J. Horton, Filmmaker/Youtuber/Podcaster: If you are a filmmaker and you want to upload directly to Amazon, you cannot do it for subscription based, the SVOD.
Film Courage: What do you love about Amazon Prime?
J.: I love that Amazon, sometimes that people think I suffer from Stockholm Syndrome defending Amazon, but they opened up independent film distribution in a way that it had never in history been done. Amazon Prime made it possible for an independent filmmaker in Indiana making a six thousand dollar backyard horror movie to distribute their film and have it on the new release wall right next to Fast and Furious, that is cool. Initially it was paying pretty good. I don’t remember what the first rates were but I think it was 15 or 20 cents an hour, which some people say that sounds low, but you can make a lot of money at 20 cents an hour on a streaming platform on a platform like Amazon where there’s whatever 90 million users watching. I think it was incredible. I think they made mistakes. I think the biggest mistake Amazon made was there was no curation. Now I keep talking about how great it is that there was no gatekeeping or no curation but I think there needed to be a base level of curation. They were taking anything and things that weren’t even movies. They were taking shorts, people putting up YouTube-style videos and I think that all of that inappropriate content is what really started the downfall of it. Some people will say that it was always planned, that they were always going to get rid of indie and maybe they were but I think it at least would have held on longer had they not been putting out YouTube videos. There’s a filmmaker that I know that was putting his stuff right from YouTube onto there and calling them documentaries but they were not, they’re vlogs…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
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BIO:
Filmmaker, Youtube Creator and Producer of many feature films and documentaries, J. Horton is known for boldly crossing genre boundaries and ‘getting it done.” In addition to his prolific work in the film industry, he’s gained a lot of traction in recent years as a Youtube personality. His Channel The J. Horton is a go to spot for filmmakers wanting to learn more about the business side of filmmaking.
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