The Problem
Filmmaking is not a hobby; it is a very expensive, very specialized business. It's not acceptable in any industry for the producer to be denied access to its market. It's not businesslike. Why is it tolerated in the film industry? Well, it's not tolerated. The major studios don't put up with it. If you want to distribute a film created by a major studio, you must pay for it, up front, and you must pay a lot. But the majors control distribution and keep access to audience locked up for themselves. So independents have to take what they are given. That's wrong.
A distributor makes money by selling views of your film. It produces nothing of its own, invests nothing in your production. YOU created the film, took the financial risk and have brought it to fruition. So, when a distributor has done literally nothing to bring your film to life, and when they are not likely to put anything into promotion (which is true today), why won’t they pay you up front to license your creation? That would be appropriate, right?
The reason that even near-bankrupt distributors have power over you, the filmmaker, is because they control your access to audience.
The value of a distributor's “service” provides you is access to that audience - in theory, visibility - but that’s not what it’s cracked up to be. Usually, a distributor or streamer’s sole investment in the process is placing your film on a platform and seeing what happens. They put no more effort or money into promoting your movie than a grocery store does in placing a can of soup on a shelf.
A distributor who doesn’t pay you for the right to distribute your product up front has literally no incentive to promote it (and "minimum guarantees" without an advance payment are by definition no money up front). The distributor is simply working a numbers game. It ha exclusive access to a certain size audience, so long as there are enough titles in its catalog, the distributor will make money over all. They have no financial incentive to promote your film over any other film. As often as not, your film is there to increase traffic for the distributor - that is, to generate more eyes overall so that the distributor can direct the audience to the titles they actually did pay for, and therefore want to make money on. Amazon does this, NetFlix does this, TubiTV does this, YouTube does this, all streamers who don’t pay you a substantial licensing fee up front do it.
The FilmPod inverts the current film distribution paradigm on its head.
The FilmPod is developed to help independent filmmakers distribute their creations without the interference or controls of parasitic industry gatekeepers, opaque distribution arrangements, self-serving distributor "approval" processes, untraceable distributor accounting, or pay periods which take months and years.
The FilmPod gives you direct access to audience, world-wide. It breaks the control distributors have over the market. With your FilmPod, you don’t need any distributor who does not pay you up front. You can reach your audience directly, so you need only deal with a distributor who will pay you fairly for a license to distribute your film, and who puts more money into your pocket for the privilege. You can deal with any party who adds value to your efforts, and you can ignore any who only uses your product for their own gain.
The FilmPod puts you in actual control of your production, and allows you actual knowledge of the viewership it receives, and actual control over how it is branded. It avoids delays in payment of your receipts which are "required" by the usual long and complex distribution pipeline controlled by mainstream distribution.