Filmhub Update 8/25/23: Roku, Fawesome Horror, FreeTV Club, UDU Digital

 I've been absent from this blog for a long time, as life gets in the way. I'm sure you can identify.

Anyway, Filmhub worked out okay for us--the fact that most of my movies made their budgets back elsewhere meant Filmhub was just sort of additional money. There were up and down months, but now everything's settled quite a bit, even Tubi. 

Tubi used to pay quite decent, but our numbers have fallen way off. I'm not sure how much is because our viewership is down or whether the Fox buyout has affected how much we're being paid.

Anyway, that's not the main point of this post. The main point is this:

Couple of months ago I noticed my movies were on a Roku channel called Fawesome Horror. I went and looked at everyone who has licensed my movies--and the channels they claim to represent--and there was no Fawesome horror.

I reached out to Future Today(who owns Fawesome), who told me they got my titles via UDU Digital. (someone who HAD licensed my titles). I reached out to Filmhub to see if they were aware of this. They said UDU was not allowed to do this, as Filmhub had just reached an agreement with Future Today to license to them.

I pulled all my titles from UDU. I warned Filmhub that this kind of behavior by their licensors was VERY concerning. If the licensors aren't telling Filmhub where they're streaming our movies, it would be very easy to hide money from those places.

Not that Filmhub seems interested in auditing anyone, which we'll circle back to in a moment.

Last week I saw another channel being pimped on Roku. The FreeTV Club Channel. I do a quick search, and a couple of my movies are on there. I repeat my licensor check, and nope, nobody lists this as an outlet for their company.

I look to the Developer on Roku, but they are only identified as "Developer 447529083915". That's not a good sign. They don't even put a company name? Seems shady.

I contact Filmhub, who tells me that no one they deal with supplies titles to FreeTV Club.

I go into FreeTV Club's TOS and find the company says they're owned by a Chinese company called Tiny Kernel Ltd. There's an email, so I email them to find out who they licensed my titles through. I tell them that if they don't reply back within 7 business days, I'll file a copyright claim through Roku to get their channel taken down.

If you're a filmmaker, I'd urge you to go see if your movies are on either of these channels, and if so, report them to Filmhub and Roku. It looks like it's actually going to come to litigation, as Fawesome is STILL playing my titles well over a month after being informed they're violating my copyright.

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FILMHUB: GOING DOWNHILL FAST

After the whole Fawesome thing, which I posted about on the FB Protect Yourself... group, I got an email from a producer group who was interested in hearing about my experience with Filmhub. They had heard some disturbing things about them.

I got a conference call with them. One of them was in the UK, another in Los Angeles. I told them my issues, and they said they'd heard the same. They said that it appeared that Filmhub wasn't interested in audting or trying to keep honest any of the licensors they deal with.

Basically, Company X can license your title with nearly no vetting, and then just pay Filmhub whatever they want a month. Filmhub doesn't make them prove anything or account for how often they're streaming your film.

I started deep diving on some of the stats--UDU, who has had some of my movies since December of 2021 has paid me a grand total of...wait for it...$28.

They claim to operate 8 channels, and they're making me on average $1.25 a month?

Some other channels appear to be the same. Some haven't even paid me a dime, and have had my movies for 8 months to a year. 

This is no longer a recipe for success for the filmmaker. It appears Filmhub's strategy is to license as many movies to as many places as possible, hoping for whatever money they can get. There is no oversight. No one is vetting these companies. No one is auditing at all.

I've now told Filmhub to stop licensing any of my titles unless they clear it with me first. I told them that if that was too much trouble, just stop licensing them to any new places. I also told them to pull my titles from quite a few of the companies that weren't paying.

I'd urge any filmmakers using Filmhub to take a good look at some of these channels on Roku and see if their movies have been licensed, and to stop Filmhub from licensing to just ANY channel. UDU is pretty clearly a scam company--I'm positive there is a TOS for Filmhub that says these companies can't license material from Filmhub to third parties, but that's just what they did when they licensed my movies to Future Today, without letting Filmhub know.

If we find enough filmmakers that this has happened to, perhaps it will be time for a class-action lawsuit against these companies...

Filmhub Update 9-9-21

 

So here's the most recent listing of where they're placing my titles. A lot of these I've never heard of, but hey, the more the merrier. Obviously Tubi seems to be the one paying the most at this moment. Looks like Plex pays about 10-20% of what Tubi does for a full watch, but both platforms vary depending on what commercials are being shown, I believe.

This week was a bit of a downer though, as Tubi's number dropped to about 20% of what I was doing for Terrortory 2. Garden of Hedon notched up a bit, doing just a few more bucks than Terrortory 2 on Tubi.

Filmhub also has an excellent filter system where you can have it show you only results from individual platforms. I can tell you that so far, since I started getting titles up on FH, they're estimating I've done about $135 on Plex. That's in about two months. 

Obviously nothing to set the world on fire, but if the other platforms start doing Plex numbers, that stuff will add up. And apart from that, Tubi has done about thirty times that number. The fact that Tubi's slowing down now is concerning though. Wish I had an idea what drove Terrortory 2's numbers through the roof while the others have done pretty mediocre.

Things I'm mulling over. I've had some postcards printed out with the Tubi links on them. Should have had them done for the other two conventions I did, but didn't think of it. I'll take these to the Monstermania show later this month and put them on the tables and stuff.

Filmhub Week 2 of August and Tubi Musings

 

Another report drops, and it's more good news. I gotta tell you, I'm VERY curious to see the earnings report, though it's clearly a ways off. (I haven't seen an earnings report for Q2 yet, even though we're now only about 6 weeks away from the end of Q3)

Any way you look at it, I'm seriously considering Terrortory 3 now. Sure, I had put some thought into it before, having intended to shoot a segment last year that fell through due to Covid, and I've been working on the main script.

I may try to shoot that smaller segment that I'd tried to do, this time in the fall. However, we're at that uncomfortable stage of our existence called "Is the next plague about to hit us?", re Delta variant, so I'm not putting big stock into it yet.

I know a couple of the actors I'd cast have inquired as to the status, but I think the main actress I'd cast has basically written me off. (we went through three false starts on this piece, so I don't blame her)

So I'd have to recast her and find the locations, but otherwise I don't see too many issues other than the complicated VFX I'll have to do.

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Tubi continues to be, as predicted, the star of the AVOD channels. I like how they report too--you can one lump sum for each movie per week, whereas Plex seems to literally give you EVERY individual transaction(so you might see a $.25 if someone watched your whole movie through, and you'll see various smaller amounts every time someone watches parts of your movie).

Some people might like that more, but it really clutters up the insights and makes you scroll through pages and pages of Plex insights. Not that big a deal, just a minor nuisance.

Was nice to see two of my movies listed under the "Recently Added" category. Really hoping they pick up the first Terrortory soon, since the second one is killing it right now, and people watching that might then give the first one a try.

Filmhub update week 1 of August 2021

 

Did a horror convention this past weekend that was a lot of fun. Sure, everybody was masked but it was still nice to be back in that atmosphere and seeing people I haven't seen in years.

Then I come back and see this bit of goodness. The new stats:

The last week of July saw a big uptick, and I think August is only trending down right now because it's first-week. We're now in the four-figure range, most of that coming from Terrortory 2 on Tubi.

I'm not sure why the amount of countries has gone down on that chart though. I might have to ask about that.I'm thinking that it just means in July there was a bunch of countries where one person streamed something that month, and so far, nobody in those countries have streamed anything. (as opposed to thinking those were the amount of countries where the flicks were available to stream, which is what I was thinking)

I continue to experiment on my duplicate-frame problem for Fear of Clowns 2. It's complicated as fuck because of the audio. When you mess with taking 20% of the frames out of the movie, that means sound gets sped up by 20% to match, which either leaves you with a chipmunks audio, or you tell the program to try to keep the same pitch, which still sounds distorted.

Filmhub update End of July 2021

 

This is the background graphic I'd used for "Bounty" on Amazon

So at this point, here's where I'm at. I have seven features PASSED on Filmhub. All of them have been picked up by various places from Tubi to Plex to Vuuzle to Xumo to Gruuvr and a bunch of other I've never heard of.

If you don't know that much about Filmhub, they give you a dashboard that's similar to Amazon's but it shows you what they call "Insights" that tries to give you an idea of how much you're making. However, there are warnings all over so you understand that these are NOT earnings, just estimates.

Since I'm still new to this and haven't gotten an earnings report yet, I can't testify as to how accurate they are, but I'll let you know. At this point, since many of my titles are recently placed and I only started with two movies, I can't draw any conclusions, but this is what my current trajectory looks like:

As you can see, there's now a sharp earnings trend up. You're probably like, "Hey, why'd you blur your earnings?" and I'll tell you--I'm not sure whether Filmhub cares whether I share this information. I have no problem sharing exactly how much money they're making(and the graph shows an approximation so you can guess), but I'm going to go through the pages and see whether there are any issues with sharing this information.

I can tell you that it's not a massive amount yet, but I'm very encouraged by the results, especially because I've done NO advertisements for my films yet other than my various social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, of which I don't have that many followers--I'm a pretty bad social media guy because I just don't have time to spend there that often.

But it's also very encouraging to see how many countries Filmhub gets your titles into, as opposed to Amazon's four.

Another thing I'm trying that may be of interest to filmmakers who only have, say, one move in their belt is this:

If you've been following me for any length of time then you know I pride myself on making entertaining and lengthy "Making Of" segments for my DVD/Blu Ray releases. A while back I had even gotten three of them onto Amazon before the Great Indie Purge.

Well, I've now started submitting them as documentaries through Filmhub. Wasn't sure there would be any interest, so I only submitted one but it cleared and has now been picked up by a couple of platforms including one of my new favorites, Plex. (for me, Tubi and Plex seem to be bringing the most interest/money according to Insights)

So I intend to get some of my others ones up also. Only issue is that I have to make all the various graphic posters and then make trailers for them. (I only made a trailer for one of the three that went up on Amazon, because they weren't required there)

But if you have a feature film and you have a good long Making Of, perhaps consider submitting it for some extra revenue. (and also consider that perhaps someone will stumble upon the Making Of, and seek out your film, so it could be another avenue to discovery of your film)

Also, when I say "long", I suppose it could be short because they do take shorts. 

Anyway, at this point I'd recommend to anyone looking to place titles out there to consider Filmhub. It's definitely opened up some avenues, and I'll continue to update this, including making some educated guesses at exactly how much each view on certain platforms could earn you.

Another long gap / Some More Filmhub stuff

 

So...yeah, I'm the worst blogger in history. Things have been hectic over the past few months.

Here's what happened re: Filmhub

They gave me a bit of the runaround with Garden of Hedon, so I finally just told them to forget it. I just ignored that whole thing for a few months, and someone reached out to me and said "We're just wondering what you want to do with Garden of Hedon?"

I told them, not very nicely, "You failed it and I don't care, just delete it."

They said some things had changed, and that they thought they could work to get it to pass. I said in that case, go ahead. So then I figured, okay, I'll follow through on Bounty.

I got both of those up, and they started getting picked up by outlets. I was encouraged, so I worked double time on every single other one of my films to get them all over there. As of this moment, every film other than Fear of Clowns 2 and Terrortory 1 are available and being placed on platforms.

Those two films are currently pending. FOC2 failed due to duplicate frames because--and this goes way back into technical shit--we shot it in 2005ish on a Panasonic AG-DVX100B at 24 frames per second. At the time, you had to convert it to 30fps to edit it for video, and what that did was duplicate a frame every 4 frames--that's how you got 30 frames out of 24.

There's really only one true way to fix that, and that's to go pull out EVERY fifth frame, stitch it all back together, and then reexport at 24fps.

Am I going to do that? Not at this time. Filmhub's looking into seeing if they can fix it on their end. Weird thing is, we shot FOC1 on the same type of camera(it was an AG-DVX100A) so I'm not sure why they didn't fail that one. It was edited on the exact same computer, exact same edition of Premiere.

I just submitted the first Terrortory, so am waiting to see if it passes.

If you want to see all of the places my movies are currently placed at, check this web page I made in Notepad. It's not pretty, but it's functional.

https://bit.ly/kkfhorrors

So far I don't have any money to report, but I'll let you know. The movies first went up at the end of May, and I think you get quarterly reports. Stay tuned.

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I helped a buddy get his movie placed on Filmhub--he too is pretty sick of Amazon's bullshit. I whipped up his posters and cut him a teaser trailer. You can see that here:

He started getting placed on platforms now. Personally I really enjoy Plex. Found quite a few things I wanted to watch on there, and it streamed fine. Sure, there's commercials, but that doesn't bother me too much as I'm always working anyway. 

Anyway, when I have more to report about actual earnings, I'll let you know if I think it's worth your time to get your movies over there.

Been A While. Let's Talk Filmhub.

 

Okay, you're probably wondering what happened to me, if you've been following this blog at all. When last I posted, I was moving ahead to shoot a film set in an asylum, a balls-to-the-walls action horror.

I was barely two weeks out from filming when I had a major problem. The actor playing the "monster" bailed on me out of the blue. I had already had the outfit custom made to his size(he's like 6 foot 7). I scrambled and found a couple of backups to take his place since nobody could commit to every night I needed him. 

It was demoralizing to say the least. THEN I went to the asylum for last looks and to do some final tests, shoot some promo video/stills. Well, security busted us going in. They were nice but said "Don't come back", and that's when the whole thing died.

I was in a pretty deep funk. I haven't had to cancel a movie shoot that far in prep since BEFORE my first film, Hunting Humans. (we had cast two movies before that that never got off the ground)

For months I was pretty depressed, and not long after that, one of the actors I'd written a major part for died unexpectedly. (pre-Covid) I had been looking for other locations to maybe shoot for, but couldn't find any that were close.

I wheeled and wrote a new segment for Terrortory, figuring maybe I release it on Amazon and eventually it can go into Terrortory 3 if I make it. I cast the segment, started working on props, went out on a location scout back to the Terrortory woods...

and Covid hit. Nobody wanted to let us into their houses to shoot stuff. Actors were leery about coming out. We're on budgets so tiny that we can't possibly follow any protocols like getting people constantly tested.

So I dropped it all. Long story short, I have no plans right now to shoot anything.

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Remember my kinonation posts? How that didn't work out?

Well, they got bought out a while back and are now filmhub, and we've been discussing it on the FB forum that you MUST be a part of if you're a filmmaker. It's a wealth of knowledge and networking stuff.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/699825860525598

The movie I submitted to kinonation, "Bounty", is still in their system and is actually STILL live on FandangoNow even though I'd asked kino to remove it. Anyway, since Amazon pulled "Garden of Hedon" I figured I'd try to submit it to filmhub.

I uploaded the movie, plus like 8 different size one-sheets(seriously, there's some weird fucking aspect ratios they want), and submitted it. Got a QC rejection, asking if I had a higher-res mezzanine file. I did--I had submitted the video file I had used on Amazon--so I found the higher quality version and sent it, submitted it again.

Got a rejection, asking if I had key art with less nudity. This pissed me off, because they HAD the key art on my last submission. Why wasn't it rejected at the same time as the other? If I fix the new issues, will there be ANOTHER rejection for ANOTHER reason?

I'm used to QC's coming as a list of things to fix. You get the list, you fix, you send it in, done. 

So I just dropped the whole thing. I think that was back in early 2020. Recently I was contacted, as they wanted to know what I intended, so I replied back with the exact details about why I wasn't happy. Someone named Alan contacted me and wanted to set up a zoom meeting today.

Well, zoom didn't work for shit, so we just had an old-fashioned chat on the phone. Alan seemed pretty nice, pretty knowledgeable. He gets why I was frustrated, and made some suggestions. The salient points of our conversations were this:

-- I'm most interested in getting some of my flicks onto Tubi, as I've heard it's paying pretty decent as those things go. This goes to the fact that he suggests I provide them new key art for Garden of Hedon because a lot of channels won't pick it up with that poster. Tubi was one he said probably wouldn't bite, and he said imdb TV also wouldn't, and he seemed to think that's becoming a pretty good place to put your flick.

He said they have guys who can mock up a new poster for like $225 and it will get taken out of any future payments. That's a fair price for key art, but the quality isn't as high as my guy, so I'll probably just get him to do a new one if I can think up a decent concept. I mean, the hot chick on the poster obviously brings the views, so what's the next option? Not sure yet.

--I said maybe I'd let them reopen "Bounty" and see if they can license it. He took a look at what I'd provided and let me know the bad news about THAT key art. You need about 5% of edge for your title in case it gets cut off by whatever channel or venue it shows on. You can see the problem in my "Bounty" poster:

See how it runs right to the edges? You need some room. Now, I don't have the original psd files of this from my guy and I don't wanna bother him to redo it, so I'm just gonna manually fix it. Will take some work but I can do it.

--I asked about Insights on their web site because I had seen someone else asking about them. They're sort of rough estimations on how much your flicks have earned, but someone online had said they were WAY higher than their actual earnings, so what use was the Insights if it were that far off. He more or less said it's their way of trying to be transparent, but it can definitely differ because it can't take into account refunds and other things that might happen. I don't have enough info yet to say much about it yet, but I'll let you know.

Hey, I'll try to get back to updating this blog on occasion. Did I mention that I shot a music video a couple months back for my buddy's band? You can see it here: