1.0 Executive Summary  

The key differentiator between Vviuw and the hundreds of other players in the $25B+ video-on-demand (VoD) market is our pursuit of the position of de facto film festival VoD provider: our content will be drawn exclusively from international film festivals, our target audience is film festival audiences, and our passion is to connect these two, via partnerships with film festivals and filmmakers.

Our goal is worldwide distribution, with content streamed to a multiplicity of device types, and a hybrid revenue model, based primarily on monthly subscription fees, but also including direct-to-sales and donations. 

We further differentiate ourselves as insiders – via experience from filmmaking and film festival administration – and have designed a symbiotic ecosystem: our goals were to:

(1) empower the filmmaker, by offering global distribution and a highly-competitive revenue-sharing strategy

(2) empower the film festivals, by providing them with sponsorship, revenue and the hosting of their libraries on our platform.

(3) provide film festival audiences with access to what they couldn’t take in at the festival, and to the festivals they can’t attend in person.

(4) infuse a community branch (komune_vviuw) to coexist with our content delivery platform (vviuw_ondemand ) so it creates a centralized hub that will foster the grander idea of creating a cinematic/community driven movement.

Our ethos? Everyone wins. Except, perhaps, Hollywood: we’ve chosen to champion the film festivals, their filmmakers and their film enthusiasts because we want to disrupt the status quo: the major players in the film industry churn out products for the masses, lacking the courage to offer the content festivals fill the vacuum for: Provocative. Edgy.  Eccentric. We’re guided by a passion for transformation, disruption and empowerment. 

2.0 Company Summary

Vviuw Inc., was founded in 2013 between Berlin, St. Malo and New York City. Its founder and CEO, German Rodriguez, was inspired by his own experiences as a filmmaker; he perceived (1) a severe gap between demand for film festival content and the distribution channel’s ability to fill it, and (2) the market’s inability to offer effective distribution and fair compensation to filmmakers. He conceptualized Vviuw as a means to remedy these problems.  

The Vviuw family is a team of professionals who have been drawn together by both the love of cinema and of the challenge of creating solid concepts then executing them as profitable business scenarios. Their experience – in finance, marketing, international festivals, legal, and creative – lends a diverse skill set and perspective; and their dispersion throughout the United States and Europe provides Vviuw with a global perspective that parallels it’s scheduled global presence.

3.0 Services

Film Festival Audiences

Festival audiences take in only 5-6 films out of the hundreds offered at the festival, and only a handful of festivals of the hundreds offered each year. VoD offers a remedy, and the Vviuw model gives access to only the content they want, with inclusion in a community of their peers, in a risk-free environment, at a price they can afford:

  • By our singular focus on film festival films, Vviuwers get only what they want, and are spared from wading through what they don’t; a sea of content.
  • Vviuwers sit proudly outside the mainstream, hence peer’s ratings lead more quickly to the content they want but may know nothing about. We call this our personalized curator interface (PCI) concept.
  • Pay-per-view puts the subscriber in a pressure-cooker situation, and it runs contrary to the prevailing ethos that content should be affordable. Vviuw’s monthly subscription model allows the subscriber to start-stop-rewind-skip as they please.
  • Festival attendees include a broad range of income profiles; Vviuw’s pricing plans are an attempt to make film available to all.

Filmmakers

Fewer than 10% of the films screened at festivals ever end up with distribution deals.  Vviuw offers an alternative path to distribution and revenue. 

  • Audience Base: Film festival attendees are the filmmaker’s target audience. We initiate a business relationship between the two via a free trial subscription offered at the festival.
  • Marketing: Cinephiles love to spread the word to their peers about the cool films they’ve seen and the platform that helps in putting these types of films out there, thus initiating a free marketing-and-promotions campaign.  Our emphasis is also to market the overall content of the platform/the vviuw brand, and not focus on one film in particular.   
  • Legal: Few distributors (and even fewer filmmakers) have the capacity to negotiate multi-country or multi-regional deals. With Vviuw’s global distribution network we offer a “Gordian Knot” approach to the tangle of legal restrictions in place. Also: Vviuw will offer a non-binding, non-exclusive 1 month contract – initiated at the film festival – which honors pre-existing agreements, and includes country and regional on-off filtering.
  • Tools: Our design envisions the most sophisticated tools for not only delivering their content to a multiplicity of devices but also for gathering metrics of usage. If the filmmaker chooses to “negotiate up” with a distributor they feel offers a more promising arrangement, we’ll provide them with a dataset that can be used to make a more compelling argument for their next deal, DIY theater release or just to have transparency on who is watching their work.
  • Revenue: Our 65-70% revenue-sharing scheme for our streaming service is highly competitive within the industry. Global reach, advanced tracking algorithm (tracks subscriber usage), incentive allocation via social media migration (SMM), donations and direct to sales (95/5% slip) offers diverse channels of revenue creation for the filmmakers.

Film Festivals 

  • Revenue: We’ll offer 5% of our 30% cut – i.e. 1.5% of total revenue – to help festivals with their limited budgets.
  • Reputation: To our festival partners we offer a platform for providing post-festival access to audiences who weren’t at the festival. This promotes the films they curate, and their brand across the globe.
  • Promotion: Just as we champion the unconventional, unknown, off-the-map filmmaker, Vviuw will champion and promote lesser-known, more obscure film festivals via partnerships, established either directly or via their national film institutes.
  • Platform: As Vviuw becomes established as the de facto film festival VoD, our goal is to offer to be a service provider to the festivals by handling the creation of their selections each year – for a competitive fee, based on economies of scale and efficiencies we’ll realize through streamlining the preparation and processing of films pre-festival.

4.0 Market Analysis Summary

Film Festival Audiences

From our Competitive Analysis we see a VoD market already populated with hundreds of players, many already well established with infrastructure, brand recognition, subscriber base in the millions and deep, deep pockets. We’ve come to the conclusion that our success rests on targeting a specific niche of customers who are passionate about international film festival films, giving them more of what they want, less of what they don’t, at a price they can afford, and with a rich set of interactions with their peers.

We also want to be able to bring film to a neglected audience: those in the low-income bracket across the globe without the ability to access film festivals directly or film festival content online. Our bottom-tier pricing (EU2/month) and global distribution platform are both designed to access this potentially huge market.

Filmmakers

We’ve targeted the kinds of films that end up in film festivals not only because of our passion for this type of content, but also because we believe there’s a gap between the demand by audiences and the VoD markets’ ability to fill it – i.e. a global niche. And although we would hope to capture all the content that gains entry into international festivals, we’re truly pursuing the 90% who end up without distribution – or cash.

Film Festivals

Festivals are our natural allies, and partnership with them promotes the work they curate and the festival’s recognition. Just as we target more obscure, lesser-known films, so too shall we target the more-obscure, lesser-known film festivals. Exposure to a global audience translates into name recognition and increased revenues for them and for us.

5.0 Strategy and Implementation Summary

Organizational Strategy for Target Marketing and Sales and Marketing Activities

Possibly the greatest challenge faced is that of achieving critical mass: with comparatively limited funds we must populate a library, establish film festival partnerships and create a subscriber base. These are intrinsically intertwined, in that the partnership with festivals facilitates partnerships with filmmakers, and the library (and brand identity) lead to the subscriber base that makes the model viable. 

The film festival venue represents the “Perfect Storm” in which filmmaker and film enthusiasts are brought together in a charged environment – and therefore the ideal opportunity for growing a subscriber base and library. We will initially select four “premier” film festivals, 2 in Europe and 2 in the US, for field-testing concepts and procedures.

Digital Initiatives

There are a few strategies for the marketing initiatives of the Vviuw Movement.  The first three months will consist of low cost, pre-money tactics implementing various social media platforms to get the name out into the social ecosphere.  The key objective is to initiate brand introduction. 

Generating this initial momentum and brand recognition will; (1) attract or better leverage investment opportunities by initiating a collective (internet) interest in the brand by its simple messages, associations, character building.

Vviuw will align itself (follow, retweet, interact) with both local and global supporters, players, and makers and shakers of the arts, culture, and film scene.   We start with setting up various accounts for the Vviuw Brand on Twitter, Facebook, Snapshot, Tumblr ect.

This initial marketing plan is to get the ball rolling on the scene.  We will tie in these initiatives with the latter marketing strategies that will follow a post-investment stage.

Post-Investment Stage

Komune

Komune is the community branch that will exist within the completed website.  It’s purpose is to create a place where the film community can meet to blog, contribute, share and find a diverse and extensive array of information about what is happening in the film community.  Part Facebook, part blog, part posting (jobs, critic) part many unknowing things. 

Komune is free, but it purpose is to create the community, the movement, as well as have the ability to share clips, audio, and photos of content from its sister side Ondemand.  This ability will help promote the paid Ondemand side via komune’s traffic and its interaction within and externally with other social media platforms. On the grounds Campaign: @film_festivals

Vviuw Mobile Operations Unit / VMOU

We will launch the prototype in the European market.  Our initial schedule places the VMOU on location at 3-4 selected film festivals.  Reminiscent of touring bands or caravans, the VMOU will travel from festival to festival  to maximize exposure and minimize costs.

The crew onboard the VMOU will comprise a hybrid marketing/production team, and an acquisitions team.  Rigorous pre-production and the establishment of contacts with key festival staff or scouts, will facilitate expected team efforts; subscribers, content acquisition, and video clips from the festival onto the Vviuw platforms.  

Film Festival Audiences

Our subscriber sign-up strategy is to give it away, with the option to provide data via a survey. Our hooks are that (1) we allow post-festival access to the films they couldn’t see, (2) the “cool factor” of being able to direct their peers to a film they were the first to see, and (3) association with Vviuw, uniquely branded as the champion of the films, filmmakers and film festivals.

Filmmakers

90% of a festival’s entrants leave the festival without a distribution deal. To these neglected artists we offer a chance for distribution – and revenue – they’d otherwise be without. This exposure offers an increased ability to negotiate up: our one month non-exclusive contract will include comprehensive metrics for building a more persuasive argument with more mainstream distribution, though our goal is to encourage a one year contract signing – via brand identity and competitive revenue stream.

An even-stronger case can be made to the filmmakers from previous years of the film festival whose work languishes unseen and whose bills are unpaid. We offer exposure and revenue to the forgotten artists – with few (if any) acquisition costs.

Film Festivals

Even “premier” festivals face intrinsic limitations, what with a weeklong revenue window for the entirety of a year. Although the likes of Fandor and Vimeo-on-Demand have made exploratory moves toward partnership with festivals, no one is “filling the niche” for gathering and serving content post-festival – and creating, for the festivals, a continual revenue stream. We’ll propose a 10% cut of Vviuw’s gross revenue – i.e. 3% of total revenue – in exchange for access to their roster of filmmakers, right to port content to our servers (subject to permission of the filmmakers), and waiver of fees for prime booth space location at the festival.

We perceive Vimeo as our strongest competitor in this regard, as they have legitimacy within the filmmaker community and infrastructure to support the type of model we propose. Nonetheless we feel we have the unique opportunity – by being film festival-centric and via our symbiotic ecosystem that benefits festival, filmmaker and audience – of becoming the platform festivals will gravitate toward.

Partnerships

Third Party

Initially we wanted to have films that had no prior contracts to world sales or other forms of distribution deals.  But with the way the wheels are spinning in the VoD world this will likely change.  The inclusion of World Sales, Production Houses, and other Distributors as potential partners for our content building initiatives, will facilitate both beginning and future stages of the Vviuw strategy.

To build up the library, we are looking for films, which have premiered at festivals.  We will employ the tactics of contacting European based National Film Institutes, Festivals, World Sales Companies, Production Companies, and other distributors.

National Film Institutes: Low-Hanging Fruit

There is one National Film Institute in every EU country.  At a National Film Institute, you have a clear idea on all the films from your country and – as you have the challenging task to promote these films abroad- certainly understand the hardships for films that are more daring, unconventional or less compliant to the common taste of the audiences.  It is their duty to get these national films out for the world to see.

Providing a list of films (old and new) that are still lacking a distribution deal and in danger of disappearing into film limbo would be most beneficial to both Vviuw and the EU National Film Institutes.  They provide the potential content, Vviuw provides distribution.  Everyone wins.

Organizational Strategy for Product/Service Development

Product Development Overview

The Vviuw platform will be developed using the Agile methodology by a team initially consisting of the partners, plus freelancers and a digital agency.  Week One will be devoted to defining the features for the minimum viable product (MVP) and brainstorming for the product backlog and future roadmap; identifying user personas and user stories to express features; and determining which technologies will be employed for product development.

From here the team will proceed with one-week sprints, where features are designed and implemented in order of priority, and product backlog will be expanded and refined. At the end of each sprint there should be something new to test, either by the internal team or by external testers.

At key junctions throughout the process, we shall conduct user testing on specific features and flows to create a feedback loop in the design process. In this manner, the MVP should be feature-complete within a few months of the team kick off. The initial focus will be on the responsive web experience, but native applications will eventually be built for a variety of mobile and connected TV platforms.

Design Approach

The user experience for each of the MVP features will be modeled very early in the process, likely using an InVision-like tool to stitch together wireframes or designs to create prototypes, and with which to validate user flows.

The front end will be responsive. While a mobile-first approach typically yields the best results, Desktop and TV experiences are likely the primary experiences. Tablet is still important, and we may find that people are increasingly using mobile, especially for short films. 

In parallel the branding and look-and-feel will be established, ideally in the form of a style guide. These two work streams will overlap several weeks into the process when the first screens are fully designed as layered PSD or IND files. 

Technology Approach

During the first week, key technology decisions will include frontend framework, backend framework, database technology, and infrastructure selection. We favor open source technologies with vital communities. 

In terms of development process we will adopt a SCRUM-like methodology, with sprint planning, daily standups, and burn-down tracking. We will also utilize Test Driven Development. 

It is important to consider the main site is just one of many clients that the backend will support. In addition to mobile apps, there will be clients for many connected TV platforms. Thus, we need to ensure that the front end and back end are loosely coupled from the outset. 

As a video-centric experience, two of the most critical aspects for the development of Vviuw are the player itself, and the CDN used to stream the video content. For the player, it’s likely that we’ll start with an open source solution (e.g. video.js). DRM isn’t a priority for us due to the nature of the films and the viewer, but this may evolve over time. 

At present we envision these technology decisions:

  • Frontend Framework: AngularJS, it should be very app-like and fast .
  • Backend Framework: Ruby on Rails or Laravel, and possibly node.js for some components.
  • Database: hybrid approach – nosql (e.g. mongodb) for the bulk of the content plus mysql for more structured data, Solr for search.
  • Infrastructure: AWS for almost everything, but set up in a portable way, CDN: Fastly or CloudFront. Caching is key – multi-tiered caching architecture.

Optimization Approach

Once the beta has launched, we’ll use a number of techniques to optimize the experience. We’ll analyze user behavior – with standard tools like Google Analytics, and more specialized tools like Crazy Egg. We will also use A/B and multivariate tests, using a tool such as Optimizely, to test out variations in functionality or messaging. 

From a technical standpoint, we’ll monitor core system metrics and application profiles to continue to optimize the speed, stability, and scalability of the experience.

6.0 Management Summary 

German Rodriguez (Founder) synthesizes 15 years plus experience as a creative director, producer and filmmaker to bring together a strategic group of talent, from around the world, to lay the foundations for Vviuw. His core vision is to create a movement by offering a global community driven VoD platform to independent filmmakers, whose films have been selected and programmed at international film festivals worldwide, give them a fair monetary share based on usage, and put their work out for the world to see.  At the same time, he wants to pay respect to the idealistic curative job festivals are doing in finding these gems – films that speak a common language, that are able to touch the souls of the audiences, that give us momentum, that help us understand the world and ourselves.

Standing from the insider perspective German and his team have positioned Vviuw to be the cutting edge future of global film distribution. He believes that Vviuw is more than just another VoD platform- but the evolution of an already very active digital revolution.

Karin Hoffinger (Co-Founder, Content Strategy & Acquisition Director) has been working in the Berlin Film Festival or Berlinale for nearly two decades.  Now head of the International Relations and Programme Organisation departments, she brings a deep understanding of film festival work, including guideline creation, oversight and organization of the film selection process, coordination of official delegates and scouts, and the Berlinale’s relationship to national film institutes, international film festivals, production companies and world sales.

Matthieu de Genevraye is an all-road financial officer. He started his career as a business planner for international groups. He then jumped into the world of startups as the CFO of several businesses in various sectors such as food industry and 3D printing. Some even say he was a winemaker for a while. Fascinated by the potential of VOD, he joined the Vviuw adventure from the beginning.

Omar Pierre Soubra, Director of the Collaboration Community at Trimble. He is also the President of the Rocky Mountain Chapter Franco-American Chamber of Commerce.  Omar is all about innovation and making it tangible for our customers. 

Bertier Luyt Advisor, Facilitator and Connector.

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