Moving Still Media

YouTube has just this week entered the film “rental” (or pay-per-view) business, launching with films showing simultaneously at the Sundance Film Festival. They are starting slowly, with just a few films and only for limited time, but it seems likely this will evolve.  Let’s hope is that it will become a channel for any filmmaker to have a for-pay distribution outlet for their content, ideally a simple selection option within your YouTube account.

To the extent YouTube continues to roll out this service, it’s great news for content creators. While the web has been a fantastic tool to bypass the middle-man/gate-keepers and distribute our work to potentially massive audiences (as we discussed here), it has been difficult to monetize and seek a return on our efforts.

YouTube, with its large active community and ease of access, will do two great things:  (1) make it easy for us to process pay-transactions for our content, and (2) hopefully help bring broad acceptance to paying for high quality online content.  It will take efforts like this to change the “free” mentality online but with Ruper Murdoch’s recent statements that he will be charging for much, possibly most, of News Corp/Fox’s online content, and Conde Nast and other publisher’s hoping to use the launch of the Apple Tablet to start releasing for-pay digital issues of their magazines, the timing is perfect for YouTube’s mass-video outlet to simultaneously start shifting the expectations for high quality content.

It seems likely we will increasingly determine viewing choices through more democratic world-of mouth social media influences (from people we know or trust), then pay a nominal fee for the more produced, high quality content online. YouTube is ideally positioned to facilitate this by simplifying the quick-pay viewing process for consumers, and greatly reducing the transaction and setup obstacles for smaller content creators.

You can see an example of the rental approach with this highly Sundance documentary film “The Cove” (a great suspenseful documentary), and read more at the Hollywood Reporter.