Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Your Prime Video account is about to be flooded with some excellent ‘90s television. Starting this week, full runs of Roseanne, 3rd Rock from the Sun, Cybill, Grace Under Fire, A Different World, and Grounded for Life are going to become available to stream. It’s all part of an exclusive deal between Amazon Video Direct and FilmRise.
Both Roseanne and 3rd Rock from the Sun became available on Prime Video August 1. However, according to FilmRise CEO Danny Fisher, another classic series will be added to the platform every week. “So we have A Different World, Grace Under Fire, Cybill, Grounded for Life basically roughly a week apart,” Fisher said.
This is big news for fans of ‘90s television. Though viewers can always find Friends, Frasier, and Seinfeld, a large swatch of classic ‘90s sitcoms have been missing from streaming for a while. Four shows in this new deal, Cybill, Grace Under Fire, A Different World, and Grounded for Life, have never been available to stream before now. FilmRise licensed the rights to these shows from Carsey-Werner. It’s an exciting announcement for viewers but it’s also one that reveals how Amazon is subtly yet powerfully changing the streaming game.
FilmRise started working with Amazon five years ago, starting with Amazon’s Disc on Demand ecommerce service. The film acquisition and distribution company has a large library, holding the rights to titles as diverse as indie Sundance gems and mainstream hits to offbeat docu-series. FilmRise works closely with Netflix and Hulu as well, but the launch of Amazon Video Direct last year changed the way the company distributed many of its titles.
“When we launched AVD last year, I think Danny really realized what it meant and how it could help his business,” Eric Orme, Head of Amazon Video Direct, said. “He was someone who jumped on it pretty early, had very early success, and his business has just grown phenomenally since then. It’s great to see.”
Amazon Video Direct (AVD) is a self-distribution platform that was launched last year. It’s essentially a version of YouTube’s uploading model for filmmakers. As long as a title meets Amazon’s guidelines and contains captions or subtitles, there’s no charge to upload a film or TV series to the platform. The uploader can then select one of four viewing options for their title — rent, buy, available on Prime Video, as an add-on subscription, or available on Amazon with ads. For the average content creator, AVD may feel a bit overwhelming. However, for filmmakers and content distributors, it has the potential to be revolutionary.
“When Amazon Video Direct came along, this was a logical extension with our relationship with Amazon, which has always been very supportive of what we were doing,” Fisher said. “We have great relationships with other platforms. We work with Netflix, Hulu, and many, many other platforms. The difference with AVD is we control everything. We create the artwork, we create the descriptions, we create the thumbnails, and we literally deliver it via the internet.”
AVD provides users with a dashboard so they can track how their shows and movies are doing in real time. The service even shows whether audiences are watching entire series or falling off after a certain point. This transparency has helped give FilmRise more insight into what audiences want to see and what titles they should acquire.
Fisher also praised Prime Video for being a “democratic platform.” “People watch what other people like,” he said. “So if people are liking something, more people are going to watch it because it’s more discoverable. People rate the movies and TV shows, they write comments, they watch it, and the more something is watched, the more something is liked, the more discoverable it is on Amazon, and the more successful. That enables us to actually find and identify content and also experiment with content.”
This viewer-generated feedback is especially important to Fisher and FilmRise. Though the company does have critically praised titles with big stars, it’s difficult to speculate how a more niche show like Forensic Files would perform on streaming. “If you put a film on Amazon Prime that people like, it’s going to have more traffic than a bad film with major stars. That differentiates [Prime Video] from major platforms that are really driven by who’s in it,” Fisher said. “With AVD and the Amazon platform, it’s pretty simple: We look for content that we believe people are going to like as opposed to having to have certain ingredients.”
“The great thing about our platform is that we don’t actually have to decide,” Orme said when asked why these six ‘90s sitcoms were selected for Prime Video. “We make it really easy for content creators and distributors to put their content in front of our large global audience. We give them a lot of flexibility to choose where or which global marketplace model. We give them a lot of transparency so they can actually learn from what customers are engaging in.”
AVD has faced some criticism, especially regarding its Film Festival Stars program. If a film that was shown at Sundance is uploaded to AVD, the filmmaker will receive a onetime bonus of $100,000 for narrative titles and $75,000 for documentaries. “The way that we’ve kind of approached it is that it’s kind of a take it or leave it kind of offer,” Orme said. “We aren’t trying to get every filmmaker through our program with this. We’re trying to reach filmmakers who may not have access to a full-service distribution deal. We believe as a company that the theatrical window is really important to the industry, and so for AVD we made sure to have some kind of program that could support that.”
AVD’s future will certainly involve the film festival circuit. In March, Amazon acquired 12 Sundance films through the Film Festival Stars program, six of which came from FilmRise. “We received a very overwhelming response at Sundance even though that was the first time we ever talked about it. At SXSW, at Tribeca, it’s just continued to grow,” Orme said. “Next month we’ll be at the Toronto Film Festival to continue to show our support for independent filmmakers.”
When asked what he thought the future of independent film is, Orme focused on how important it is for filmmakers to have transparency. “I think that what’s been neat about a platform like AVD is that we’ve made it really easy for these filmmakers to find that premium audience that they’ve been looking for.”
There are a lot of headaches that come with distributing a movie — negotiating a deal, worrying about the marketing, fretting over audience opinions. According to Orme, AVD gives filmmakers a transparent distribution channel all while letting them keep the rights to their work. “We feel like we’ve done a good job of breaking down some of the barriers that maybe caused some friction before and are excited about continuing to do that,” he said.
Orme did not disclose how many filmmakers have used AVD. However, he did say the service has a large base of filmmakers that use it all over the world and that is continues to grow every day. He also said that AVD has generated billions of minutes of content. A not insignificant amount of that content likely comes from FilmRise.
“We are currently generating over 5 billion minutes annually for AVD,” Fisher said. That translates to over 83 million hours. “That’s quite a lot of viewing power. We expect that to double over the next 12 months.”
As for how much money FilmRise has made using Amazon’s self-distribution model, Fisher disclosed that the company is currently making an eight figure annual revenue from the platform. He expects that to increase to the mid eight figures by the end of the year. “We’re placing the biggest bet on AVD. We’re spending the most amount of time on AVD,” Fished said. “We expect that situation to expand.”
