Indee.TV - an alternate destination to discover content

According to IMDB, over 21,000 films (legit enough to get a listing on IMDB) were made in 2006. Of these less than 2% received any type of distribution. Ever wondered where those amazing shorts, film festival darlings and cult-favorites go away after their limited half-life?

There are several new offerings that attempt to deal with this problem and a need for an alternative market for launching, promoting and distributing indie content. Some examples are IndieGoGo (which was founded by my friends Danae Ringelmann and Slava Rubin and of which I am an early and happy customer), The Auteurs (which Edward King, a friend of mine works for), Jaman etc.

Indee.TV is a cool new entrant in this space, that is founded by my friend Sharan Reddy. I joined the board as an independent director some months ago. Since launching in February, the site has 500+ short and independently made features uploaded or embedded on the site.

The value to filmmakers is three-fold:

- Drive community around their work. Users "rave" for their films and this bubbles their film to the top, not unlike what Digg does for news.

- Finding talent and collaborators for future projects. Think IMDBPro meets Facebook, where you can network with the editor or cameraman of another film you see, and interact directly.

- Getting your film screened. The second such special screening of shorts happened at SWIG in San francisco this past weekend, in conjunction with Natalie Portman's company MakingOf, IndieGoGo and TheAuteurs.

As someone with a technology background interested in digital filmmaking, it's great to see these brave new companies make hard-to-find content accessible, curate them and deliver it (mostly for free) to consumers.

There have been interesting companies which were all Generation 1.0 services for content creators - JumpCut (since discontinued by yahoo), WithoutABox (THE definitive film festival submission tool), Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB come to mind. Should be interesting to see how these Generation 2.0 companies evolve and how this impacts consumers' overall movie-going experience!

UPDATE: Feedback from those who read this... other companies that were successful Gen 1.0 services include iFilm (acquired by MTV), CinemaNow (now part of Sonic Solutions), AtomFilms (also owned by MTV/Comedy Central), MovieLink (since acquired by Blockbuster) and the Morgan Freeman promoted ClickStar.