We'd appreciate your adding this to the conversation with regard to Institutional and Home DVD Pricing:
We wanted to share our perspective on the recent spate of emails on the list serve about the topic of tiered pricing connected to one of the titles in our collection. When filmmakers complete a film, they look for the best opportunities to distribute their work to different markets and usually work with different distributors who hold rights to different types of markets. New Day Films, as many of you know, is a cooperative distribution company that distributes to the educational market, which includes university and college as well as public library, K-12 and community organizations. If a filmmaker affiliates with New Day, that means that New Day has the film's rights to the educational market for his or her film. New Day, like most other distribution companies, has a tiered pricing system. The cost per film for academic institutions is higher, for example, than the cost to a community group or a high school. New Day is responsible for educational sales, but other types of sales, including sales to individuals, are handled differently by each individual filmmaker. Most of our members have some other arrangement in place to sell their films to home or individual users, and those prices are typically much lower. The assumption behind the range of prices is that academic institutions will be able to use their copy of the film for years to come, showing it multiple times, to large numbers of students. The assumption behind the home user prices is that it is for one person or family to use. We understand it is not illegal to purchase a DVD intended for home use from Amazon and use it in the classroom, but independent filmmakers survive because of the honor system that Anthony Anderson wrote about in his post. If our higher-ed customers stopped paying the institutional rates, independent filmmakers would never be able to continue producing the high quality films on social issues that faculty and students depend on. We always are open to finding a solution to pricing concerns so that our films get used and shown. We also have developed different options for digital streaming licenses to accommodate the institution that only intends to use a film one or two times. We always are looking for ways to creatively work with the video librarian field to fine tune product delivery and pricing structures that work for higher ed and for the filmmaker. We hope this helps to explain the tiered pricing approach that many independent filmmakers use. Jacki Ochs and Debra Chasnoff, on behalf of New Day Films
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.
