Crackle Launch
Friday, July 20th, 2007 by Pat
Lou and Aaron’s film, “Socks,” was featured today in the animation channel on Crackle!
Sony launched Crackle on Monday, a new video sharing site born from the ashes of Grouper and aimed at the minor league filmmaking crowd. They plan to use the site to find and develop talent in addition to creating a more upscale online viewing experience. The place looks nice enough but the flash interface feels a little slow and clunky sometimes. The quality of videos is superb though and many of the tools are well thought out.
It will be interesting to see if people actually migrate over to Crackle looking for better films or if they’re happier rolling around in the shit on YouTube. I have to say the grungy online video giant is growing on me but I’m enticed by the attention Crackle seems to be giving to their filmmakers. They could potentially build a good community around some happy and productive creative types and Sony has deep enough pockets that they can stand to spend money for a year or two while they build up their talent base.
The revenue sharing agreement isn’t too impressive but it’s better than nothing and maybe more notorious filmmakers are getting better deals than our crew. The payoff in our deal ranges from $150 for 50,000 views to $5450 for 5 million views. At best, that works out to well under half a cent per view. I’m not sure if filmmakers are going to see that as a kind gesture or an insult but I guess most of us just want people to watch our films.
YouTube is king for now but I still prefer the lines sketched out by the Participatory Culture Foundation and their Democracy/Miro project. I like the idea of independent producers manning their own tiny web stations and sending feeds out into the world to be picked up by a variety of readers. Broadcast television for the masses. UHF on the internet.