According to Bloomberg, Netflix has sold out of it's Roku set top box which streams digital movies from its library to the TV screen. Only recently Netflix started allowing high quality digital downloads of some of the content in their library, and now the Roku set top box is part of an extended strategy to make that media library available across multiple platforms. Since lesser known and independent content has always done rather well on the Netflix, has this opened another door for indies to get their content into the living room?

This may be a coup for potential market penetration for indies, but let's not forget Akimbo, which I wrote about earlier, who also had a set top box specifically geared to stream indie content to users. While I think they were ahead of their time, there does come a big problem with delivering to users content they never heard of, don't know about, and therefore don't want to watch.



Netflix has made indie titles available for years and I know some indies who have had some success there. I'm talking about these $10,000 budget, urban, hip-hop, gangster films shot on a Canon XL-1, not anything big. The thing to still consider, though, is what you, as an independent content creator, are offering the viewer.

Indie content on Netflix means competing against rentals of Iron Man and Indiana Jones 4. One of the reasons these super low budget films can do well is because there are people who are tired of the monotony coming from Hollywood, but that is not to say that name doesn't matter.

One of the things these super low budget movies will do is get some halfway known rapper to show up for an hour, shoot a quick scene, and then stick him and his name on the box cover. Even so, these movies are delivered on Netflix, cable TV channels, DVD and sold in foreign markets, and they might make a couple hundred thousand dollars. Not bad if you spent $10,000 to make it in a week. But the actual creators are fortunate if they get double or triple their production budget as a return. As a result, many producers in this field literally make two or even three movies per month. It's true "long tail" content creation and distribution in action.

Now this scale really doesn't help those who create animation. I don't know of any system, not even the most horridly simple Flash animation, that can allow feature length production on that kind of schedule. The real key, though, is realizing and understanding that you still have to deliver content that fast and that often.

Tags: DVD, movies

The tides of digital content creation and delivery are quickly shifting. Major Hollywood studios have been playing it safe in the online content realm and possibly with good reason. The writer's strike over internet revenue is largely because of the often heard statement from the studios, "No one knows where it's going. No one knows what kind of money there is to be made." A few brave souls, however, have tried to stake their claim in the field of online revenue and digital content delivery. Some of them, unfortunately, have not made it out of the game unscathed.

Akimbo was an ahead-of-it's-time idea to deliver "long tail" digital content via a set top box to user's TV screens. According to GigaOm, "The company had initially started out offering niche content via progressive downloads using a special set-top box. The box didn’t fly..." After this Akimbo tried to shift gears focusing on selling their niche content library to other companies. That didn't exactly fly either. So Akimbo is no more. They have close their doors.



Another service aimed at delivering indie content has also shifted gears. Jaman initially started on the basis of selling downloads and rentals of their content library, they are now adopting ad supported streaming as another revenue stream. This may or may not be a sign of them giving up on selling downloads and rentals, but it certainly has been difficult to get users to hand over their credit card information in a world of massive amounts of free content.

I can't say that I haven't felt the pinch myself in some of my online content endeavors. Anyone who reads a lot of tech news can see that things have been, for some time, and are continuing to shift towards being free. I have chosen to make the switch on my own iPhone Alchemy website, where all comics are now, and will be from henceforth, free. As digital content proliferates online and practically anything becomes available at the touch of a button, even on a mobile device, the value of that content inevitably drops to zero. The value, then, turns to how many eyeballs are viewing that content.

This is something every content creator needs to seriously think about as they create their show, their website and their relationships with their viewers. How are you delivering what you have created? In what format? What will be the incentive for someone to actually buy your product as opposed to moving over to the next site where Hollywood produced TV shows and movies are free? How you deliver could be the key to whether or not your content gets watched by an instant gratification seeking audience. That will be the key to whether or not you generate any revenue at all.

Tags: digital, Hollywood

The ability for one artist to create their own animated film without major studio backing or millions of dollars doesn't come by following conventions. Convention, after all, says it can't be done. Those of us with a dream, however, know better. Still, there comes a time when the right tool must be chosen for the right. The key is knowing when the right tool is what is dictated by convention versus making the tools you have into the right tool.

We all know that success comes not by waiting for the right tool, but by doing what you can with the tools you have. One of the tools I have is Vue 6 Infinite. It has allowed me to make tremendous leaps in the quality of images I can create, especially in my favorite genre, which is fantasy. No tool can do it all though, and sometimes, even though achieving your project goals with fewer tools may be the most efficient way, not using the best tool for the job can begin to hinder progress.

I was working on putting together an interior set using Vue. The pieces I needed to builded were in the Vue format and I had planned a very particular way of rendering the final images, something easily done in Vue. The software's strong point, though, really isn't pushing around millions, or even hundreds of thousands of real polygons. I say real polygons because, used properly, Vue can push billions. When dealing with actual 3D objects though, especially those from another source, things can slow down very quickly. When my construction reached about 300,000 polygons in the scene, things came to a crawl. When I tried to duplicate part of the set, it was all over. It was crash time.



I eventually plodded through it and got the set done and all the necessary images rendered, but in retrospect, it would have been better to open VUe, export the pieces I needed and build everything in another software package. This, however, is as much an issue of my limited computing power as it is one of software. Still, when I working on this, someone said to me, "Vue is for doing outdoors." It is true, that is its primary focus, but that is not say you won't find some incredible interior architectural renders in their gallery. Not only that, as I mentioned earlier, I was attempting to render a very specific kind of image, which Vue does very well. I will explain that in detail in my next Anigen video.

In the end, you need to know all of the options available in the tools you have. If I did, I may have found a more efficient way to achieve my task without the headache, and save time. When using Vue's incredible instancing technology, it is a dream to work with, and everything flies. When dealing with lots of real geometry, though, sometimes it's better to go with a dedicated polygon pushing application.

Tags: Art