In a banquet room at Eggspectations, Amy Letourneau, Director of Acquisitions at PBS Distribution, gave a short presentation titled “How Can PBS Distribution Help You?” In PowerPoint detail, the former supervising producer for Antiques Roadshow laid out the case for selling your film to PBS.
PBS Distributing released 310 titles on DVD last year, she said, mostly new material, with some holdovers from the VHS era. (”We’re done with that,” Letourneau said with some relief.) The company sold two million discs and reached one million iTunes downloads. A catalog is mailed to seven million homes and a separate catalog goes to one million educators. In addition to wholesaling to Amazon, Netflix, etc., and specialty niche sites like MuseumStore.com and Acorn, PBS also manages e-commerce sites for itself (ShopPBS.org) and various public stations (like Boston’s WGBH). There is also a sales team hitting at least 70 trade shows a year.
Surprising to hear PBS in the same sentence as XBox and BitTorrent, but the company maintains a digital presence with those outlets, as well as Hulu, Joost, and others, in addition to streaming content at PBS.org.
Letourneau offered PBS Distribution as a way to “extend the film’s life beyond broadcast.” But even if there was no broadcast, there may be a deal. Docs like I.O.U.S.A. are in the catalog but not on the TV schedule. Such titles won’t carry the PBS branding on the packaging, an obviously valuable asset. Letourneau also noted that there is a firewall between the distribution and broadcast sides of PBS. While distribution can offer opinions, it doesn’t decide what is aired.
Letourneau said she was eager to commence discussions “at any point in the project,” positing PBS Distribution as a “turnkey” solution, handling design, menus, warehousing, fulfillment, etc., at no charge.
But filmmakers may continue to sell through their own sites. One woman said she had kept distribution rights on a previous project and “I don’t want it any more. You can have it.” This cued Letourneau to stress the importance to “make it easy” for consumers to find and purchase your work.
To that end, PBS Distribution offers “competitive” royalties, and all its deals are royalty deals. “Typically,” she said for a DVD, “we’re going to pay royalties of 20 percent of gross receipts. We’re paying top line, we’re not including any of our expenses. We’re really in this for a partnership, so we’re paying off of gross receipts. For digital it’s 50 percent, because there’s less costs.”
Asked how successful Silverdocs has been as a PBS pipeline, Letourneau said, “Silverdocs, in my heart, is sort of the Public Television festival, there’s so much stuff here.” Thus, she has “a bunch of meetings” scheduled with filmmakers. “My job as the acquisitions person is to go and talk to filmmakers about how we can work with them, so I’m always talking to people. Always looking, even in my free time.”
Interesting tidbits: In 2003, only half of US homes had DVD players. Today it’s almost 100 percent. While DVD sales are slipping, Blu-Ray is picking up some of the slack, but remains a very small niche, even among PBS customers, accounting for 5-8 percent of sales. However, Blu-Ray viewers expect the disc to be “awesome.”
