Digital platforms have opened up a world of opportunity for the National Film Board, and it has had the good sense to seize the day. The NFB’s revamped website and new application for Apple’s iPhone provide a wealth of content that shames other comers, and they allow the public agency to reach consumers more directly than ever before.

‘Our first sense was, ‘Wow, there’s a void here. There is something we could be providing that no one else is providing – to be offering this amount of quality video on an iPhone,” says Deborah Drisdell, the NFB’s director general of accessibility and digital enterprises.

‘We feel we need to take those risks,’ she continues. ‘That’s part of our mantra here – to do things that maybe the private sector or even others can’t really do. So we felt, ‘Well, let’s try and see.’

The NFB Films iPhone app launched Oct. 21. Downloadable from NFB.ca for both the iPhone and iPod touch, the app gives access to around 1,000 board films and trailers. As the agency pushes forward with its ongoing process of digitizing its collection, it aspires to refresh the app with four or five new entries per week.

Working in the NFB’s favor is the fact much of its content is well-suited to the ‘snackable’ nature of digital platforms. It’s no surprise that, as of Jan. 7, nine of the board’s 10 most-viewed iPhone films are animated shorts, led by Cordell Barker’s Oscar-nominated The Cat Came Back (1988). The remaining film is the feature-length Carts of Darkness, Murray Siple’s 2008 doc about shopping-cart-racing homeless men in Vancouver. It is also one of most-watched films at NFB.ca, which has recorded more than 3.6 million film plays overall since its relaunch one year ago.

According to the NFB, there have been 112,520 iPhone app downloads so far and 480,484 film plays. One-third of app downloads and 40% of film plays have been foreign, with Americans being the biggest out-of-country users. Films can be streamed or downloaded and then watched up to 24 hours later, even away from a network connection. This is where the board sees some revenue potential.

‘People are saying they’d love to download a film [to keep], or they prefer to have a film for more than 24 hours,’ Drisdell says. ‘That raises some ideas and some complexities of rights, because it’s a very different rights package for downloads than it is for streaming. These are all things we’re looking at in the future, as most content providers are – how we can monetize download-to-own and download-to-rent. We would always want to keep a free offer to Canadians, but there could be some premium new releases or something that people would want to pay to have later on.’

The app works on WiFi, 3G and lower-bandwidth Edge wireless networks. Of course, a holder of any mobile device with Internet capability can stream all the films available at NFB.ca, but that would be without the made-for-mobile functionality and the downloading option. As 2010 promises the latest and greatest mobile devices from various manufacturers, the NFB wants its app to ultimately be device agnostic.

What the film board has accomplished proves that making a significant move into mobile doesn’t require a substantial investment. Drisdell says the total cost of getting the app off the ground was around only $20,000, with Montreal tech company Alamanga performing the technical development around the NFB’s in-house app design.

Of course, that $20,000 doesn’t include clearing rights and digitizing the content – but that back end was already taken care of for the online screening room. That’s the glory of the digital world: make it available for one platform and then it can migrate easily to the next. Hopefully other media companies out there are taking note.