Getting your indie film onto iTunes

Plenty of distributors talk about putting your independent film onto iTunes.  They wax lyrical about how good they are at it, give estimated timelines .. talk about what deliverables you need .... but if you ask for a single example where they've successfully done it before then you just hear silence.

The reason why is fairly simple - Apple simply doesn't want to work with small distributors .. they want to work with large aggregators who provide a known quality of product.  To be blunt - they can't be bothered working with independent films.     But there are solutions.

Selling a Short Film in Foreign Markets

We all know that Short Films are a very  hard sell. So when I heard that David Gould had sold the Italian Pay TV rights to his short film 'Awaken', I had to find out more.

The deal was truly an international affair - it was brokered by Premium Films in Paris who was contacted by a buyer from Italy who had seen his film at the 'Short Film Corner' at Cannes. The Pay TV deal also covered Monte Carlo, Malta, Switzerland ... and even part of Slovenia!

This gives the first clue - I suspect that the first key to selling the international rights to a film involves not sitting around at home. So this led to the first question - how his exposure in Cannes helped him: