Jonathan Marlow has spent much of the last two years trying to persuade filmmakers to put their most valuable products on the Net. On some days, the task feels a little like pulling teeth.
Marlow, a cinematographer and Amazon.com alumnus, is director of content acquisition at Greencine, a small San Francisco-based Netflix rival that is increasingly offering online access to films alongside its rent-by-mail business.
Unlike most video-on-demand providers, he’s all but ignored Hollywood. Greencine launched the on-demand service in September 2003 with a small independent documentary called “Mau Mau Sex Sex,” about a pair of exploitation filmmakers from the 1950s, and he’s continued to focus on indie productions since.
For now, Marlow says it just isn’t worth working closely with the big studios. Hollywood is too in love with its own soaring DVD revenues to risk supporting an attractive Internet alternative, and it needs to be shown that video-on-demand services can make money, he said.
“DVD revenues are so out of proportion to every other aspect of this business,” Marlow said. “There has to be some proven revenue in the space before the big studios will even think about dismantling a model that has proven so lucrative for them.”
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