No, you haven’t invented “Netflix for indies”

By MAT and KO’D
Posted May 8, 2025

Distribution is the hardest challenge for the independent creator. Many creators find no venue for their work, and are desperate to place their movies before an audience. Quite regularly, some newbie will come up with the Totally Original idea: they will found a streaming service of their own — Netflix for Indies! Here is why that never works.

In spring 2017, an influential article appeared, describing how a mixture of software and services could be combined to mimic the delivery and billing of Netflix for a very modest cost. Many people, myself included, were very interested in discussing and exploring the potential of this idea. Other articles followed, and now a search-engine inquiry will yield more than you could ever read. There’s such a wealth of information out there, I can’t find the original article! Sorry about that.

Don’t get me wrong! This is great. It’s great that creators have another means to place their work before the world. It’s great that it is so low-cost; in years past you’d have to strike prints and ship heavy cannisters of film around the country, and now all you need is a website. Just as digital video placed movie-making within reach of anyone with a middle-class income, so Web distribution is within reach of any creator who can actually make a movie.

The problem, of course, is that if anyone can do something, then everyone will. It’s never been so hard to stand out from the crowd and attract attention to your movie, because so many other creators are out there trying to stand out from the crowd and attract attention to their movies.

Likewise, if anyone can set up a movie-distribution service, everyone will. Some of these will be good — legit, fair, transparent. No, they’re not going to get your movie on the big screen at your local GoogolPlex; but the best of them offer a small but devoted audience of cinephiles who really want to discover new movies and new creators. When these people first encounter your movie, they want to love it.

Some “distributors” will be outright scams. A good sign that it’s a scam is that they want to charge you money. This is the Vanity Press Scam, first developed in the writing business.

 

 

Now, of course, these Wantrepreneurs don’t want to spend that much time curating their content; that would be work. They can’t afford to pay someone or take time off from their day jobs themselves, because they are Unfinanced Wantrepreneurs. And they’re too impatient to start a venture part-time, and grow their business into maybe a full-time job. If only there were a shortcut — a way to have content to put on the service without having to vet content on the service.

These Unfinanced Wantrepreneurs usually devote themselves to one or more of these strategies:

1) Accept everything that’s submitted

It’s amazing how quickly you can pad out a catalogue of movies if you have no standards! So what if the dialogue is inaudible, and the camera isn’t even pointed at the actors or may not even have been switched on? It’s indie; it doesn’t have to be perfect!

However, it is unfortunately true that not all movies are great. Some are not even good. A lot of them are just plain bad. And not “so bad they’re good”, just . . . so bad they’re bad. It makes you sad to watch them because you know the people involved tried so hard but just couldn’t do it. Or it makes you angry to watch them because you know the people involved are corrupt and cynical exploiters for whom quality is irrelevant. Or it makes you . . . It doesn’t matter. The point is that some movies are bad, and most people would not enjoye them. We can maybe argue about which movies these are, but most of us agree that bad movies do exist.

If you accept that bad movies exist, and you accept any movie submitted to your distribution service, then I’m afraid you accept that you offer bad movies to the public.

And because good movies can find a venue with some curation, some discrimination, most of the movies you accept will be movies that can’t find distribution anywhere else. In other words, nobody wants these movies. That’s what you offer the public: anything that can’t find an outlet anywhere else.

You wind up with a whole website full of crap. You have no quality control, because having no quality control is your business model. Okay, now you have a catalogue. A catalogue of crap.

At the same time, you have to convince an audience to pay you for access to your ever-growing catalogue of crap. You know how hard it is to make your movie stand out above the everyday noise? That’s what it’s like trying to find the good movies on your service among all the crap. You are willing to do that work because it benefits your movie and your success; why should the audience wade through all the crap you offer to maybe find one or two gems?

Another thing that’s surprising is that, at any given moment, there is a finite supply of crap. You will find it easy as first to fill your cataglogue with crap. But as time goes by (if you keep your business of selling crap afloat) you will pluck the low-hanging fruit; all the people who see your ad and have their crap ready to submit will have submitted, and you will have to seek further afield for new crap to add to your catalogue of crap. So now you’re actually spending time and money chasing crap.

2) Pad your catalogue with public-domain material

We are sure to see many of the same titles available from many of these streamers. They scour Archive.org for anything in the public domain and add it to their catalogues. Rare is such a website that does not feature Nosferatu (1922), Phantom of the Opera (1925), or

 

 

3) Charge creators to put their work on the service

This is a well-known scam in the freelance Writer’s world. The scam is that they promise you that you can become a Published Author if you just pay them some money. The reality is that your pockets are a little emptier, and you’re stuck with a storage locker full of books now have to sell. And they’re a hard sell, too; there is widespread prejudice against these kinds of books as being not good enough to attract a real publisher.

Real distributors do not make money from creators. They make money by buying work from creators and selling it to exhibitors or viewers. The creator is the supplier, and the viewer is the customer.

(Practically, many otherwise legit distributors of independently-made movies operate on the raggedy edge, fiscally speaking. Even in the Hollywood Minor Leagues, the days of the MG (Minimum Guarantee) from distributors are behind us. You may find that the pay is a straight share of revenue. That can be fine — if their bite isn’t too much. I suggest that if they want more than 33 percent, they’re asking for too much. Yes, I know that businesses have expenses to pay; you pay your website-hosting expenses out of your cut of the money my movie makes, and I’ll pay off the movie out of mine.)

 

 

For some reason, it seems unfair to Unfinanced Wantrepreneurs that they should have to pay their own business expenses until their business starts making money. “I’ve got a web-hosting bill to pay! I deserve money! Your money! After all, I’m providing a service!” What service? To whom?

You’re not a distributor. You’re an exploiter.

 

 

• Netflix started offering its streaming service in 2007. By then it had been in business for ten years, renting movies on disc. Its market capitalization at the end of that year was $1.72 billion. That’s the equivalent of about $2.66 billion today. Do you have $2,660,000,000 to spend on your venture? Then you are not starting at the same level as Netflix when it started streaming.
• Tubi was founded in 2014 with $4 million. (It raised another $20 million in a later funding round, but that’s not pertinent here.) That’s the equivalent of about $5.5 million in today’s money. Do you have $5,500,000 to spend on your venture? Then you are not starting at the same level as Tubi when it started streaming.
• OVIP service-provider claims that a streaming service can be set up for between $15,000 and $100,000 USD — or more. That’s the equivalent of $ CDN. Do you have as little as $ to spend on your venture? No? Then you can’t afford to do it. Got that? You can’t do it. Capitalism sucks sometimes, doesn’t it, when all that stands between you and your dreams is money? C’est la guerre.

 

Netflix for indies: The venture

Say you are a budding entrepreneur, and you get the Totally Original Idea to found your own distribution venue. It’ll be Netflix for indies! Finally, no more gatekeepers discriminating against worthy movies. Creative freedom! Rah rah!

Let’s run through how this project will work, stage by stage.

Assumptions

To start, we need a few assumptions:

• You’re a newbie, so you don’t have records of past business years. You also don’t have any insider access; you rely on public information as you build your business plan.
• Your want to have ten feature-length movies available on your website when you launch it. If your business is to succeed, you will of course need many, many more movies than this — and acquisition will be a major and ongoing part of the venture. But for now, let’s start with ten.
• A movie is 100 minutes. Of course, submissions will vary in length, but this is a good average for a feature.
• Sturgeon’s Law always applies: “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” To find good movies for your website, you’re going to have to watch a lot of bad movies.
• A full-time job requires you to work 40 hours a week — eight hours a day for five days, and then a two-day weekend off.
• The living wage in Vancouver in 2024 was $27.85. Let’s call that $30 an hour ’cause round numbers are easier to work with. Rule of thumb: Always over-estimate expenses and under-estimate revenues! Any work your venture needs, that’s the wage of whoever does it — meaning you. (Another rule of thumb is that, after employer’s CPP contributions and whatnot, an employee costs a business 1.4 times their actual hourly wage. But that doesn’t concern us here.)

Technical requirements

What do you need to set up your own video-streaming or -downloading venture?

Well, at the simplest level, all you need is a website. You pay a domain-name registrar to register NetflixForIndies.com; that costs about $20 USD , and pay a hosting service to host your website, and you might be out a total of $20 or $30 a month. They won’t build a website for you; that’s up to you. But you can, for twenty bucks a month and a few hours of your time, place the movies in your catalogue before the world. Truly we live in glorious times! Celebrate this triumph!

Then realize that this triumph is worthless. Nobody is going to watch your catalogue of movies, because nobody knows your website exists. And anyway, you don’t have a catalogue of movies; creators won’t submit movies, because they don’t know your website exists.

And even if you put up a few movies, and if a few people watch them, it won’t take very many titles or streams or downloads before your web-hosting service suggest that you upgrade to a paid hosting-plan to cover the cost of their servers and bandwidth (and profit, of course; always profit).

 

Soliciting submissions

At first, of course, nobody knows who you are or what you do, and we don’t particularly care. We all have jobs and families and hobbies and lives and stuff, and if you want our attention and / or money you’re going to have to attract our attention and make an attractive offer.

So if you want creators to submit their movies to your website, you have to find out where creators are and offer them something they want. Fortunately the former is easy because of social media, and the latter is easy because of creators’ desperation.

The two primary challenges the indie creator has are funding and distribution. Of the two, distribution is harder; for proof, count the large number of movies that get made but never distributed. So it’s a buyer’s market when it comes to independent movies. There are many more creators seeking distribution for their movies than there are distribution venues available.

You can go to Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Discord, MeetUp, or any other social-media website and find an unlimited number of creators trying — as are we all — to make meaningful movies with whatever resources we can scrape together. Search for independent movie-makers

 

Dealing with submissions

Once you start looking at the movies in your Inbox, you will realize that the majority of them fall into two categories:

1) Movies by newbies who don’t really know what to do with their movie now they’ve made it. This doesn’t necessarily mean these movies are bad — although that’s usually the case. There’s nothing wrong with being a newbie; we all start off as newbies. But newbies, by definition, don’t know a lot of stuff yet. Their projects are likely to be full of creative and business mistakes.

2) Movies that could not find any other means of distribution. This doesn’t necessarily mean these movies are bad — although that’s usually the case. But they might also be of such narrow or local interest that distributors don’t believe there’s a wider audience for them.

 

 

Our third assumption was that Sturgeon’s Law always applies. So to find 10 movies for the website, you need to watch 100 movies. You send a polite rejection letter to 90 creators, and put the top ten movies on your website.

To watch 100 movies at 100 minutes each will take you 10,000 minutes, or 167 hours. That’s a full-time job for a month. You are going to take a month and work eight hours a day just watching movie after movie. That assumes that you make the decision yea or nay instantly; if you have to think about a movie, or rewatch all or parts of it, that’s even more time.

Of course, in practice you won’t have to watch all of every movie. Let’s say that half of the submissions you don’t have to watch all the way through, ’cause they’re awful. (Some creators get offended by this, as if they’re not being given a fair shake. To them, I say: Dude, if the first five minutes of your movie are terrible, it doesn’t matter if it gets brilliant later; the first five minutes are still terrible, and nobody will sit through them to get to the good bits you swear are coming.)

So that’s 50 movies that you watch five minutes of. That’s 250 minutes to review half your submissions — just over four hours. That’s more manageable! In half a day you can cut the slush pile in half and save yourself almost two weeks’ work.

You still have to watch 50 movies. At 100 minutes each, that’s 5,000 minutes. So you’ll spend a total of 5,250 minutes reviewing submissions. That’s a total of 87.5 hours — two working weeks plus a day.

That’s still a lot of time, so let’s further assume that, of the remaining 50 movies, half of them start off promisingly but head south somewhere along the line. Let’s say that you need to watch these movies halfway through before this becomes apparent. That’s 25 movies you will watch 50 minutes offor a total of 1,250 viewing minutes — 25 hours, a half-time job for a week or a full-time job for three days.

That leaves you 25 movies that you watch all the way through, before picking the top ten to put on your website. That will take 2,500 minutes — 42 hours, or a full-time job for a week.

Let’s total up so far:

• You spent half a day watching five minutes each of 50 movies.
• You spent three days watching half of each of 25 movies.
• You spent a week watching 25 movies all the way through.

That’s a total of eight-and-a-half workdays spent watching submissions to select ten movies for your website. That’s someone working all day from Monday to Friday, then all day from Monday to Thursday lunch. Let’s round that up to two weeks even.

Note that there are no economies of scale to be had here. Every 10 movies you accept for the website will take the same amount of time to cull from the submissions.

Realize what that means: If you want to add ten movies a month to your website, you need a permanent half-time employee whose sole job is to watch movies and accept or reject them. If you want to add 30 movies a month — one a day — to your streaming service, you need three part-time employees whose only job is to watch movies and select 10 of them to for posting. At $30 an hour, these employees will earn about $2,000 each a month. Every ten movies you add to the website will cost you $2,000 — just to find them among the movies submitted to you.

Note that this does not include any time or money you spend to get those 100 submissions. This is just the time and money you spend to assess those 100 submissions after you’ve got ’em.