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Celebrating

25 years

December 31st 2024 (25 years since the soft launch) –  February 2nd 2025 (25 since the hard launch).

Netribution arrived at the end of 1999, excited by the possibility of emerging digital video and the World Wide Web to democratise film production and distribution.

The means of video production are now in the hands of the masses, with over 7.2 billion smart phones in the world. But video distribution is more centralised than it ever was.

25 years on it’s impossible not to ask, did we just end up making ad-funded TV cheaper and less-regulated? Was the revolution just a mix-of union-busting and the end of scheduled broadcasting – in place of overworked/underpaid influencers, algorithmic timelines, and on-demand from a far smaller selection than your average Blockbuster store?

Cover of Netribution Issue 62.
2022-2025

CiviCRM Theme Architecture

CiviCRM is the world’s biggest open source, license-free CRM designed for non-profits, civic society and the arts. From Wikipedia’s fundraising and bulk email engine to the Royal Television Society’s event ticketing – Civi supports countless org’s missions. But the interface hasn’t changed much since 2008. In a major re-architechting project, we built a new theme framework, with four revamped, accessible themes. With the arival of CiviStandalone in 2025, the new theme engine can support a new generation of integrations.

2024
Screengrab from Mova with two large buttons: Register an individual rights-owner and Register a legal entity-rights-owner
2020-2022

MOVA: video fingerprints, with composable moderation & verified credentials on a decentralised database

Monetizing Open Video Assets (MOVA) was built with Sprillow , and is a working proof-of-concept Mac, Linux and Windows app to generate and manage a community-run database of film distribution, marketing and sales metadata, matched with their ISCC fingerprints using composable moderation. ISCC is a new ISO standard for a self-generated media identifier, like ISBN/ISAN but free, and without a central registry.

2022
2020-2022

RevenueSha.re: protocol and toolset for automated profit-share agreements and distributions.

RevenueSha.re is an open way to structure, set and pay out royalties, deferrals and profit-shares. It includes RSL, a human and machine readable syntax for structuring multi-step pro-rate and pari passu profit-shares; Cascade, a Svelte-based drag-and-drop RSL builder, and CiviSplit, a suite of applications integrating Cascade, to store, calculate and payout RSL agreements.
Screengrab of a payout report for a Revenue Sharing Language agreement
2022
Screengrab for post-viewing screen.
Screengrab of Donation post-viewing screen for I Am Breathing documentary.
2011-2012

The Micro-Major: CRMs, self-distribution and making a virtuous circle.

Creative Scotland gave Scottish Documentary Institute £100,000 to build with Netribution an open source toolset to empower indpendent producers to become a ‘micro-major’, mixing self-distribution with CRM for marketing and crowd-funding, supporting the path for self-sufficiency. It supported the release of three feature docs, hiring a Producer of Marketing and Distribution, and a series of blog posts.
2012
2010-2011

Big Open Playlister

With a grant from Creative Scotland, this was the first time we could pay developers – and this project suffered from epic scope-creep as a result. What started as a playlist-builder for public screens using RSS targetting the open source Miro Player, became an interface to programme video and rich animation across multiple screens at once, with time-synched metadata and multiple media library sources. BOP is part of an open source patent-defence database.
2011
Diagram for the Valid project
Diagram for the Valid project
2009-2010

Video Access Licensing and Identity Database

VALID.ac was an Innovate UK-funded project that didn’t complete due to lack of match-funding and the project lead’s sister getting terminal cancer. It brought together the Leeds International Film Festival, Kendra and YUVA Glasgow (partner on Living Cinema, below) – and was Netribution’s first attempt to articulate a film architecutre using a database of film metadata to separate platforms (e.g. cinemas or online distribution channels) and producers (e.g. rights holders and filmmakers). This concept continued in the MOVA project (above), which used the development of the fediverse to take it a step further.
2010
2008-2009

Living Cinema

In June 2008 Netribution Ltd won feasibility study funding to explore how to enhance the live experience of filmgoing. The project, Living Cinema, was run with Francis Morgan-Giles, Eelyn Lee Productions and Yuva, culminating in test performances at Thomas Tallis School in South London and the Star and Shadow Cinema in Newcastle.
2009
How To Fund Your Film: The Film Finance Handbook cover
2007-2008

Film Finance Handbook: global edition

Written by Adam P Davies, Leslie Lowes and Nicol Wistreich, with 40 experts from six continents. Listing over 1,000 funds and incentives in 50 countries, we think this was the most comprehensive book on film finance yet published. It sold over 4,000 print copies before moving to digital-only.
2008
2004-2008

Netribution 2.0

Inspired by Shooting People’s success at open publishing with paid moderators, plans began at the end of 2004 for a new open access Netribution. After attempts with a custom CMS, Mambo and finally Joomla, it launhced in January 2006. Anyone could create an account & profile, then publish film-related articles: with 1000s of articles published from 100s of people.
2007
Flyer for the UK Film Finance Guide
2002-2004

Shooting People and Film Finance

When Netribution.co.uk ran out of money and steam, Nic moved to the email-list Shooting People who’d just borrowed £30k, and brought Netribution’s film funding guide with him. He built the paid membership site, helped grow membership from 10k to 40k, and turned the funding guide into a book, which sold 4,000 copies in its first year, mostly to SP members.
2002
1999-2002

Netribution.co.uk

Co-founded with Tom Fogg, Netribution was a weekly web magazine and email newsletter that ran for 99 issues alongside extensive free filmmaker resources. The first edition (of which there are no known copies) went live on December 31st 1999 and led with the news of AOL and Time Warner’s merger. Each week had a couple of interviews, reports, festival reports, comic columnists Andrew Cousins and Michael Whiner, general film industry news and James MacGregor’s Northern Exposure for British film outside of London.

In addition the site had 1000s of pages of free contacts, film statistics, film funding info, festival listings, links, contacts and company profiles. It ran for 99 weekly issues, thru the dotcom crash and 9/11 until February 2002.

Netribution went live on December 31st 1999 as a weekly magazine and filmmakers’ encyclopedia, written in plain HTML, and growing to over 2,500 pages. It ran for 99 weekly issues, thru the dotcom crash and 9/11 until February 2002. Everything else started from this, and it was the work of many people, most of whom never got paid.
  • Ran UK office for filmfestivals.com
  • Co-produced Digital Asset Management for Informa Media.
  • Co-hosted London Screenings in 2001.
  • First in Google for ‘film funding’ and ‘uk film industry’, for ‘film industry’.
Cover of Netribution Issue 62.
1999