Get involved
Subscribe
![]()
Person of Interest
<p> A veteran of the war in Iraq, and self-proclaimed American Patriot, becomes convinced that the federal government is setting him up as the fall guy in a soon-to-be terrorist...
Downloads: 14106 Comments: 7 Peers: 3081![]()
Sintel
“Sintel” is an independently produced short film, initiated by the Blender Foundation as a means to further improve and validate the free/open source 3D creation suite Blender....
Downloads: 14106 Comments: 7 Peers: 3081![]()
![]()
Talk To Me
In 1985, Mark Craig bought an answer machine.He then kept every message it recorded... for 20 years. 'Talk To Me' is a journey through life, conveyed entirely by real answer...
Downloads: 14106 Comments: 7 Peers: 3081![]()
2men, 1war, 33 years on...
Having fought on opposing sides during the brutal Lebanese civil war, two men reconcile openly with their violent history to find forgiveness. All donations will go to the...
Downloads: 14106 Comments: 7 Peers: 3081![]()
The Yes Men Fix The World...
THE YES MEN FIX THE WORLD is a screwball true story about two gonzo political activists who, posing as top executives of giant corporations, lie their way into big business...
Downloads: 14106 Comments: 7 Peers: 3081Are you a creator looking for an effective way to distribute your work? We can help you promote free-to-share content to a global P2P audience and earn thousands of dollars in sponsorship in return. If you want we can also hook you up with appropriate sponsors to help you earn money from your project or fund future endeavours.
Become a distributor and get your own slice of the action. Choose which VODO films you think should get out there and help push them through your own social networks. See how many people you got the films to, and earn points for each discovery that happens because of you.
VODO content partners
Excerpt from Gregory Bayne's blog:
"On Saturday night (October 2nd) PERSON OF INTEREST screened at the 2010 Open Video Conference as part of the Shared Film Festival, sponsored by BitTorrent, and curated by our partners at VODO. Simultaneously, we released the film worldwide via VODO as a free to share P2P download.
Some have asked if our decision to ‘give’ PERSON OF INTEREST away in this manner is prudent, as many in the film, and increasingly in the independent film industry are decrying internet piracy as the primary basis of potential lost revenue for films. We simply don’t see it that way. We see it as a completely new opportunity to distribute work, and create new audience relationships worldwide that, prior to now, would not have been possible. We prescribe to VODO’s philosophy that is summed up in their recent blog post:
“One of our core beliefs at VODO is that “peer to peer” ultimately means that everyone is a distributor. To us, this is a really big and important change: it means we no longer have to rely on big media, big business, big anything to have our ideas seen and heard. We think a lot of interesting social changes will spin out of this single fact. And that’s why we’re working on VODO. Business people call it ‘disruption’. We prefer to think of it as transformation.”
read the full post on Bayne's blog & watch the film:
By Milton De La Cruz, October 1st, 2010
This is the official trailer for Collapsus, a media phenomenon that will expand the limits of how different forms of communication work together to create a complete experience. The project is headed by Tommy Pallotta, producer of Waking Life and Scanner Darkly. Collapsus is set in the near future and details the effects of the imminent energy crisis on ten individuals who become the central figures in an energy conspiracy. Collapsus is the transmedia project related to the movie Energy Risk which focuses on the rough transition from fossil fuels to alternate resources and how it would affect worldwide energy infrastructures. Collapsus is being developed by SubmarineChannel, in collaboration with the Dutch public broadcaster VPRO. The combination of animation, narrative, documentary, and interactivity will plunge the audience into a highly developed world that is falling apart at the seams. The audience becomes a player within the story by making decisions that affect the global arena. The story is propelled through the interactions of different media forms, but that is what makes it all the more engaging, as there are layers and layers of intrigue and drama. For those who need some assistance with getting started with this correlative experience, Tommy Pallotta, the director of Collapsus, has made a video walkthrough for the project.
Collapsus – http://www.collapsus.com/
Walkthrough – Link
Saying You Can't Compete With Free Is Saying You Can't Compete Period
from the a-little-explanation dept
Getting back to my series of posts on understanding economics when scarcity is removed from some goods, I wanted to address the ridiculousness of the "can't compete with free" statements that people love to throw out. If we break down the statement carefully, anyone who says that is really saying that they can't compete at all. The free part is actually meaningless -- but the zero is blinding everyone.
To explain this, it helps to go back to your basic economics class and recognize that, in a competitive market, the price of a good is always going to get pushed towards its marginal cost. That actually makes a lot of sense. As competition continues, it puts pressure on profits, but producers aren't willing (or can't for very long) keep selling goods at a direct loss. Sunk (or fixed) costs don't matter, because they've already been paid -- so everything gets pushed to marginal cost. That's pretty well accepted by most folks -- but it's still misinterpreted by many. They tend to look at it and say that if price equals marginal cost, then no one would ever produce anything. That's a misconception that is at the heart of this whole debate. The problem is that they don't add in the element of time, and the idea that what drives innovation is the constant efforts by the producers in the space to add fleeting competitive advantages (what some economists have annoyingly called "monopolistic competition," a name that I think is misleading). In other words, companies look to add some value to the goods that makes their goods better than the competition in some way -- and that unique value helps them command a profit. But, the nature of the competitive market is that it's always shifting, so that everyone needs to keep on innovating, or any innovation will be matched (and usually surpassed) by competitors. That's good for everyone. It keeps a market dynamic and growing and helps out everyone.
Excellent post! Read it all on techdirt.com
Our Own Dark Helmet Shares Lessons From Crowdfunding Experiment
from the that's-one-dark-helmet dept
Last week, we kicked off our new "case study" series, with a post about musician Jason Parker's experiments with "pay what you want" for his music. This week, we're going in a different direction, as will be explained in a bit. We've received a bunch of suggestions for future case studies, with plenty of good ones, but if you know any content creator experimenting with interesting business models, who you think would make a good case study, please let us know via the "contact us" link at the top of the page.
For this case study, we're actually going to discuss an experiment by someone that regular Techdirt readers may know quite a bit -- especially if you spend a lot of time in our comments. It's Tim Geigner, whose name may not be that familiar to you, but his alter ego Dark Helmet has been one of, if not the most prolific commenters on Techdirt, where he tends to play the role of comment enforcer, keeping people (including me at times) in line, when he feels anyone has spoken without thinking. Separate from that, however, he's been writing a fair amount of fiction lately, which is quite enjoyable.
For one of his fiction books, Midwasteland, he decided to test out Kickstarter, a platform for "crowdfunding," creative works, which has received a lot of attention. His Midwasteland project is still in process, so if you like his work, feel free to jump in and support him. That said, he's not sure that he used Kickstarter all that well, and isn't sure that his project will reach the necessary goal to get funded. I think there's often a lot more that can be learned from what ideas didn't work, than what did, so I talked with Tim about why he thinks things didn't go as ideally as possible. First, however, he pointed out that even if the project doesn't get funded, a few really good things have happened, which we'll get to below. But, he's taken away some important lessons on why Kickstarter hasn't been quite a magic bullet:
Why didn't it go as I'd initially hoped? The onus is all on me. That's the other cool part of this: I'm learning lessons that I can use on my next project, whatever it may be..
Lesson 1: It isn't enough to have a good idea, you have to do your due prep work to make it successful.
Lesson 2: It isn't enough to have people be genuinely interested in you, you need them to want to PROMOTE you.
Lesson 3: There is more to value in a project like this than making money. I got a TON of feedback on my writing. I learned a TON of little lessons from trying this project.
Read the full post on techdirt.com