Filmies
Filmies helps film fans discover and watch films.
Filmies is about helping users discover films that match their personality, mood and taste.
The average film fan takes 22 minutes to decide what film to watch*. Filmies aims to reduce that to get film fans doing what they want to do; sit down and watch!
Filmies gives users trusted film recommendations from people they know, who have opinions they value. This provides credibility; each recommendation comes from a real person with a face and name, rather than a complex algorithm.
Users have the option to click to third party websites to purchase, stream or download the film.
*Independent Filmies research panel of 85 film fans.
John is a film fan and wants to watch a film right now with his housemate.
They begin to search the internet for inspiration, wanting to discover a film that exactly matches their tastes, personalities, mood and situation.
Getting to the point where they actually start watching a film can be a long time. Filmies aims to help in this situation.
The Filmies app contains a community-curated set of data tags applied to films. These tags then enable discovery in search. Tags consist not only of genre but also characteristic, mood, emotion, description. So users can discover a film by a much broader range of tags.
Filmies focuses on the film watcher, not the reviewer.
Filmies has a large social component which provides users like John with film recommendations from REAL PEOPLE, not algorithms. People who are genuine film fans like John, whose opinion John trusts and who like similar films to him. No algorithms and no bias. John can bring all of his film conversations online. John is able to maintain control over the types of recommendations he receives, as he receives only recommendations of the other filmies that he chooses to follow. If John doesn’t like the recommendations he is receiving from another user, he can simply unfollow them.
Filmies also aims to eliminate a lot of the ‘noise’ around film recommendations. The concept is that users simply recommend films to others; an entirely different concept than ‘reviewing’ which ultimately may end up with neither a positive nor a negative recommendation of the film.
Filmies launched a website for Beta testing in October 2013. It currently has 220 registered users, predominantly a combination of friends and associates of the founders, as well as a number of key influencers identified on other social networks. This includes film bloggers, writers etc and other keen film enthusiasts interested in the filmies concept.
For our iOS app launch (for which this campaign relates) we will use our small but engaged following as an initial testing base for filmies, as well as a broader group of testers. This will enable us to build the tag database prior to hard launch.
To date, web design and development has been provided by external parties, and funded by filmies’ founders incomes. Filmies also raised a small loan from the School for Start Ups.
Filmies would initially has two revenue streams;
1) Affiliate / referral fees – Filmies generates revenue from referring sales to third parties (between 4-10% per sale or £4-£9 per new registered member for registration services). This revenue model has already been activated; filmies has registered affiliate relationships with Blinkbox, Amazon, iTunes, MovieMail.
2) Advertising – Filmies sells advertising space in users’s feeds to film promoters. Advertisers can be targeted based on users specific film recommending activity. For example, a trailer for a new Ridley Scott sci-fi film can be posted in the feed of all filmies who have recommended either a film directed by Ridley Scott OR all filmies who have recommended a film in the Sci-fi genre in the past X months / years.
Filmies will also likely sell a small number of relevant and targeted adverts in the new weekly newsletter emails.
A number of possibilities are available to filmies for future revenue generation. We’d like to be a content provider, linking directly with independent film makers to offer a platform for distribution. Currently these future revenue streams are in ideation stage only.
Additionally partnering with cinema chains to offer ticket-booking facilities for new releases is a target revenue stream.
Filmies has made significant progress throughout 2014 on a relatively limited budget. However we need additional funding for our iOS app development ready for launch later in 2015.
Seedrs proceeds will fund:
– Essential development and enhancement of the filmies app.
– Promotional animated videos outlining how to use filmies.
– Execution of digital marketing / SEO strategy (focused towards launch).
– Execution of physical marketing strategy i.e. promotional adverts / flyers / banners etc.
– Ongoing initial operational costs inc. hosting / server fees, email fees etc.