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Reframe: Rare Filmpalooza Launches From Tribeca and Amazon

Widge
June 9, 2008
3 min read
Reframe Logo

Today is the launch of Reframe, a joint venture between the Tribeca Film Institute (you guys have a great grill in NYC, BTW) and Amazon. The impetus is to get rare films converted to digital and give them a place to market it to people who wouldn’t normally get a chance to see them. The film they lead off with on their front page, for example, is a reworking of La Boheme by director Sally Porter (she of the excellent Orlando) that apparently hasn’t been available to the public since 1980. All this from an article in Hollywood Reporter. The site plans to…

provide free digital copies of video and “at-cost” conversion of films to content owners, then rent or sell the digital download or DVD versions on a nonexclusive basis. Reframe will use Amazon’s DVD on Demand service for physical copies and its Unbox service for digital downloads to rent or sell.

I wish them luck, especially if people are going to get a chance to see stuff that they normally couldn’t. I’m all about that. Here’s some quick suggestions, because I would love to see this work. And I realize it’s launching today and in beta, but hey…free feedback. They do ask for it. So, to Reframe, I say…

[ad#rightpost]

    1. Your site needs help. I think it’s great that you have all this stuff by filmmaker and by collection and genre or whatever, but here’s an idea: why not just one big fat list? Give me a single page with all the films listed (or broken up into multiple pages) because maybe I’m looking for something and I don’t know what genre you’ve decided to put it into.

    2. Your site needs to heavily showcase what’s unique. I poked around and your Recent Titles as I write this are all stuff that’s available on DVD. Where’s the genre called “Rare”?

    3. Speaking of DVDs… The majority of your stuff is available via DVD only. I realize you’re just getting off the ground, but maybe you should have gotten some more unique content under your belt first? Because from where I’m sitting you’re an Amazon frontend. If there’s nothing on your site that we can’t find via Amazon…why are we going to your site? The article says that you’re planning to add social networking elements…there’s some of that already…on Amazon, you know?

    4. Unbox? That same service that I don’t offer stuff for purchase through on this site because of the terrible reviews it’s been getting for its DRM strategy and requirement of loading apps on people’s machines? You sure?

Here’s the site, folks. Let me know what you think.

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