M+E Daily

Media and entertainment companies, including those who produce award shows, must put measures in place to “future-proof” their businesses, according to media services provider Vision Media and Film Independent, the nonprofit Los Angeles arts organization that produces the annual Film Independent Spirit Awards.

Like many agencies, distributors and studios, Film Independent was challenged over the past few years to find tools to support its awards efforts and turned to Vision Media for flexible and secure streaming services.

“We’re here to talk about the transition from physical to digital,” Jason Deadrich, CTO of Vision Media, said Sept. 21 at the Entertainment Evolution Symposium (EES), during the Workflow, Awards & Insights breakout session “Future-Proof Your Business: the Transition from Physical to Digital Awards with Vision Media and Film Independent.”

Deadrich pointed out that Film Independent “made the decision to transition away from a more traditional physical method of distributing content,” noting that meant physically shipping boxes of DVDs in the past.

That translated to many boxes because there were typically more than 30 nominees and as many as 50 now when also including TV, according to Evan Ward-Henninger, director of membership at Film Independent. That sometimes meant an individual voter could get 50 DVDs in the mail, he added.

“Obviously” that was “kind of a big pain point for people that just don’t want clutter in their mail,” Deadrich noted.

He asked Ward-Henninger to discuss what made Film Independent to decide it wanted to move away from the physical space into digital.

There were “many reasons” for the shift, according to Ward-Henninger, “the first being we’re a nonprofit organization and we had many challenges from a financial standpoint of delivering the DVDs to so many of our voters.”

Film Independent also had  a “strong desire to make it a more equitable experience for our nominees because our nominees come from studio films that have been distributed by larger studios with big budgets to kind of your mom and pop like filmmaker who made a film and distributed on their own,” Ward-Henninger said.

“We wanted to create an equitable experience for our nominees so that they could get their nominated titles in the hands of our voters, just like the ones that had the money to send them,” according to Ward-Henninger.

DVDs, at a certain point, “just became unsustainable for that space,” he said, adding: “We also wanted accessibility” and realized that the optical disc was “not going to be a thing that we could really stay with [and] we wanted something that was more nimble and something we could grow with.”

There was also a cost issue, he said, noting DVDs had to be produced for 7,000- 8,000 members.

For a filmmaker who’s just financed their own project and self-distributed it, it’s “just almost impossible to consider doing that kind of a mailing in the award season,” he added.

“So we wanted to create a scenario where they could pay a flat fee” and, also, “we wanted sort of a holistic voter experience and I think that the digital space created that,” he said.

The Entertainment Evolution Symposium (EES) was presented by the Pepperdine Graziadio Business School Institute for Entertainment, Media and Sports (IEMS) and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS)  and was sponsored by Iron Mountain, Signiant, Whip Media, Atos, Fortinet, FPT Software, invenioLSI, Perforce, Vision Media, and EIDR.