Distribution Does Not Equal Marketing and Sales

Reid Rosefelt of IndiePix went on a near rant about the recent semantics used to describe the distribution transactions involving Youtube and some of their features. He makes it clear: "distribution does not equal marketing and sales." Check out his passionate, yet self-promotional piece below:



"The distribution business is a very valuable part of the American economy. Railroads are in the distribution business. UPS is in the distribution business. Trucking companies are in the distribution business. People that make movies are not in the distribution business. Let’s talk about the difference in detail.

Distribution happens when you move something from point A to point B. The way you do that, if you are a trucking company, can be very sophisticated. You can have major loading docks and distribution shipping points. You can have full load and partial load (LTL – Less Than Full Load) shipments. You can back the truck right up to the dock at its destination. In the US economy, physical distribution is so efficient that in many respects and for many product types, it rivals electronic distribution. (It is a lot cheaper and even faster to ship a terabyte drive than to try to ftp the same quantity of data to a partner, for example!) And your product (a DVD for example) can appear simultaneously in stores and shops and in mailboxes uniformly around the country.

This totally has parallels in the electronic network business. You can have points of origination. Along the way their can be routers, and switchers. You can have repeaters and intermediate storage points (like Akamai). And yes, your program can appear simultaneously on screens everywhere around the country (where the bandwidth is high enough and demand doesn’t overwhelm switching capacities).

But that’s not what the filmmaker means when he says: “I want distribution for my picture.” The DIY people are the worst at this! “You can distribute your film yourself!” they say. I guess if what they mean is that you can call up Fex Ex and ask them to pick up a disk from you and take it to your Aunt Mary, that’s right. Or I suppose you could drive it over to her on a Sunday afternoon. But that’s not really what the filmmaker meant. Or wanted."

The rest can be found HERE.