Dear Tonyboy Cojuangco, maybe it’s time to replace your old-school focus group.
During the CinemalayaX awards night held recently at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, the businessman who had been using his personal money to prop up the 10-year-old independent film festival lamented Cinemalay’s sustainability, fearing that it is in danger of zero growth.
“We are facing a situation that is approaching a plateau although we have grown geometrically over the past 10 years. It will reach a plateau because of the physical constraints of the number of theaters and CCP,” explains Cojuangco.
“As soon as we reach the capacity of theaters, that’s your limit. Unfortunately, we are nearing that capacity and we are still subsidizing the festival,” he adds.
To solve this problem, the businessman formed a focus group and one of its recommendations was to “go beyond physical structures and go online.”
But that didn’t turn out well: filmmakers raised their arms in protest when Cinemalaya posted their full-length films to YouTube, allegedly without their permission.
Cinemalaya officials maintain that the contract signed by 2012 and 2013 winners give the film festival digital rights to the movies. Nevertheless, it has removed the YouTube posts. Both Cinemalaya and the filmmakers have called for dialogues.
Cojuangco thought of making the videos available for free on YouTube in order to entice and hook a new market of indie film lovers, the same way, he says, that telcos offered SMS for free when it was still new and started charging a peso per text only after users grew dependent on the technology.
Yawn. Old school.
Eventually, Cinemalaya would have charged for people to view those films.
Another option would have been to partner with Amazon, but that would have required more capital.
“If I uploaded to Amazon, it will have cost me US$8,000. Okay, Amazon would charge $2 per film but which films would I upload? There are 250 films right now in our library. If we decided to just show some of the films, then the filmmakers will ask us, ‘how did you choose the film, what was your basis’. So it’s really an all-or-nothing situation, either we upload everything or none at all,” says Cojuangco.
In the meantime, while his focus group was busy brainstorming commercial solutions to a non-mainstream problem, an innovative digital solutions provider in Singapore has built TaraNoodTayo.TV, a website that currently has 23 movie titles in its database—including Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros and Tribu, both produced with Cinemalaya funding.
The films are available for a year and at least 20 more movies will be added to the site by the end of August.
Since its launch on July 20, there have been 700 registrations with at least 10 per cent of that buying movies, according to Singapore-based Advent Integra Solutions.
Registered users must purchase a minimum US$10 credit. They can buy a movie for US$1 and view it as many times within a 24-hour period. Most of the videos are in high definition format, but the website adjusts the resolution according to the viewer’s bandwidth connection so that the movie streams as seamlessly as possible.
Now, why didn’t Cojuangco’s focus group think of that?
