Mike Todd shares his experience of working with US online content provider Hulu, and looks at just how viable online distribution is becoming for film and video.
They used to say that if Philadelphia was the capital of boxing then Joe Frazier’s gym was the White House.
It was over five years ago when I first met with Joe and his son Marvis at their iconic gym. I had a fairly simple idea. I wanted to make a film about Joe, his gym and try and look at what the place meant to him and the community it served. Things rarely turn out as you expect. When we started on the project I never dreamed it would take us some four years to complete.
On November 8 last year, I found myself stood outside the IFC Center Cinema in Greenwich Village New York. The documentary was due to premier at the Doc NYC festival that evening. Earlier in the day, the US media had been filled with news of Joe’s sad passing. Word had got out that our film chronicled the last years of his life. The New York Times were there, CBS, I did live interviews for Canadian television, the Dutch news. The queue for the screening stretched around the block. It was quite a surreal experience.
In true ‘on their hands a dead star’ fashion, Universal had already approached us with an offer to distribute our film. It all seemed to be happening.
However, we had some difficult choices to make. Despite extended discussions with numerous broadcasters, we faced a hefty bill for archive rights that needed to be paid if our film was ever to be seen outside festivals.
We had a US television distributor already on board and we had had offers from the likes ofESPN and others. The problem was that the financial realities didn’t stack up – even with Universal. Television fees for acquisitions, as opposed to outright commissions, are much lower but the costs of acquiring Frazier v Ali fight archive rights remain the same.
However, there was one offer that had caught our eye. It was from the US online platform Hulu. With some 30m+ monthly users and partnerships with some of America’s most heavyweight media companies, including the likes of Fox and Disney, we knew that they were an emerging and important player in online content. We also knew that the Banksy film ‘Exit through the gift shop’ had had its US ‘broadcast’ premier on the site and, although Hulu keeps much of its revenue generation close to its chest, it had apparently been a big success.
There were certainly risks involved for us, it meant taking a revenue share arrangement rather than a set fee, but the archive clearance for online was much lower and we felt that our film could have the type of ‘long-tail’ that would benefit from the deal Hulu were proposing.
Normally, Hulu like producers to go through content ‘aggregators’, companies like Snag Films and Film Buff, who provide a lot of content for the site. However, in this case, as a rare exception, because they saw an opportunity to gain an exclusive with our film, they were prepared to deal with us directly. They offered to make our title their first ever ‘documentary of the month’ and promote it for Black History month, which is February in the US.
So we did the deal and Hulu did indeed promote the film heavily. We were there most popular doc title for the first six weeks of our run, which wasn’t bad when you see the calibre of many of the projects they have. However, despite the title’s seeming popularity, I would say that initial revenue expectations were somewhat under what we had been pitched.
That said, money was being generated and it shows that an online platform, which in our case was showing the title as ‘Free Video on Demand’, could create ad-funded revenue. And it was certainly vastly better than any other online option. The film is still up there and Hulu have again pushed the title on the homepage this month, which coincides with ESPNpremiering the title across Europe. They are always looking to tie into any buzz that may exist around a specific project.
Perhaps online income will never match the big budgets of TV’s halcyon days but over the course of our two year deal, I’m confident that Hulu will prove to be the right choice for our film. And the fact that we were still able to do an international television deal with ESPN, thanks to their ownership of the most expensive archive, means that the film will have many lives anyway.
Indeed, online needn’t cannibalise other opportunities – we have also just released the film on DVD through Amazon’s Createspace, as there still exists a DVD market for this type of project – and a different one than uses Hulu.
The film may have taken us four years and pushed us to the financial and emotional edge but in the end, with the positive critical coverage we’ve had and the online life the film will continue to have, it has definitely been worthwhile…just!
This blog was featured in the Creative Times on 09 July 2012
