The Industry Conference on TIFF Day 6 featured presentations  focused on the challenges and issues facing the film distribution market today. Here are some highlights from three of the five panels.

Vimeo’s Jeremy Boxer on the benefits of direct distribution 

The statistics are daunting, according to Vimeo creative director Jeremy Boxer.

Only 40 movies come into the Toronto International with a distribution deal signed with a studio specialty division like Fox Searchlight or Sony Pictures Classics, or an arthouse distributor like Magnolia or IFC. The rest of the TIFF lineup is in varying stages of their “distribution strategy,” Boxer told an industry panel on direct-to-fan distribution on Wednesday.

So Vimeo arrived at TIFF this week with an innovative offer to raise the debate over traditional vs. self-distribution: the offer of 30 days of online exclusivity on the Vimeo on Demand platform for a $10,000 distribution advance, to producers with world premiere titles at Toronto.

“The main concept is to enable flexibility, so we give filmmakers the choice of having a single film or series to be sold, whether sold as a buy or rent option,” Boxer told the TIFF panel.

A host of films debuting in Toronto already have distribution in place. But that’s not stopping Boxer from touting the benefits of direct distribution on Vimeo on Demand, including allowing a filmmaker to set their pricing and geographic location to reach a potentially global audience.

Gathr founder Scott Glosserman also pitched his web-based distribution platform during the TIFF panel, arguing what many in the industry long called self-distribution is no longer an “anomaly.”

“There’s a number of filmmakers thinking of going direct straight away because they understand their audience and they know how to get to them,” Glosserman said.

– Etan Vlessing

Great concepts, connections leverage producers to distributors

During the Producer-Distributor Relationship discussion, France-based animation producer Denis Friedman said that the relationship between a producer and distributor is long-term, not a one-off. He stressed the importance of the producer arming the distributor with as much information as possible about the film that is being pitched. He recalled previously sitting in on every market meeting his sales agent had in order to understand how a pitch would work. “[You need to think about] how a distributor would actually sell your movie in the three minutes or five minutes they have to talk about it; when you understand that as a producer, you can provide the distributor with as much information for him to be as precise and correct in what he delivers,” Friedman said.

The panel also discussed how producers can leverage themselves to distributors. Senorita Films producer Rita Dagher said producers get noticed with a strong concept, or a strong director. The latter is how Dagher secured a distributor for her 2007 documentary My Enemy’s Enemy – director Kevin Macdonald agreed to direct the project, following his feature film The Last King of Scotland, which Dagher says was the hook that got the attention of sales agents and distributors.

Phase 4 Films president and CEO  Berry Meyerowitz agreed that a project needs something impressive – like a great concept, a good piece of conceptual art, or a strong director –  to get elevated above the stack, which he says at Toronto-based Phase 4 reaches between 15 to 20 pitches every week.

– Dani Ng-See-Quan

The Global State of VoD

Featuring representatives from Mexico’s Cinepolis Klic, Africa’s BuniTV, China’s Youku Tudou and distribution agency Under the Milky Way, this panel took audience members around the world with an overview of various global VoD operations. The dominant theme? The promise of mobile and changing the channel on video piracy by offering affordable, accessible VoD services on platforms that make sense for each market.

While each panel offered nuggets of insight, it was Youku/Tudou’s Allen Zhu, the company’s SVP of movie & corporate development, which elicited the most response from the crowd. Having merged in 2013, the video platforms combined now earn over 100 million visits each day, Zhu said, with over 10 million views each day for the sites’ film library.

Youku is mainstream-new-release-focused, he said, a deliberate strategy to try and thwart China’s video piracy problem: “We wanted to start with new releases, so we can develop a culture where people get used to paying for them,” he said. (Tudou, on the other hand, will be more focused on less mainstream fare in the future, he said.)

It appears to be working: the purchasing rate for online video in China has increased 40-fold in the last three years, he noted. And although China is currently adding 15 movies screens every day across the country, there are still only 17,000 big screens on which to catch new releases – still less than France. This creates not only a huge opportunity for growth in the online streaming space, he said, but for mobile as well.

The opportunity for mobile was also echoed by Marie Lora-Mungai, founder and CEO of Africa’s Buni TV video streaming site, who notes that with only one movie screen per six million people in Africa (in the U.S., it’s one per 8,000), mobile is the area Buni TV is most focused on, with 33% of its users accessing the site by mobile. Due to that market’s restricted access to screens, piracy is a problem continent-wide, but as new VoD players flood the market and domestic telcom’s push affordable smartphones, the online streaming opportunity is poised for significant growth, she noted.

– Katie Bailey