Synopsis: Popular independent film projects like the Outbreak continue to search for monetization alternatives in the face of thousands of dollars in bandwidth and hosting costs. YouTube might still be their best option. (For a complete transcript of the interview with the Outbreak's producer Lynn Lund, see Interview: SilkTricky's Lynn Lund Talks About 'The Outbreak' Interactive Film.)
"Build it and they will come” may have worked for W.P. Kinsella, but for indie filmmakers trying to leverage the Web, it’s more like, “Build it and they will come, and your children’s children will pay for all the bandwidth they use.” Admittedly, Kinsella’s version has a little more panache.
In September 2008, SilkTricky, a Portland interactive studio that specializes in online and interactive entertainment, launched the Outbreak, a full-screen, choose-your-own-adventure styled interactive zombie film. They wrote it, produced it, and directed it. They also distributed it using the video platform their fortune 500 clients like Nike, Coca-Cola and Lexus utilize for much of their video content: the Internet.
The Outbreak was original. It was interactive. And it was widely popular. SilkTricky won award after award, including the FWA, which is known for pushing waves of traffic to featured sites. All told, close to a million people gobbled it up; a viral marketing triumph by any measure for the pocket studio, and a case study in autonomous storytelling, free of broadcast TV and film studio meddling, with massive exposure and no middlemen.
It was the entertainment Internet fully realized. They built it – built something pretty awesome, that is – and people came in droves. But they didn’t come without a price.
Eight months after launch, the project is no longer available for mass consumption – minus a dinky YoutTube version (see below). The reason: bandwidth costs.
Put aside for a moment the internal costs that a boutique design studio or maddened creator racks up in producing original production of a consumable magnitude (for the Outbreak, figure three months full-time for the writer/director/producer team, plus a system admin, a Flash guy, and hard costs for actors, props, equipment, etc., and it’s easily into the hundreds of thousands of dollars). The real killer, as endless lines of bankrupt indie filmmakers will attest, is ‘out-of-pocket’ expenses.
“We've been spending anywhere from $500 per month to $4,500 per month, depending on the traffic,” claimed Lynn Lund, Producer at SilkTricky. “As you can imagine, it adds up. We've spent about $20,000 in hosting alone since we launched in September [2008]. Since we funded this project out of our own pockets, it's been tough to keep the site afloat.”
To be clear, this isn’t a relevant discussion for film/video content centered on dancing monkeys, drunken stair falls or backyard wrestling (all good stuff though). This is for pro, or at the very least, aspiring pro, albeit independent quality consumer content. It can be made relatively cheaply by someone who knows how and has the right connections. It cannot, however cheaply made, be distributed cheaply, unless you’re a company staring with “g” and ending in “oogle.”
For Lund, the equation was simple. “With the economy as it is and no means to monetize what we did with the Outbreak, we had to find a way to save some money so that we could put it towards a new project … we had to pull the plug.”