Jaman CEO Gaurav Dhillon: Building a Marketplace for Indie Movies
I'm posting the video of a portion of our chat here. It is very much geared to filmmakers who might be considering using Jaman for their films. Below the video are some of my notes from the non-recorded part of our conversation.
Some notes:
- Jaman's split is 70/30, with the filmmaker getting the 30 percent. That's a smaller cut than other sites offer, like Brightcove, EZTakes, Lulu and Grapeflix, for example.
- But Gaurav emphasizes that the site has done a lot of high profile marketing at events like the Tribeca Film Festival and Cannes, and that the community they build around their catalog of films will help lead users from one movie download to another.
- One cool feature: allowing viewers to "blog inside a movie," leaving comments and questions that other viewers can read as a movie plays, attached to specific scenes.
- Gaurav says they don't support downloading content to a portable device; they're more interested in getting onto set-top boxes like AppleTV right now.
- They also don't support DVD burning; Gaurav says that "a good percentage don't burn right or just won't play."
- Movies on Jaman aren't quite HD. They've got fewer than 720 horizontal pixels, but they're better than DVD. The file of one movie Gaurav used as a demo, "Agua," was compressed to just 1.3 gigabytes.
- Some of his favorite movies on the service: 'Yank Tanks,' 'An Uzi at the Alamo,' 'Stoned,' and Hirokazu Koreeda's 'After Life.'
- I suggested that one way to get other sites pointing users to Jaman movies (you can already embed links to movie trailers) would be to offer an affiliate program, where those sites would get a cut of any resulting movie rentals or downloads. Gaurav seemed open to that idea -- but it isn't on the near-term radar.
- Jaman's movie files are wrapped in their own flavor of DRM, but Gaurav says that if Apple would license its FairPlay DRM, he'd do that deal in a second. Windows DRM, on the other hand, is "buggy and crash-prone," he says, "and the rules that are imposed are fairly arbitrary."
Labels: digital distribution, digital downloads, Gaurav Dhillion, Jaman
1 Comments:
Jaman has a nice interface and the image quality is good, but the organization of content is poor.
I did a search for the most downloaded film in North America. The search came up with "Amargosa" as #1 with about 700 views and "Destination Banglore" as #3 with over twice that. My film has more hits than both put together and doesn't even show up on the list! And 70/30 split? That's terrible!
By strangeframe, at 8:47 PM
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