The votes have been tabulated, and based on the results from our last webinar we’re happy to announce our second webinar.

Title: Search Engine Optimization for the Film and Video Licensing Industry
Date: Thursday, December 6th, 2007
Morning Session: 8:30 AM EST (UTC/GMT -5)
Afternoon session: 5:00 PM EST (UTC/GMT -5)
Duration: 30 minutes
Cost: Free

This webinar will explore the benefits and challenges of Search Engine Optimization: the art and science of drawing qualified traffic to your website. Search engine expert Jordi Duran i Batidor, will offers tips, tricks, and hints to help film and video property rights holders expand their web presence.

Click here to register

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.

More than a few participants of our November 15th Webinar asked us about e-mail marketing software, particularly that very attractive variety: the free kind.  Top drawer tools like Listrak and Campaigner aren’t exactly cheap, but give you the peace of mind of technical support (though, for example, Listrak does not offer it 24-7). 

If you are adventurous enough to trust your campaign to free ’Open Source‘ software, you’ll be intereted in OpenEMM.  Our CTO is really excited about it, and claims it’s very powerful and very robust.  I’ll let you know what we discover.

One of our participants was also nice enough to direct our attention to another free tool called PHPList, which looks worth checking out.

E-mail me at info@ipextv.tv if you have any comments you’d like me to share, or better yet, if you tried any free tools out and you have a story—cautionary, or otherwise.

Thanks to everyone who attended our online seminar “E-marketing Strategies for the Film and Video Licensing Industry.” It was truly our pleasure to host the event, and your feedback has been extremely positive and gratifying.  We will be announcing the next webinar, and our guest speaker, next week. Stay tuned to this blog...and for those who missed the event, check back regularly: we will be posting some of the tips, tricks, and analysis we discussed in Thursday’s webinar right here.

Please note: Webinar participants will be receiving an e-mail this weekend with a PDF summary.

This is a weekly post showcasing a film festival we think should be on the radar of international buyers, and on the submission list of rights-holders looking to reach out to new audiences.

The Barbados International Film Festival will be hosting its inaugural festival from December 5th-9th 2007. It will be an annual celebration of film, both in and out of competition, showcasing the very best of filmmakers and storytellers of the world for the audience of the world.  A great mix of local and global, new indie and classic festival fare--oh yes, and the beach--makes this one festival to keep a close eye on.

Obviously it’s a great venue for a festival...but even more important than the beach is its geographical location. BIFF is literally in the perfect spot to bridge the gap between North American film festival audiences and Latin American and Caribbean cinema.  BIFF’s dream of a vibrant mixture of classic, independent, world renowned, and regional cinema says a lot about the globalization of content.  It’s a festival on the threshold, and if you happen to be in Barbados this December, it’s an amazing chance to get close to paradise: a major international film fest, still on a human scale...and walking distance from the beach.

We’re very happy to be hosting a webinar on Thursday, November 15th, 2007.  Everyone is invited.

Title: E-marketing Strategies for the Film and Video Licensing Industry
Date: Thursday, November 15th, 2007
Time: 8:30am EST (UTC/GMT -5) and 1:30 PM EST (UTC/GMT -5)
Cost: Free

The first in a series of webinars examining the online opportunities available to the film and video licensing industry, this webinar explores the buzz around ‘holistic’ digital marketing and how it applies to a B2B industry like ours.

We’re hosting two sessions, one for Europe and one for North America.  The webinar will be in English, and we invite you to pick whichever session is most convenient for you.

Click here for more details and for instructions on how to register. 

IPEX TV had a very successful trip to MIPCOM 2007 this year.  It doesn’t seem possible that people can be so busy yet so eager to be friendly.  It was a crazy week in Cannes (video is forthcoming).

In the mean time, we wanted to offer you a link to some of the titles currently on IPEX TV which were showcased at MIPCOM and which you may have missed.  Happy browsing.

Click here for the MIPCOM 2007 list.

This is a weekly post showcasing a film festival we think should be on the radar of international buyers, and on the submission list of rights-holders looking to reach out to new audiences.

The Urban Mediamakers Film Festival, held in Atlanta, GA, USA (October 12-15, 2007) is a three-day event that promotes and supports a strong, diverse independent media arts community emphasizing the work of a diverse group of people—in the United States and abroad.  A community conscious approach, an eye to promoting indie values and commercial opportunities, passionate volunteers, and an adventurous audience makes UMFF, now in its seventh year, a model of what a grassroots festival is all about.

Winners this year include a selection of Fiction, Documentary, and Shorts. JACOB, an astonishing 25’ short film, tells the story of Eli, a young father, and a minority, searching for his missing son amidst a media frenzy focused on the disappearance of young Caucasian boy.  JACOB asks pointed questions about all of America’s missing children.

This is an issue that is slowly gaining visibility.

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.”