Selling Dance DVDs and Downloadable Videos
I've always been curious why choreographers, dancers, dance companies and teachers have not experimented more with different approaches to selling videos of their work online.
But I'm especially curious to know why creators of dance on camera works have not tried to sell their films through online channels. There are many dance film festivals that take place every year around the globe, yet it seems that very few of these films are sold online in DVD format or as downloadable videos. If there's an audience for these film festivals, there has to be a potentially larger audience online.
On the DV Guru blog, I came across a story, "Distribution made easy: CustomFlix and Amazon how-to" by Sheila Ward. This post describes a turnkey service offered by CustomFlix that helps you package and sell your videos either in DVD format or as video downloads through Amazon's new Unbox offering. Visit this page to learn about the specifics of this video download service and the revenue split.
What I like about this CustomFlix offering is that everything can be taken care of for you. DVDs are burned as needed, they offer DVD design services and they integrate their offering with Amazon's Unbox service. But a potential roadblock is that the minimum length for a downloadable video is 20 minutes and dance films can easily be shorter than this.
However, I'm assuming that if you used the Unbox service, you could sign-up for the Amazon affiliate program and generate additional revenue every time that a visitor to your website clicks on a link to purchase your DVD or downloadable video through Amazon.
If you use Unbox, Customflix or any other services for selling your dance videos online, I'd like to hear how well they work for you. Are you selling dance DVDs or downloadable videos? And how are you promoting your videos?
Bookmark with your favorite service
Read related stories:
Posted by Doug Fox on January 9, 2007 10:04 AM
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://greatdance.com/mtadmin/mt-tb.cgi/579
many reviews of Amazon's Unbox service have been somewhat unimpressed by the very restrictive DRM scheme the site sues to "protect' copyrighted content. Even going so far as to have a disclaimer in their terms and conditions that if they change the playback system (you have to use a proprietary player) your paid for content may stop working and there's nothing you can do about it. Also; UNBOX is Windows only, last time I checked anyway.
Posted by: Michelle at January 9, 2007 06:02 PM