I run a small film festival in Montana. We show 25 films, of varying lengths, over 3 days in April, but because of COVID, we had to postpone this year’s festival until October. Even with our safety measures, there are people who either can’t or won’t attend a live event, so we would like to offer an online alternative where someone could pay to watch a block of films. I spoke with Vimeo and they want $12-15K to set something like that up so we can monetize it, which is more than our entire annual budget. Is there a low-cost streaming service anyone has used that we might be able to work with?
I don’t have an immediate answer, but I know that one of our regional film festivals in Indianapolis (Indy Shorts International Film Festival) showed some of their films at the local drive-in, and had them streaming on their website (I thought I heard on the radio that they used something with Roku, but I can’t find anything about it). You may want to contact them directly to see how they did it.
Can you allow rentals of individual films? If so, Vimeo on demand might be more affordable than whatever they were trying to sell you: Sell your videos online and worldwide | Vimeo On Demand
I also attended a virtual conference today using Hopin, though I’m not sure of their pricing structure: https://hopin.to/
Zoom Webinar is another option, and you can combine it with Eventbrite to sell tickets: https://zoom.us/webinar
Vimeo Pro is only $200 a year and allows you to upload 5gb a week (the total is unlimited, but you have to be careful about spreading it out if you’ve got a lot) with unlimited views, and I believe their business level is only twice that with unlimited uploads. You could do what we do with our online courses: embed the video elsewhere, either onto a password protected website or in a basic online course. We actually use Vimeo because our online course platform charges $40/gb for storage, so it’s far cheaper to embed the videos into the course.
True, you’d have to find another way to collect the funds if you didn’t use Vimeo’s ability to, but I’m positive you could find a workaround for far less than 12k.
This is a pretty specific question; I expect only a very few, if any, posters here have managed online film festivals. But Googling, I found that Eventive does this sort of thing. You might be able to do this on YouTube. Or there is this list of platforms.
I contacted a half dozen companies, included Vimeo and YouTube, but most were far more expensive than we could afford. It looks like Eventive is the best company around to work with. We’ll have to see if they have everything we need.
By reaching out, what do you mean? Are you asking them to come and film it all for you in addition to just streaming pre-made videos?
I’m only looking for a place to stream the films and be able to charge for it.
This isn’t clear to me, but do you realize those companies (or at least Vimeo) offer different products at different price points? Their pro and on demand offers seem much more affordable, for example.
Was there some nuance we didn’t understand that necessitated the much more expensive $12k version?