Amazon today announced an overhaul on their payout that will absolutely destroy our ability to make any significant money on movies. Personally it probably means I'm going to lose money on Terrortory 2 unless I seek out other venues, and the problem with that is that many of those venues don't want your film if it's already playing on Amazon.
Amazon used to pay a measly $.15 per hour of your movie streamed, but it could add up to okay money if you keep your budgets very low.
Now, unless you stream over 6,000,000 minutes then you will be paid a pauper's $.06 per hour for your film. Roughly a 60% cut to their rates.
If you can stream over 6,000,000 minutes then you get a dime per hour.
If you can stream 30,000,000--that's 30 million minutes--then you can get back up to the $.15 per hour.
All of my movies combined from when I put them up nearly two years ago wouldn't add up to that.
So do we have any other options? As far as I can see, no. There is no other way to get your movie out there as easily and with the accounting transparency that Amazon has. Distributors will demand a lot of things that will cost you more money(QC--quality control--can bury you in thousands of dollars of additional debt)--and they probably won't offer you an advance.
Which means you probably won't see any money.
The only other thing I'd now consider is an aggregator who could submit to places like Hulu, Netflix and Itunes, but that costs upfront money for EACH place you submit to, and doesn't guarantee you placement on the venue. Also, even if you're accepted to, say, Netflix...you don't know what they're going to offer you, and you now have to pass their quality control standards.
Wish I had better news, believe me.
You can read the full text of their new terms here:
https://videocentral.amazon.com/home/help?topicId=G202037410&ref_=avd_sup_G202037410
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