with nothing charged upfront: we only make money when a seller makes money. We don't perform the aggregation role, so while we have users from a great many streaming platforms, including Amazon and Netflix, it's up to them to come to Vuulr and look for content.

If you’re the seller—and your content is the type of content that they're looking for—they'll find it. They'll watch the trailer, the screener, check your avails and then if everything looks good, they'll make an offer to you.

What are some of the benefits of working with Vuulr compared to the traditional route of a film market or even a film sales rep?

Ian: There are unique benefits from a buyer’s and a seller’s point of view. First of all, there are no upfront fees and no registration or listing fees. In fact, you can list your entire catalog for free, and non-exclusively (i.e. we're additive and complementary to your existing efforts). So if you've been a filmmaker—or you're a distributor or a production house—and you've got 500 titles, we're happy to take all of those titles.

We reach all of the 249 countries in the world. We market for you and can retarget on Facebook and Instagram, and Google to every corner of the world, so we're reaching buyers everywhere.

Speed: Deals typically close on the platform in about eight to nine days. So it's much quicker to go through our negotiation process via Vuulr than it is doing it the traditional way.

So you get more deals done. And the rights management functionality that you need to keep track of avails, to make sure that you always know what you sold to whom, is built-in and it's available for free on the platform. 

Each title has its own screening room, so we can host your screener, again for free on the platform. And we take you all the way from a buyer discovering a title, right up to you and the buyer agreeing on a deal memo. At that point, it goes back to normal for delivery and payment where that happens off-platform. Although, we do plan to expand our functionality there as well.

For buyers, we're a powerful search tool which allows you to easily search the aggregated catalogs from 3,400+ different sellers, selling over 13,000 unique titles and 85,000 hours of content all in one place from all over the world. There’s no doubt that a Buyer on Vuulr would get exposure to content that he/she would never normally see.

And somewhere in that content is going to be that gem, that hidden gem, right? That's going to suit you and your audience better than any of the stuff that is being tracked through your door and pitched to you. And we empower you to go find that content. And then again, speed is helpful as buyers today have their work cut-out for them looking for content, especially now that - as consumers - we're all consuming content faster than ever before.

Are there success stories already?

Ian: Yes, there have been hundreds of transactions already. What's interesting about a digital platform like ours is that we are able to super-serve really niche content, not only middle-of-the-road content. If you have a piece of niche content, then normally very few distributors will carry that niche.

For example, here in Singapore—a tiny island nation with a population of six million, roughly the population of San Francisco—there are some people making great content. One of them, BananaMana Films, run by two guys, listed some of their content on Vuulr and it's probably the third or fourth most sold piece of content. Somehow, they've struck a chord with their storytelling, and we've already sold it into several different countries that they would never have expected. So here's a two-man outfit, getting global reach for their distribution and making sales, for no upfront cost.

On the other side of the story, we have some LGBTQ platforms who are buying through us, finding content in places that they wouldn't have expected. We have a lot of big Bollywood catalogs, and one of the Bollywood studios (ALT Balaji) produced a gay love story remake of Romeo and Juliet. An LGBTQ platform out of Taiwan found it, thought it was great, so then they negotiated and acquired it.

And when I spoke to both sides, the guys in India said, 'We would never have thought to pitch this title. We've got many more mainstream titles,' they said. ``We made that for other reasons, and we certainly would never have gone to Taiwan to try and sell this content. So we would never have done this deal without you.' 

I've got another example of a guy who runs a horse-related streaming platform. Though all of this content is about horses—film, shows, and documentaries- anything to do with horses—that's his thing. He typed horse into the search bar at Vuulr and we have more than 500 titles that were all related to horses, like a documentary about a racehorse. His eyes lit up and he said, 'It would have taken me years of walking around festivals and markets, trying to find horse content. You just saved me many years’ worth of work.'

So what I'm really proud of is bringing great content and putting it in front of the right people and democratizing the access to distribution. It doesn't matter who you are, and it doesn't matter whether you've made one film or ten films.

Geography doesn't come int it either. You could be in the center of the media industry like L.A., or sitting on an island somewhere off Iceland, it really doesn't matter on a digital platform, right? Everybody, no matter who you are, what you are, where you are has equal access to distribution. And once you're on our platform, you stand or fall dependent on just one thing: the quality of your content, which is exactly how it should be.

So you may be a first time indie filmmaker, but your film can sit right next to a title from a major studio. 

Are the content creators on your platform responsible for marketing their films and television series?

Ian: We thought long and hard about this question, and we looked at the experience of some of the other things that have been happening in the industry. We realized that if we just left the gates wide open, where every seller could approach every buyer, then the buyers would be bombarded and flooded by everybody trying to “shout louder” to cut through the clutter and sell their content.

They may think that it's easier to do a mass mailshot, versus selective marketing. But if buyers kept on being bombarded with irrelevant content offers, in the end, they would switch off. Then that channel would have been degraded, because the “signal-to-noise ratio” would have been too diluted. 

So we made the decision that this is a buyer-led platform—a platform that buyers feel comfortable to come to because they don't get bombarded. And it makes it very easy for them to look for and find content, and then it is the buyer who reaches out to the seller and then initiates the process.

So while of course, Vuulr does help sellers sell, we have slightly more of a focus on providing a tool to help buyers buy; and there's a subtle but important distinction there. In order for it to grow and be successful, we have to keep the Buyers happy and Buying. 

But the good thing for content providers is that that puts the responsibility on Vuulr's shoulders. Since our business model is that we don't make money until the seller makes money, the responsibility of making sure that we've got buyers and that they're coming to the platform—and that they're acquiring content—rests on our shoulders. We spend our own budget and use our own specialized marketing skills to do that. 

We market in an intelligent, digital way so that we don't pollute that information channel, the buyer therefore still finds us valuable, and is more likely to come back to the site to look at the content. That goes back to my digital agency days of more than 15 years of learning how to do exactly that.

How do you assure the buyer that the quality of content made available is premium?

Ian: We have a vetting process at registration. What we vet is that you're a valid maker or seller of content, right? We look to see if you've got a website that clearly explains who you are and what you do. If you don't have that, then we'll ask for you to send us a photo of your business card or a LinkedIn or IMDB profile.

We needed some mechanism to assure that you're not a consumer—some kid in a basement that just wants free access to content—and that you are a B2B professional in the industry. On the other side, the buy-side, we want to make sure that you work for a proper TV channel, a pay-TV channel or a streaming platform, and that you're truly in the business of buying rights. In short, we look for whether you're either in a genuine position to be able to sell, or you're in a genuine position to be able to buy.

Who you are, what you are, where you are, we don't care—just that you are a valid industry professional. Once a Seller is approved and on Vuulr, the content they can list can be about any topic. There are really only two rules on the platform: One, no pornography, and the other one is it's not a place for your wedding video or your kid's birthday party video! Vuulr is for professionally produced, broadcast quality content.

We are open to feature films, episodic and we also have lots of shorts: Three minutes, five-minute pieces are fine. So it doesn't have to be a feature, but it has to be professionally produced content. This is not a clip content platform; news clips and the like. It's professionally produced content which has a beginning, a middle and an end... with a story!

How are you able to track sales made if one of the options, besides a flat rate, enables a buyer to pay per view?

Ian: If the transaction between a buyer and a seller is based on a performance pricing model rather than a flat rate, that information is captured on the deal memo that is generated at the end of the journey on the platform. So our journey finishes at the point that both sides click ‘agree’ on the deal memo;at which point, the deal is done.

Next, from a billing point of view, by then, we have a relationship with both the buyer and the seller. So the performance reports that the buyer will be issuing to the seller—to say this is how many views, this is how many minutes streamed and therefore how much we owe you—is also shared with us. This is so we know how much the seller is making, and therefore we know how much to invoice for our 10 percent commission. 

Thank you to Ian for his candor and for opening the doors for content creators whom may never had had the opportunities to introduce their content to a global audience without this new platform. We look forward to seeing what Vuulr has to offer.

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