Doubling down on independent filmmakers, Tribeca Films expands distribution pipeline to Kanopy and Kinema today utilizing cinema as a catalyst for education and cultural expansion. In an exclusive, multiyear partnership with Kanopy, the digital streaming media lending platform for libraries, universities and other institutions, Tribeca Films will initially offer 50 films from independent filmmakers with 25-50 new films added per year.
In a strategic move to reach new audiences with creative content, the output deal puts Tribeca Festival’s award-winning films in front of a swath of younger, university-aged students and diverse library card holding members via Kanopy for free while Kinema’s direct-to-consumer exhibition platform allows a new venue for live and on-demand screenings with a “Pay What You Wish” feature allowing users to pay to watch on a sliding scale.
“Kanopy has a couple of pretty different audiences, due to how we’re experienced in academic libraries and on campus, versus at public libraries in local communities,” said Jason Tyrrell, EVP of Content at OverDrive, the company behind Kanopy. “On campus, the benefit is having more well-rounded students and thinkers–films and series on Kanopy are used in curriculum, and that’s been shown to directly and positively impact learning outcomes. Culturally it means cinema hopefully continues to be relevant for young people discovering what they want to do in the world.”
Kanopy, the slightly under-the-radar brand name platform available to use for free and without ads to anyone who has a library card, acts as a media lending platform with a subscription model that allowmunities to scale the content they provide to their patrons and students through a portion of their yearly collection development budgets. Kanopy is partnered with institutions in more than 35 countries and works with over 4,000 libraries and 158 million library cardholders. OverDrive, Kanopy’s parent company also operates library applications Libby, Sora, and TeachingBooks housing a sizable institutional collection of ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, comics and manga.
With a mission-driven alignment between Tribeca Films and Kanopy whose tagline is “films that matter,” Tyrrell said the partnership just made sense. “We’re a Certified B Corp, so operating with sustainability in mind for our team members, for filmmakers and for libraries, that’s all really critical. But the core of it for me is democratizing audiences’ access to movies, to books, basically to stories that matter, regardless of where you live, your level of formal education, or how much money you have in your pocket. I firmly believe film changes lives, and the right film, in front of the right person, can change the world.”
The first collection of films available on Kanopy are 2022 Tribeca Festival Best Narrative winner Good Girl Jane, Mary Heilmann: Waves, Roads, & Hallucinations, A Bronx Tale, In Her Name, and others, making this curation deeply impactful for creators.
“I don’t think it’s news, necessarily, that it’s a difficult moment to find distribution for independently produced films,” said Sarah Elizabeth Mintz, the filmmaker behind Good Girl Jane. “It’s always been complicated and required strategy and effort, but the climb has steepened greatly, it seems, recently. We’re in a time, post pandemic, where people still haven’t quite returned to the movie theaters as their primary venue for watching new films.”
With brand name streaming platforms’ inability to program and provide the full gamut of curated content cravings for consumers, the wider opportunities and revenue streams that come with mainstream distribution also shrink for independent filmmakers. Expanding output to non-traditional platforms like Kanopy and Kinema could be a slow burn but with Kanopy’s massive audience reach, the long-run could provide valuable streams of revenue for niche films and the marginalized human stories those films tell. “Part of what makes non-theatrical or institutional distribution so unique is that a single transaction could represent one viewer, or three hundred, or three thousand, so no two streams are the same,” said Tyrrel.
While the full deal terms are undisclosed, “each party is comfortable” with the revenue projections the multiyear deal provides. Tribeca Films portal can be accessed via Kanopy on desktop, mobile (iOS and Android), tablet, Roku and Apple TV.
“I am thrilled that Good Girl Jane will be streaming on Kanopy. I think the film will find a lot of its people on the site. I use the platform often,” said Mintz. “Sometimes I just scroll, as one does, but sometimes I go to it when I know there is a great film that I missed in theaters or that I was reminded of in conversation. I remember first learning about the service in 2017 or so when I was living in Los Angeles and I’d just gotten a new Los Angeles Public Library card. I didn’t have a lot of disposable income at the time and I would watch two or three movies a week on Kanopy any free minute I had between jobs.”
In January, Tribeca Enterprises, the owner and operator of the Tribeca Festival in partnership with Giant Pictures, launched the Tribeca Films distribution label under the leadership of Tribeca CEO Jane Rosenthal and Giant general manager, Nick Savva, who has been collaborating with Tribeca for two decades. “The thing I am most excited about is that this is free for consumers,” explained Savva. “There aren’t any public goods anymore socially in this country–it is sort of alchemy that you can get access to this very high quality content for free and there is actually a business model that someone has figured out.”
* Citing cost concerns, The New York Public Library along with Brooklyn and Queens Public Libraries no longer offer cardholders free access to video streaming platform Kanopy.
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