The Promise of Snagfilms and Online Doc

The Internetnews.com published an interview with the leading online doc service "Snagfilms".  The article has some grear insight into the devolping business of Snagfilms and how it affects the documentary industry. "Nielsen ranks YouTube as the top U.S. brand ranked by number of video streams. In October alone, Nielsen counted more than 6.5 billion video streams on YouTube, and more than 105 million unique viewers in the United States. Hulu was a distant second with 632 million streams and 13 million uniques.
Upstart Snagfilms is nowhere to be found on these lists, but then it's not looking to be the next YouTube. Rather than user-generated, short videos, Snagfilms thinks there's a ready market beyond the stereotypical, attention-deficient Web user. Snagfilms now has more than 1,000 films available for free viewing in its database. Revenue comes from advertising sold by partner AOL, and a revenue split from DVD buy offers found on many of the videos.
"There's no advantage to owning short-form content. We've found a lot of viewers are using (online streaming) as a sampling mechanism to decide whether to buy the DVD, which is a great way to experience the content," said Allen. "We think we're a long-term play and believe we're creating a significant business. That's what all the founders are expecting," Allen said.
Read the full article here.

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