I created my EarWolf account to share a little bit of info I have about this movie. I happen to know how this movie ended up on Amazon. I worked for the company that put it on Amazon. The filmmakers used a company called Distribber to help them self-distribute. Distribber and its parent company sadly went bankrupt and no longer exist but I was still working with the company when this movie was released on Amazon. Distribber ended up getting way behind on paying the residuals out to the filmmakers' who did business with them and incurred a lot of debt. This sadly led to a lot of independent filmmakers losing out on thousands of dollars that was owed to them when the company went bankrupt.
The philosophy behind Distribber was to help independent filmmakers have a way to release their movies without going through the traditional distribution model. Distribber could release movies on Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Google Play, Netflix, Hulu, etc., without having to go through a major distribution company. On top of that, the filmmakers took 100% of the profits. They had to pay an upfront fee to cover services that ensured the movie and all its assets (feature, trailer, captions, etc) met the specs of each platform. It all gets very technical and boring as to what all goes into getting a movie into a file that is able to stream on Netflix or Amazon. But every streaming service has different levels of quality that they'll accept and as you all saw with Governor Gabbi, Amazon allows just about anything to be uploaded.
Also, Amazon allows anyone to upload a movie. You need to have a specific deal with Netflix or Apple to release on their platforms (Distribber had these deals) but Amazon will take anything from anyone. If you have a home movie of your child taking her first steps, you can upload it to Amazon for people to rent or buy in HD or SD. You do need captions and they have to be in the right format. You also need to come up with some artwork in Photoshop for the thumbnail that the customer sees. But these are the kind of things Distribber could help with. So June was right when she saw this as just an intimate family film project. Those are the kinds of movies Distribber attracted.
If you had enough money to throw around upfront, you could put your movie on a wide variety of streaming services in many different countries around the world. But Distribber did not offer any marketing services. So most of the movies released on Distribber didn't make any kind of profit, because no one knew these movies existed. It's quite possible that the HDTGM audience made this one of the top 10 most successful Distribber released movies. I only hope Gabbi got to benefit from that and the residuals aren't still tied up in court.
