A Netflix for Indie Films and Documentaries?

There have been renewed calls for a streaming platform dedicated to independent films and documentaries. It’s not something novel, of course—people have been working on this for years. The landscape is littered with both current and shuttered attempts to give audiences a singular place to find the kinds of alternative, innovative, and boundary-breaking films that we all know are much better and more fulfilling than Hollywood and Netflixified content, but for some reason, aren’t embraced as widely (sound familiar, Democratic voters?).

The urgency for the current discussion stems from a number of things, but mostly this time, it’s corporate media’s increasing abandonment of indies and the recent publication of Keri Putnam’s vital and mammoth US Independent Film Audience and Landscape Study in which she both identifies the existence of a large audience for independent films in the U.S., and calls “for a new, consolidated streaming destination.”

“Our survey suggests that the loyal fanbase for independent and arthouse film would subscribe to a platform that aggregated independent film,” writes Putnam. “An opportunity to aggregate the niche subscription or free streaming audience is also suggested in recent studies that show the demand for smaller channels has increased since the mass-market streamers have narrowed their new investments to mass-market fare and focused more heavily on older library content.”

After month’s of research, Putnam’s conclusion verifies a lot of rumblings that were going around Sundance 2024.

In a post in early January titled “The Coolest Film Brand in the World”, former Amazon Studios executive Roy Price similarly threw down the gauntlet: He warned: “indie film is spread thinly across the various streamers. It has no brand or home, which dilutes the energy of the space.” And Price called for an ambitious and wholly unrealistic billion-dollar new platform that would include everything from major titles from A24 (“Everything Everywhere All At Once,” “Past Lives”) along with Cannes winners (“Fallen Leaves”) and significant library titles (“Pulp Fiction”) to original series. A24+, anyone? I don’t think Price’s plan was meant to be taken seriously, but his point was clear: For a new platform to work, it would cost a lot of money, because frankly, more modest attempts have never broken through the noise and the already established platforms.

For independent documentaries, in particular, which are perhaps most at risk right now at a time when both commercial backing and government support may be cut further (more on that story soon), I don’t see how well-intentioned enterprises such as the Documentary Channel, XTR’s FAST channel Documentary+, or OVID.tv are going to be reaching enough audiences (or have enough licensing fees) to make a difference to either filmmakers or audiences. (New doc platform Jolt.film has a more targeted approach, which could help individual films, but not the ecosystem, at large.) Has anyone reading this (a self-selecting indie-minded audience even) watched a title on any of these channels in the last year? Have you even heard of any of these? OVID.tv, which has both fiction and nonfiction, has some impressive arthouse docs—Wang Bing’s “Youth (Spring)”, Mila Turajlić’s “Non-Aligned: Scenes from the Labudović Reels,” and the Oscar-nominated “Five Broken Cameras”—but it also has very little curation, with a whole lot of filler films that I’ve never heard of.

At a price point of $6.99 per month, OVID.tv also doesn’t have enough flashy content to sustain that rate. After all, you can see a lot of these documentaries for free through your library via Kanopy. Unfortunately, “free” is the price point that most audiences expect to pay for their nonfiction content, and by “free,” I also mean all the documentaries that already exist on SVOD platforms (Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc) that people already have subscriptions to.

On the fiction/art-house side, yes, there is Mubi, but their paying subscriber base, particularly in the U.S., is tiny compared to the big streamers. For just two years, 2016-2018, we had FilmStruck, the much-beloved pact between TCM and The Criterion Collection. And then there is also Fandor, which I didn’t even know still existed until I started writing this piece. Back in an earlier iteration of itself, I thought Fandor had everything an indie platform would need to succeed: It had robust curation and editorial to support its many titles (I personally wrote for its long defunct Keyframe, its cinephilic publication), along with a catalogue of obscure and compelling foreign and American independent cinema that seemed like it might have an audience.

But in the book I co-authored with producer and short-lived Fandor exec Ted Hope, “Hope For Film,” he discussed his frustration at the company and “the harsh realities of the online streaming marketplace,” he said. “I was shocked by the problems of customer acquisition and retention—and how much it cost to get movie fans to the platform and keep them on the platform…. I also quickly came to realize how much ‘exclusive’ and ‘new’ mattered when it came to any library. The business of streaming is driven by connectivity and scale.”

“You know what got watched on Fandor?” he continued. “Monster movies and softcorn porn from the 1960s and ‘70s, not award-winning auteur films.”

Despite such challenges, there are a number of other factors that do make a compelling case for indies joining forces with more solidarity. The fragmentation and inner conflicts within the indie market are real—everyone is fighting to stay alive—but just like in politics, dividing the people against each other rather than against their corporate bosses is how the oligarchy maintains control.

One of my central doubts about whether this will ever happen is that larger indie titles—the ones that a platform will need to initially draw eyeballs—won’t join in the endeavor. Why would an A24 or Neon ever have the financial incentive to do so when they already have their own comfy output streaming deals? I guess they would have to see the upside in starting their own exclusive streaming service, but that seems like a very tall and expensive order—see Price’s post.

Putnam argues, “A scaled field-wide platform would serve audiences by improving the discoverability problem, bring revenue to small distributors, fuel the makers of the future with an aggregated engaged fanbase, which in turn enables marketing expenditure and fair payments that enable creators to make new work.”

But to achieve this, she also recognizes “a collective approach is required. To avoid high library acquisition costs and monolithic curatorial points of view, the many competing small services and independent distributors must experiment with radical collaboration.”

Putnam’s call for a radical scaled-up “all-in” approach sounds a lot to me like Roy Price’s pie-in-the-sky plan. By nature, I’m skeptical of the market, or the billionaires that control it, to shake things up in such a profound way to benefit arts and culture—though it’s certainly a nice idea Maybe we can start this Thanksgiving. Rather than streaming another film on Amazon or series on Netflix with your family: Check out a great doc or indie film on Mubi, Fandor, or the Documentary Channel. Who knows: Maybe it’ll be the future of indie streaming?