We’re celebrating the IPEX VIEW Blog’s 11 month anniversary (good a reason as any) with a look back at some of our favourite articles.  Enjoy!

The Film Licensing Professional’s Guide to the Blogosphere: A directory of film blogs

Independent Film Marketing: 5 Tips to Impress Film Buyers

Looking for Film Buyers? 5 steps to secure indie film distribution

Sweding, Sweded Videos, and Viral Marketing

Sundance Film Festival: Trends and Insights

Sell Sheet & One Sheet Sampler

Five Common E-mail Marketing Mistakes That Film Distributors and Producers Need to Avoid

Film/Video Distributors and Producers: Make Sure You Know These Nine SEO Recommendations

The concept: every month, 1 film selected from submissions all over the world, under one minute, and a grand champion announced at the end of the year. Check out SWEEPER, the winner for March. "Astonishing" is a good word for it. You've got a minute to spare to see something astonishing, don't you?

Renderyard 1 minute Film Festival

The situation between longtime frenemies the Geeks and Hollywood heat up in 2008.  Never before has a Hollywood slate catered so vigorously to the tastes of filmgoers of the comic con, fantasy, and sci-fi set. Sure, the geeks are bad on downloading movies (they’re downloading some right now) but they are also an audience: a real live film audience that goes to the theaters and will pay money just to see how badly Hollywood has screwed up their favourite franchise.  Even better, their extracurricular hobbies, such as blogging like mad about films that interest them, have basically acted as a template for how Hollywood has come to understand online marketing.

So here’s to you geeks and here’s to Hollywood.

Let’s take a look at some of the upcoming big geek films with breakdowns, ratings, and embedded trailers!

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"‘Geek Films’ Dominate Hollywood Slate in 2008: But Will Any of Them Be Any Good?"

When I was invited to start blogging for IPEX, most of my film reading came from the trades: Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, IMDb Pro, Worldscreen, and C21, with the odd issue of Film Comment or Cahiers du cinema thrown in when I found the time to feel cultured. Over the last month, I’ve really enjoyed the chance to catch up on the state of online film blogging and am pleased to report that it’s a wild and woolly world out there with a lot of gems and really cutting edge information if you know where to look.  This week, I’m happy to present a satisfactorily comprehensive directory of film blogs, categorized under headings that make sense to me.

Coming soon: I get all Andrew Sarris on the list and offer my top picks, and top picks for industry professionals who are looking for the kind of alternative industry perspective blogs can provide.

Have I missed your blog?  I’d love to visit it, so please leave me a comment.

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"The Film Professional’s Guide to the Blogosphere: A directory of film blogs"

In 2007, retail behemoth Wal-Mart announced it was bringing in HD-DVD players made in China that would be retailing for around $200. In a nutshell, Wal-Mart’s support of HD seemed to be ringing the death knell for Blu-Ray. However, in a somewhat surprising turn-around, over the last month a number of studios jumped ship, Wal-Mart’s ship that is, and backed the great Blu-Way, leading to Best Buy and then Wal-Mart’s decision to also go Blu.

The odd thing here is that it seems Wal-Mart might have caved to studio pressure on this one, which would be a momentous role reversal indeed. Wal-Mart is used to calling the shots. Oh, well, war does strange things to a man. And, apparently, to America’s Most Massive, and possibly asinine, retail outlet.

Swe·ding (swee'ding) 1. verb. To express your love for something by imitating it in a way that is obviously an imitation. Especially the act of a fan remaking a beloved film with no budget. 2. noun. A marketing campaign from New Line Cinema for the Michel Gondry directed film Be Kind Rewind.

Alison at IFC Blog was kind enough to help us get the word's origins straight:


Gondry's film is about a couple of hapless VHS Video Store clerks who have to swede the inventory of their store in order to keep product on the shelves after a massive tape demagnetization mishap. The film has taken sweding one step further by using the sweding practice in all aspects of the film’s viral marketing campaign: Gondry swedes the film's own trailers, Youtube users are invited to swede scenes of their film favs on Be Kind Rewind's YouTube channel, and the film’s website stages a breakdown of the Internet and quickly swedes a site.

Sweding is basically remaking with no dollars. With a lot of love, duct tape, and well, that's about it. The joy of sweding is the gap between the lack of resources available to the sweder and the sweder's tremendous love for what is being sweded. Anyone can pay tribute with a budget; sweding is paying tribute despite the fact you don’t have a budget. That's true love.

While Gondry might be the first to put a name to this phenomenon, the practice has been around for awhile, and, if the New Line Cinema marketing team has their way, it will reach critical mass in 2008. Who are some notable sweding pioneers? Keep reading...

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"Viral Film Marketing: A Brief History Of ‘Sweding’"

The National Film Board of Canada is schlepping an excellent slate of films to Park City this week including the absolutely gorgeous short animated film Madame Tutli-Putli. This hand crafted stunner was licensed at MIPCOM '08 to Canal + France, ARTE, and Switzerland's TSR. Already a winner at last year's Cannes Film Festival, this crowd favourite is sure to bring attention to the many other worthy NFB produced films playing this year at Sundance. These films, created with pure passion and commitment, represent some of the finest results socially conscious government funded arts can produce.

Take a look at this clip of Madame to get the cinephilic juices flowing, and check out some of the great coverage of Sundance 2008.




Madame Tutli-Putli - Distributed by The National Film Board of Canada


NEWS FLASH: The National Film Board of Canada's UP THE YANGTZE is the official first sale at Sundance 2008. It was acquired by Zeitgeist, for release in April.

Esteemed and often peeved Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has done the heavy lifting, and here are the numbers he’s crunched from Film Comment‘s Annual List of films played theatrically in the United States:

Major studios released 119 films

Specialty divisions of major studios released 49 more

Independent distributors were behind nearly 500

Films playing at Festivals accounted for the remaining 1,600-plus titles

Total: 2,400 titles

With that many films, of course, it’s impossible to see them all.  That makes the anointed best of the year either really impressive, or not impressive at all.

[Source Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Year End Piece from the Chicago Reader.  Yes, Mr. Rosenbaum plans to retire from film reviewing at the end of February 2008 and we wish him well. A truly great critic and a tireless prospector for the rarest of cinematic gems.]

Congratulations to our development team! Those tireless and cheerful wizards of code have managed to add one more new IPEX TV feature before the holiday break, one we know you’re really going to like. 

Registered buyers and sellers can now import all or some of their contacts from Outlook 2004/2007 and Outlook Express directly into their IPEX TV account.  A few simple-to-follow steps, and you can have your complete sales list at your finger tips.  Need to prepare for a tradeshow?  Blast digital sell sheets, including trailers, to your entire contact list with just a few clicks.  Maybe you’re a buyer and you want to inform multiple members of your team about some great new titles you’ve found. Perfectly formatted IPEX TV e-mails: easy on the eyes, easy to send, a pleasure to receive.

Feel free to contact us at support@ipextv.tv if you have any questions about this new service, or if you would like a tour of the system.

It’s been an exciting and eye-opening 2007 here at IPEX TV and we’re all looking forward to an even more rewarding 2008.  The web industry moves very fast, so you cover a lot of ground when you want to stay up in front.  We’ve come a long way in one short year and we want to thank our colleagues, partners, friends, and families for their support.

What’s ahead? Our platform has matured into the most robust and user friendly film and video content marketplace on the web.  We are looking forward to working even closer with all of our colleagues and clients to help meet head-on the uncertain but exciting changes our industry faces. Production, delivery, marketing, artwork, distribution, and licensing: everything is changing; everywhere there are new opportunities.

5 New Year’s Resolutions

1. Bring you the best and most cost effective film and video content marketing services in the industry.

2. Do more to help our clients understand how the traditional meets the cutting edge.

3. Keep developing new digital tools to serve you better.

4. Bring our community even more news and commentary about film festivals around the world.

5. Help even more independent producers access the licensing industry.

There. That should keep us busy.

All the best from all of us here at IPEX TV. 

Have a successful, inspiring, and rewarding 2008!

The first session of our latest webinar, SEO Strategies for the Film and Video Industry, with guest speaker Jordi Duran i Batidor, just finished and we’re sorting through the feedback and questions.  Thanks again to everyone who attended. 

We won’t have the presentation ready for download until tomorrow, but in the meantime, we did want to answer one question right away: how do you submit your site to search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN?

As Patrick pointed out at the beginning of the webinar, only 7% of sites are actually visible to search engines.  There are a number of things you need to do to make sure that search engines first know you exist...then you can start worrying about Page Rank.

The first thing to do is to submit your site.

Here are the links to the submission page for four major search engines:

Google
http://www.google.com/addurl/

and make sure you checkout other great Google tools
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Yahoo
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

dmoz
http://www.dmoz.org/add.html

MSN Live
http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

If you have a blog (and Jordi’s offered many compelling reasons why you should) make sure you submit your blog to blog specific search tools like

Technorati
http://technorati.com/

and blog post promotion sites like

FeedBurner
http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/blogs

IPEX TV Festival Central, launched this week, is an evolving resource, a new space to help both buyers discover films garnering festival buzz, and rights holders discover great new venues for their work.  Film Festivals have become a key player in helping content travel not just to the big screen, but around the world.  As it becomes easier to move content across borders, new and exciting opportunities open up for buyers and sellers.

We first launched the IPEX TV video trailer marketplace to serve the traditional film and video licensing industry—the crowd of professionals you will meet at tradeshows like MIPCOM and NATPE.  Since then, we’ve been approached by a number of independent content creators and rights holders interested in using our service to break into the industry.  The licensing industry has been fairly closed to self-distributing indies, but the web is helping change things.  We are very happy to offer indies a chance to get in front of registered buyers on IPEX TV through our free Sell Sheet Broadcaster tool.  We’d love to hear from you if you have any ideas about new features you’d like to see on IPEX TV.

If you have any comments, or you have a festival you think should be featured on Festival Central, e-mail me at info@ipextv.tv.

Earlier today I posted a note on HD technology.  The fact is, that even as prices come down, it is ultimately content that will drive consumer adoption, and, naturally, license buyers are on the look out for HD in a big way. Vanguard buyers like Discovery Channel HD are setting the pace, and we are more than happy to help industry buyers like them discover what international content providers are offering. Watch this blog as we work to welcome the best HD content in the world to the web.

The website is only going to be up for two weeks, but that’s long enough for Akamai’s HDWEB to make a simple point.  The web can deliver HD content.  It’s still expensive and it still requires some powerful hardware, but HD over IP will be coming a lot sooner than many people in the industry expected.

The technology is finally just about right.  NBC Sports head David Neal, predicts NBC’s 2008 Summer Olympics HD broadcast “will be a signature moment for the adoption of high-definition as a mainstream delivery medium for consumers” (source: Broadcasting & Cable).  He goes on to predict that over 50% of U.S. households will have an HDTV set in 2008.  Even if this is wishful thinking, HD TV is clearly on the verge of a tipping point.  The technology is moving rapidly from luxury item, to cool toy, to “the only way to watch sports at home.”

It’s been a little quiet here on the IPEX TV blog.  That’s about to change. 

We love hearing from you.  E-mail us at info@ipextv.tv.