We've been invited by IFP for their Independent Film Conference to be a panelist. We'll be on the "Know Your Digital Rights" panel which will be held at 10am on Wednesday 17th, 2008 at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Cinetic, Infinicine, Zeitgeist and Joe Swanberg will also be panelists. The session is part of the Alternative Distribution day during the conference. Hope to see NYC-based filmmakers during and after the session.

We'll be at DIY Days in San Francisco this Sunday, August 17 at 111 Minna.   If you're a filmmaker, distributor, or just interested in online independent film, show up! It's part of the From Here To Awesome film series which we're proud to be a part of. 

We have lots of films from the filmmakers who will be there.  Among them:

• Tiffany Shlain - Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness
• Caveh Zahedi - Tripping with Caveh
• From Here to Awesome films

See you there!

Want to highlight the Media That Matters short films brought to us by the trailblazers at Arts Engine, who have been running the online short film festival for 8 years strong. They were definitely down with the online streaming / downloading movement much earlier than Caachi so we gotta give them props.

All of the Media That Matters individual short films are available for free on Caachi but we're also selling their compilations. Also, Arts Engine has a production arm called Big Mouth Films and we're selling four of those films: Deadline, Nuyorican Dream, Brother Born Again, and Journey to the West. Check all of the Arts Engine films here.

So for the better part of the new year, we (specifically Charles) have been working on rolling out our own affiliate program.

Don't know what an affiliate program is? Well, it works like this: You have a website or blog and want to put a Caachi film advertisement on your site to earn cash. You copy some html code that we provide and paste it onto your webiste. Users who click on the ad then are sent to Caachi and can purchase a download. Each time a user clicks through and purchases a download, you get 20% of the sales revenue (i.e., 20% of the download fee).

We're offering the ads in thumbnail, film trailer or text versions. Its free to join. We pay our affiliates each month, just like filmmakers. To learn more, check out our affiliate program.

If you're a believer that independent film needs more exposure and deserves to be seen, tell your friends who have a website or blog about our affiliate program (come on, who doesn't have a blog these days?).

Filmmakers, we'd love to hear your thoughts on the affiliate program and what changes you'd like to see in it.

Last night Charles and I attended a BAWIFT (Bay Area Women in Film & Television) panel. I was on the panel, along with Tiffany Shlain (of "The Tribe", "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" and the "Webby Awards" fame), and representatives from Atom Films and Jaman. It lasted about two hours but based on the engaged Q&A, it could have lasted another two. Some of discussion points I recall that may or may not be noteworthy (depending how Internet saavy you are as a filmmaker):

• some indie filmmakers are not that familiar with the opportunities of online distribution and the Internet appears daunting to them (which tells me that Caachi has to do a better job of making it easy to understand)
• continually aggregating emails as your personal fan base to use for the lifetime of your filmmaking career should be done by every filmmaker
• filmmakers should start their marketing campaigns with friends and family and have those people contact their friends to shill films (and don't forget to use those aggregated emails)
• streaming sites that specialize in user generated content (e.g., YouTube) is very different from distributing independent films for video downloading (that would be us). One is basically for showing short, grainy clips for the MTV crowd and the other is for professional filmmakers.
  
• both the filmmaker and the online distributor should be marketing your film to niche audiences that would have a likely interest in your film
• You don't need to stagger your film release unless there's a compelling reason (e.g., your TV deal prohibits you from distributing online until after the TV airing). The traditional window release process is meant for studio films to generate revenue for all the "middlemen" involved in the distribution process; indie films are a very different animal and the goal should be to create as much buzz/sales as possible.
  
• the future for indie filmmakers will be online and the opportunities to self-distribute is a tectonic shift from the days of being at the mercy of a traditional distributor. With these new opportunities, the filmmaker's role will morph where marketing and distribution will be just as important as making the film.
• some Internet distributors do not openly share their revenue split with filmmakers. This seems to be counter-productive since online distributors are supposed to be a mechanism to provide filmmakers improved terms and transparency compared to the old world of traditional distributors.