No, this isn't that Aaron Sorkin thing.
Film on Facebook, a project that the social network first announced in conjunction with this spring's South by Southwest Festival, will be debuting its first film on Thursday.
The movie, called One Track Mind, is a surf-theme movie created by Woodshed Films, the production company behind a number of outdoors-focused productions, including several created by crunchy singer-songwriter Jack Johnson. It'll be available on Facebook Thursday and Friday, and a live-chat session with director Chris Malloy will take place on Thursday evening.
The film and video chat session will be broadcast using live-streaming platform Kyte. The whole project has been sponsored by apparel companies Patagonia and Etnies.
At SXSW, when it announced Film on Facebook as well as Music on Facebook, the company marketed its "Fan Pages" product toward the thousands of independent musicians and filmmakers who flood Austin, Texas, each year for the cultural festival.
Facebook, the company argued, is a great promotional platform; the One Track Mind premiere is consequently a demonstration of how an indie production company can spread buzz and gain fans through the social network.
Right now, the music and film communities are still more closely tied to Facebook's News Corp.-owned rival, MySpace, which recently launched its own music service and has a "MySpaceTV" site that shows original programming in addition to user-created videos.
There's no shortage of video on the Web, but how to separate the grain (feature films) from the chaff (videos of your cat)?
Less than 1 percent of films produced worldwide actually get distributed in the U.S., according to Jaman.com. Hence the new product Jaman, showing at Demo 07 just now.
Jaman cuts out the middleman and lets independent North American filmmakers and South American and South Asian filmmakers get their cinematic works online. For a fee of $1.99 to rent and $4.99 to buy, people can then sift through and watch any of the 200-plus films in their stable. And, Jaman.com brags, the films are delivered via broadband with "better-than-DVD quality" to a Mac or PC.
Jaman's video player (playing 4:3 content)
(Credit: CNET Networks)The social-network quality is the "smart window" to the right of the video window where filmmakers' commentary, along with community commentary, is posted. You can choose to skip fellow viewers' editorializing, or navigate right to scenes with comments by the bar on the bottom of the screen.
The built-in search engine flips through the service's content, where viewers can browse films via genre and region. There's also an IMDB-ish quality, with user reviews, ratings, synopses, and listing of awards the film may have garnered.
The whole world-cinema hook reminds me a lot of Social TV, except you can watch at your own pace.
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