If not us, who? If not now, when?

In case you haven’t noticed, just about everything that we said at the launch of SnagFilms and our acquisition of indieWIRE has come true: More and more films are being made; less and less are being shown; and even less are being bought for distribution in theaters and on television. The pain points are worse than ever. The economic meltdown isn’t helping either.

The basic problems that we are trying to solve are getting worse. Every day there is an indie film studio closing its doors or a financier canceling their investment into a film or a film that has been made that collects dust as it goes unseen by the public. The industry needs a virtual bailout and we are sincere in our basic premise of trying to help. I hope you are all rooting for our success. We are in this together.

With SnagFilms and indieWIRE we are doing our best to celebrate films with great social value and to help filmmakers get their films seen. We want to help generate revenue; build an audience; generate DVD sales; activate charitable giving; and create some buzz. Shining a light on big and tough subjects and using film as an agent of social change by reinforcing “Filmanthropy” is our core mission.

We launched the service in alpha in July and went to full beta in August. Since that time we have grown from about 200 films in the library to more than 550. I see us getting to 1,000 films in a short period of time. And then I see us getting to a huge library as we move to more of a self provisioning model. We are a digitizing machine now. We make film widgets. We connect charitable causes to each film. We place the films in the library for consumers to see. On a daily basis we provide all of the technology - streaming and analytics around this process - FREE OF CHARGE. We have films from the long tail; films that did well at film festivals but didn’t get distributed; premieres; and new films seeking a big audience.

Every day we launch new partnerships. We get more films up into the library and we cut new deals. We are embraced by filmmakers as we want to do the rights things the right way together and it is working. Thank you.

We now have more than 20,000 affiliates that have snagged a film widget and streamed films for us. Think of it. There are 500 physical movie theater screens in the US that will show these kinds of films and, in less than a year, we have built out infrastructure to more than 20k “virtual screens”. Business sites and consumers alike are becoming our virtual MSO’s within our network. They are donating pixels to a cause. They are helping us create a new category of “user distributed content”. They use our films to self express, share and badge their concerns and focus on their causes. They are virtual movie theater operators for us. Their audience becomes your audience and our audience. I won’t rest until we reach 1 million affiliates and we are working hard on new technology and new applications that will turbo charge these efforts.

Big editorial sites are using our films to enhance their content as well. Everyday there is a new and innovative use of SnagFilms widgets and our filmmaker’s work. We are becoming a standard part of many sites’ programming and editorial inclusions. We are honestly becoming a standard for our industry. We have cut big and important partnerships for distribution. You will be reading about some big news from us over the coming weeks in this partnership area.

Our virtual movie theater operators have now included our widgets on more than 250 MILLION pages since our launch! THAT is a lot of branding and a lot of viewing all for free! Thank you.

And people are watching the films. I see us getting to 1 million streams per month quickly and people that watch the films then buy the DVDs and give money to the charitable concern. This is a virtuous cycle. I won’t rest until we stream 1 BILLION films!

And advertisers like this content and they are buying which is good for you as we share these revenues – as partners – on a 50/50 basis.

And after only 90 days in business, we sent checks to every filmmaker we work with. All of the checks were small but we still sent checks out. Google and YouTube didn’t send checks out after 90 days but we did. As a filmmaker, I can tell you that I didn’t receive checks and reporting and analytics like we provided to filmmakers from my real world film distributor. So I am proud of the fact that filmmakers can trust us on our basic bond. We are here to help and we are trying to scale this business all together. Checks will be bigger this quarter and they grow proportionate to our scale. Help us to help you! Snag a widget and tell a friend about SnagFilms.

SnagFilms and the newly designed indieWIRE as part of a network are now generating about a million unique visitors per month too. That is pretty good velocity as an ad buy and as a media growth engine for our filmmakers. We are investing in indieWIRE because our industry needs a vehicle that celebrates and loves film and filmmakers!

So we have green growth arrows to date; more and more films; more and more virtual movie theater operators; more and more pages; more and more streams; more and more unique visitors; more and more revenues; more and more innovation; more and more partnerships; more and more technical and infrastructure investment; more and more presence and buzz; and more and more of a basic solution for what ails the industry.

We have a lot of work still to do but is there a plan B if we aren’t successful for this industry?

If not us, who? If not now, when?

Thanks for all of your support of SnagFilms and indieWIRE. Onward.