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Hello All, I’m the Community Engagement and Communications Coordinator for Frameline, one of the “crazy” (!) distributors listing titles on Amazon at both home use and PPR price points. As part of our strategic planning process and keeping in line with our mission statement, during the last year we’ve been actively exploring what it means to increase accessibility to our films. To put it in real terms, we wanted to respond in a meaningful way to the many emails we receive from individuals in our communities regarding films like transparent (http://cart.frameline.org/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=T487) -- emails from folks who themselves are transgender men who have or are giving birth to children. We recognize that individuals are also interested in our films, that educators are seeing their budgets slashed and that different institutions have different policies regarding public performance rights. Ultimately, we want to continue our work of sharing diverse images of the LGBT communities to as broad an audience as possible, and frankly $ and literal access tend to be the biggest barriers. Of course, we also want to cover our expenses (as much as we can, we never do so completely) so we can stick around. We’re seeing that educators and libraries are purchasing our home video DVDs, how could we not? But at the end of the day, that’s success – folks are getting the opportunity to see queer people beyond the mainstream representation and the communities’ histories and contributions are being brought to light. That being said, our sales through Amazon are a test – we want to know how these sales are going to impact our distribution model and what the future of our institutional sales will be. We’re going to start looking at some of the data in the coming months and would be happy to share it with any of you. And just for total transparency of our various catalogs and experiments:
Thanks for all the lively discussion. Harris --
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VIDEOLIB is intended to encourage the broad and lively discussion of issues relating to the selection, evaluation, acquisition,bibliographic control, preservation, and use of current and evolving video formats in libraries and related institutions. It is hoped that the list will serve as an effective working tool for video librarians, as well as a channel of communication between libraries,educational institutions, and video producers and distributors.
