So I've had my flick Bounty on Kinonation for over two years. They claim they will send you a "quarterly" report.
Not sure what quarterly means to them, but I didn't receive ANY report until I contacted them about 16 months after the movie was live. Roger from Kinonation sent me an email claiming surprise that I hadn't received one.
One got sent to me. Said we'd earned like $15. Whoopee, lemme take a vacation.
Also, they're still using this "beta" website three years after they launched. WTF is that?
So in April of this year I still haven't gotten another quarterly report. One report in over 2 years.
I send Roger an email asking them to remove my title from their catalog. After all, their web site and contract claim you can "cancel anytime".
It's now June, and I haven't gotten a reply from Roger. I got a new email saying they've revamped their web site. It's not the beta anymore. I went and looked at the site. It looks a little better, but now you can't even see what outlets they've placed the movie in.
Tonight I sent an email to Roger to let him know he has 30 days to remove Bounty or I'll be contacting my lawyers about it.
My final opinion on Kinonation is DO NOT SUBMIT YOUR MOVIE TO THEM. While I wouldn't say it's a scam, it's clearly not something that is organized very well. It doesn't appear to make much money, and its dashboard and reporting is TERRIBLE, especially when compared against Amazon.
Maybe someday they'll get their shit together, but since they haven't done much in over three years, I wouldn't count on it.
UPDATE: Roger contacted me the day after I posted this to tell me he would remove Bounty from their catalog, and that the probably reason that we didn't receive any other quarterly reports was that there was no additional money.
That may or may not be true, as I told him, because I never received a quarterly report until I complained to them, and then they DID deliver a report...and it had money on it. So the reason I hadn't received a quarterly report in roughly 6 quarters WAS NOT because there wasn't money to report in that instance.
So they ask that you just believe there's no additional money.
When you deal with distributors, it doesn't matter whether there's no money. They are still bound to deliver quarterly reports for at least the first couple of years(the contract you sign typically tells how long they have to deliver them...in the case of my first film, "Hunting Humans", the contract stipulated that they would deliver quarterly reports for the first three years, and then after that quarterly unless there were no new sales to report.)
In this case, from a distributor online that doesn't have any kind of dashboard that gives you any information whatsoever about what's happening with your film, I'd expect to get a quarterly report regardless.
Either way, I repeated that I wanted the movie off, and he says it should take up to 7 days. I'd be lying if I didn't say I'm a little worried about them perhaps still trying to license my movie to some tiny distributor without me knowing.
I'll keep my eyes open for any reports of this, because if it happens then it means a big lawsuit against them.
