The professional section of the 20^th Black Nights Film Festival, Industry@Tallinn, hosted the Europa International conference on Saturday 19 November. This year, the gathering, entitled “Set The Trend!”, brought into focus the exploration of new digital business models for film exhibition.

Moderated by Brian Newman, of US consulting company Sub-Genre, specialised in strategic marketing campaigns using films and new media, the talk saw the participation of key players in the film exhibition world, hailing from both the European and the US industries, as they sought to rethink film distribution in the digital age. Companies like Spain’s Filmin VoD platform, Czech distributor Aerofilms (which has now started its own VoD platform, Aerovod), Swedish distributor NonStop Entertainment, audience engagement consulting company SampoMedia, digital cinema boosting company Ymagis, leading software company BitTorrent (now a key player in the legal film chain) and digital video platform provider Shift72 all weighed in on the subject.

The impact of digital platforms on distribution has proven crucial, and it is time for film directors and producers to embrace that fully. Missy Laney, formerly at BitTorrent, stressed how the company helps films to be released in creative, innovative ways, giving the creatives the necessary tools to do it, such as BitTorrent Now, an application through which viewers can download, stream and play any content direct from the artist. Ymagis’ electronic booking portal, CineConductor, a digital file download platform via broadband designed to facilitate direct commerce between exhibitors and distributors, is a further example of this.

But how to work in an on-demand world? Laney added, “The marketplace has evolved, and we all want to blame each other for the problems. But it’s really about aggregating the audience by, for example, following the spikes on Google Analytics and making the most of the buzz that the film creates to activate that in terms of pre-sales. There are American films like Dave Grohl’s Sound City or Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color which have managed to do it, to get pre-sales off the buzz, even before their festival circuit.” Shift72’s David White explained, “The marketing is as important as the script – it needs to be formulated during the initial stages; it has to have a well-built strategy and be creative.”

Meanwhile, from the end of the chain, Filmin’s Jaume Ripoll addressed the relevance of internet and social networks, and their importance in grabbing people’s attention through “online branding and visibility – not as an advertising and promotional tool, but as a content tool, giving people interesting things they want to know more about and share with everyone”.

Yet the correlation between what is successful in the cinema and what is successful online is still to be proven, even though “the growth of the online world is much bigger than the offline world”, said Aerofilms’ Ivo Andrle. SampoMedia’s Michael Gubbins asserted, “The numbers are not huge, but enough to justify doing this.”