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Banking on the crowd

Voice of the people Anand Chandrasekaran and Shayan Reddy

Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations? That would ring a bell to a Wikipedian. What, other than being most popular sites in their own respect, is common between Amazon, Digg and the quintessential Wikipedia? “The wisdom of crowds”, a term we hear with increasing frequency, is used to achieve collective accuracy through “crowdsourced” information. To leverage the wisdom of crowds, the task of voting, predicting or contributing information is outsourced to an open forum. The wisdom of crowds is applied in almost every field right from Piqqem that gauges the stock market to Metacritic that reviews entertainment (movies, games, music).

Indee.tv has moved one step beyond providing reviews/opinions, to build a fine-tuned model for independent films, using the wisdom of crowds. A San Francisco-based, angel-funded Web 2.0 company founded in late 2008, Indee.tv currently has the largest assemblage of independent short and feature films on the Internet. At its core, Indee offers filmmakers a collective social network, provides a low overhead distribution medium and democratises promotion through direct participation of the audience.

When a film is sent to the film festival circuit, it goes through certain steps: the person curating films at the festival either likes the film or, the filmmaker and his producer are able to influence the film’s acceptance at the festival. A large studio’s representative likes the film at the festival. They budget millions for marketing and release it to the public. Either the three people who made a decision on this film were right and it becomes a huge success or it fails at the box office.

When a film is put up on Indee, the likely steps it goes through: it’s listed as the first film on the “Newly Added Films” page. A couple of people watch the film, like it and hit the “Rave” button. All their friends on Indee are notified of the raves and they in turn rave about it. When the number of raves crosses a threshold, the film automatically gets on the “Popular Films” page. People from the industry realise that a significant subset of users raved this film. They can now choose to buy the rights to this film and spend any amount of money to promote a movie, which has proved its popularity in a democratic way, rather than an individual guessing what would be popular.

The Indee team is one with a balance of filmmaking, community building and technology backgrounds, with an apposite advisory board. “Indee began over a late night conversation between couple of friends in New York,” says Sharan Reddy, founder and CEO of Indee. Since the successful launch of the beta programme at the San Francisco State University, Indee.tv has seen impressive growth in site acceptance and traffic. This got the ear of FutureCinema in the UK, with whom Indee has tied up for some live screenings.

“The first Indee live screening event in San Francisco was very successful, with a full house attending. The idea is to have similar screenings in cities all around the US and globally,” says Anand Chandrasekaran, a member of the board of directors of Indee.

Word of the screenings has gotten around and Indee has been approached by two of the biggest entertainment venue owners in SF to recreate the event at their venues. As per discussions with leading film schools, film-makers and independent film audience, there is no significant service available today which targets the problems of independent film distribution in the manner that Indee.tv does, thereby taking it ahead of the league of social communities that only create short-term trends.

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