Written by Nic Wistreich | 19 June 2010 | in Finance

A few months ago I downloaded an open source add-on for Joomla, the (free) software that powers Netribution. It's a powerful tool which should make a nice addition here at some point - and it was free. So impressed was I after half an hour of using it that I checked out some of the add - available for it. I could buy alternative templates for $19 a time, an iPhone version, integration with other bits of software - or the whole bundle of extensions with a year of updates for $99. Plus there was a discount code of $20 floating around. It took me about five minutes to decide to make the payment.

To reverse this process, psychologically: if at the beginning I had learnt about a good piece of software costing $80 I would probably have ignored it and looked for something cheaper or free. Instead, because I got something very powerful at no cost, that I could try out, I decided to trust the software developers to make something even more incredible at a price.

It reminided me how the film and creative businesses who succeed on the internet will be those that find a way to first offer something incredible for free, and then offer something even better that is worth paying for.

Music is pretty much there. Listen to a song on MySpace or Spotify or wherever, and like it enough to pay £25 to see the artist in concert. Radiohead made more for pay-what-you want In Rainbows than their previous three albums combined, and followed with their largest tour in years. The same with books - Cory Doctorow's and Paulo Coelho's sales famously rose after they began to offer the full texts online for free. For film tho we have a significant challenge. The non-free experiences worth paying for are merchandise, DVDs and going to the cinema. DVD sales are in decline, while merchandise and cinema releases are typically reserved for bigger budget releases.

This is why the news that Franny Armstrong's Age of Stupid made £110,000 (over $160,000) through non-theatrical exhibtion - eg screenings in community groups, schools, town halls and conferences - is worth paying attention to. She not only probably made more money for distributor-free exhibition than anyone in British film history, but also got people to promote her film endlessly for free (the same people who had previously funded it's production, often). At the same time, while Franny didn't offer the full film on the web, she created a huge universe of free content that could be watched and read online, as well as a compelling narrative from the film's inception (and first public mention here on Netribution) through it's record-breaking fundraising through to it's legendary release. GoodScreenings.org - launched last week in partnership with the ever dynamic BritDoc - seeks to bring the system to more films and filmmakers and builds on the famous work of Jim Gilliam and Robert Greenwald in re-conceiving exhibition.

Written by Laura Almellones | 27 May 2010 | in cinema

from Laura at the Media Business School

Multi Platform Business School is a five-day workshop for producers of audiovisual media to enhance their skills in building business models for the development of 360º - content, the financing and marketing of linear and interactive formats and the distribution in more than one market.

Written by Nic Wistreich | 13 May 2010 | in Studio 2.0

While there is some hint that the new British coalition government will follow through on the Lib Dem policy of rescinding the rushed and hated Digital Economy Bill to let it get full and appropriate scrutiny, I would imagine that many new cabinet members are grateful to Ben Bradshaw and Lord Mandelson for pushing through an unpopular piece of legislation as a parting gift and saving them from having to implement it themselves.

However the expected consequences of the Act on the healthy and profitable parts of the digital economy (from coffee shops with wifi to iPhone developers), essential for any kind of economic recovery or new growth, means the new government should at the very least reconsider the last government's approach to the problems of piracy and the promise of the digital economy. It may be that the OFCOM guidelines currently being discussed can exempt public wifi, scrap website blocking and push the three strikes option further into the future. But it may end up being smoother to introduce a new Act in 'DEAct's place, closer to Lord Carter's original recommendations before Mandy yachted with David Geffen and amended the public consultation. For what it's worth, I outline below five points that I think should be held in mind when shaping policy or campaigning in this area.

1. The Sky is not Falling

DVD and Music revenues are currently rising (DVD up 31% Q1, UK music sales up in 09,  digital royalties rise outstrips CD fall). Indeed, file-sharers using the Pirate Bay apparently spend 75% more each year on music and film than non-filesharers (£77 as opposed to £44 pa). 

2. Hollywood is stalling on providing legal alternatives

There are very few legitimate, comprehensive and competitive film streaming or download services: iTunes has less films than Tescos and getting your film on there is very hard (plus it costs more than my video shop, which makes little sense). Penalising consumers before the content industry has offered proper download solutions de-incentivises the studios to collaborate on these solutions - indeed shortly after the Bill went through, Hulu.com dropped plans to launch in the UK. Currently there is a lot of delay from the studios over technology as all of them want to control it. Piracy may be the most effective motivator to get them to release a legitimate alternative - ie. without filesharing we probably would never have had music industry agreement on Spotify.

3. The Digital Economy is not the Information Economy

Facebook, Google, Flickr, Twitter, etc (ie the centre of the Digital Economy) build their businesses around the intellectual property of their users; they depend on people sharing their own IP, without limit or compensation, to sell adverts against. They see little or no difference between a content producer who tweets, blogs, shares a link, mashups, photoshops, comments or makes an album or feature film as they're all advert opportunities, and there's nothing to presume that the quality of the content equates to the demographic value of the viewer to advertisers. Few professional web-native content creators - if any - would risk the backlash from trying to sue one of their fans (just as Oasis wouldn't sue someone who jumped the fence at Glastonbury for lost ticket sales).

4. Legitimate free content is just as much a threat to producers

Content creators distributing online must compete with a near-infinite amount of free and legitimate video, growing at an exponential rate. While Hollywood has committed itself to prosecuting and criminalising its potential audience, the British film and video industry may not have the luxury of being able to alienate potential cinema-goers and DVD-buyers. It is unlikely that the competition for attention online will be won by those companies that display the most bullying and aggressive behaviour (unless they have the new Batman or James Cameron film) and the British industry would be sage to study how the Pay-What-You-Want experiments of Radiohead (3 million sales of In Rainbows, avg £4 price) and the Humble Indie Game Bundle (which has just taken over $1m in one week) have done so well from of the 'Buskers Hat' model. 

5. Even if piracy stopped, lots of people will lose their jobs (and need to retrain)

Part of the root of Hollywood's panic is the threat - not from pirates or even free legit content - but of technology replacing the bulk of their jobs. Social media makes marketing departments redundant, getting a trailer cut is less of a priority when dozens of YouTube fans will make one themselves, digital distribution replaces not only buyers and planners, but video rental shops and DVD designers. Filmmaking still needs a large team, but sales, marketing and distribution needs a smaller, more savvy breed of wired, serial networkers fluent in all digital media forms. Avoiding job losses is as unlikely as YouTube videomakers paying union rates. Much of the attitude from legacy Hollywood and the unions is that 'if we get governments to legislate hard enough, the realities of doing business on the Internet in the 21st Century will go away'. While ridiculous, this is an opportunity for British companies to make a head-start in building the future infrastructure and services that support the Digital world we're approaching. One where attention is such a scarcity that few, if any, artists would add barriers such as payment or court summons to stop people 'spending' their time on their work, and instead will build their business models around the slipstream of such activity, once the user is engaged.

I hold little hope that our new government will listen to this and similar arguments from those across Britain's digital economy; personal contact with my local MP, the House of Lords enquiry, lobbyists, a union head and Digital Minister Stephen Timms amounted to nothing during the last parliament. That said, the Liberal Democrats did vote against the Bill, while Tory MPs such as Bill Cash and John Redward were highly critical of it (and surprisingly well informed). If we simply implement it as it is, the new global digital economy will continue to be driven by Sweden and California, unlikely to get similar legislation soon, with the UK - behind only two of the 250 most popular websites in the world - becoming a 'quaint' and frustrated digital backwater.

Written by Alan Denman | 24 April 2010 | in cinema

Ever considered trying to launch your film career from LA? Concerned about the outcome of the next British election and considering your options? Alan Denman was a pivotal part of the London indie film community, notably as Chair of the Screenwriter's Workshop and Head of Development for Euroscript until he left to the US in 2004. Tom Fogg interviewed him here, long ago, and indeed when I started working for Shooting People he offered me free desk space. Now, with his wife Ayesha Walker (pictured below), he runs Stinging Bull Films from Hollywood and has already made his first feature.

Alan has written for Netribution a fascinating and in-depth account of his experience as a Brit in LA, learning to speak 'American', getting a Visa, writing a sellable script, as well as ten tips for making it in a very different film environment. It's 4,000 words of insider gold-dust, and worth bookmarking and reading fully when you have the time.

Six thousand feet up in the San Bernadino Mountains of Southern California. Day One of Principal Photography: a long shot of our young lead actress walking along a deserted forest road. She goes ahead on her own – and suddenly screams. That wasn’t in the script, I think to myself. I look past her to observe a large brown bear crossing the set. Principal photography is suspended as she runs back to join the main party. Fortunately she hasn’t been mauled or eaten. Indeed, the bear seems not even to have noticed her. Nervously we all creep forward to watch the creature happily snuffling around in a neighbour’s garden before moving off. Such are the dangers, thrills and indelible memories of filmmaking. 

I was there in California, a British director, shooting my first feature, which I had also written. The crew worked like Trojans, and the young American cast had so much energy it was impossible to persuade them to get to bed at night. Then in the morning they’d be up early to go through their lines with me and help rewrite my very British dialogue.

This was my first experience of how different filmmaking in America is.  Though obvious to me now, coming then from the only culture I knew – Britain – it was a big surprise to realize how differently people spoke on the other side of the Pond. You think Americans speak English? Think again – they speak American, and I needed to learn their language. The first read-through of the script was a comedy of confusion. We might as well have been speaking French and Greek, for all we understood each other. In a combination of wisdom and desperation I gave them free rein to improvise. It worked. What resulted was dialogue that was vibrant and fascinating, something I could never have dreamed up in my drafty North London flat. It was, to quote my American cast, “awesome”.

I had been writing screenplays and making short films for ten years and had reached a sort of glass ceiling: I could have gone on making shorts in Britain, but what I really wanted to do was shoot a feature. So I wrote a micro budget, small-scale sci-fi thriller, a sort of “UFO Blair Witch” about young people in a remote place looking for aliens and disappearing one by one. My original plan – a very rough one – was to take a bunch of young actors to Cheshunt Marshes, a strange area outside North London with murky lakes and towering pylons, and, hoping for the best, shoot a semi-improvised script. Not a great plan, maybe. But then I sent the script to a good friend of mine who was studying screenwriting at UCLA, one of the big universities, in Los Angeles. There he passed on the script to a producer, who loved it and was himself looking for a project of that scale and budget to produce. The timing was perfect. Serendipity. Click.

And so, four months later, in the summer of 2003 I flew to LA and then drove out in convoy with the producer, cast and crew to the San Bernadino Mountains to direct my feature film, which, after much discussion and development, was now called Alien Game. The shoot was immensely hard work and at the same time hugely rewarding, a practical degree course in filmmaking compressed into four weeks. The skies were high, blue and empty, and the mountains epically spectacular. I loved being there. Thus in innocence and hope began my journey cross the Pond.

With growing self-belief and a magnetic curiosity towards Los Angeles, the heart of the global film industry, and the vast opportunities available it offers, my wife and I relocated there in the summer of 2004 and have been living there ever since....

Written by sandip mahal | 14 April 2010 | in cinema

There was a time up until the late 90’s where late night television cult oddities were shown to fill out the schedules. To most people this was just fodder but for some people this was THE place where b-movie fanatics discovered cult classics like Race with the Devil, or The Keep and the now forgotten classic Night of the Eagle with Peter Wyngarde. Appearing in the graveyard slots, these films were in their element for those who stayed up in the ungodly hour and are 200 percent better and scarier than anything released in recent memory.

In America there has been more of a foundation for cult movies like the Golden Turkey Awards and Joe Bob Briggs getting airtime. In the UK some took a masterly appreciation of the art form such as Alex Cox’s Moviedrome which started its movie night in 1988 on a Sunday evening with a great incisive intro. Previously tossed to the side classics were brought centre stage such as The Parallax View and various Robert Aldrich films with full appreciation but nowadays these films are rarely shown in these slots that are now filled with reality TV and cheap TV repeats.

Written by Nic Wistreich | 01 April 2010 | in internet and technology

Part 1 - Three reasons why the Digital Economy Bill will damage British businesses

Part 2 - What can be done? Five steps the UK content industries could take to offset piracy losses

A few weeks ago I chatted with a single dad in his 40s, working in a brewery. He's a biker, Sun-reader and towards the right politically, hating to see his taxes used to fund free school meals or asylum seekers.

Nevertheless, Jack (let's call him) talked with great pride about his downloading habits. He had already seen Shutter Island tho it was yet to hit cinemas. He had hard drives packed with every feature you could imagine and had the unreleased new Matt Damon film torrenting at home while we spoke. When I suggested to him that the film industry was struggling and without people paying for films the good ones might stop being made, he said he couldn't remember the last good film he'd seen, that most of them were terrible with overpaid actors and not worth paying for. When I mentioned the proposed legislation in the Digital Economy Bill he didn't blink - at worst he said he would go back to his former method of having a Love Film subscription and copying every film he received onto a hard disk, and swapping the files with his work mates, who were quick to educate him on the latest software or technique. I asked him if there was a film he downloaded that he really liked, if he would consider paying something after watching it to help the filmmaker make more, and he paused a few moments before diplomatically saying that most people he know would consider that they've already seen it, so what's the point.

This conversation illustrated for me two key points: that there is a good reason for the film industry's concern about downloading;  and that the proposed new legislation won't make the slightest difference to Jack and pirates like him. Indeed he looked excited by the challenge of a new cat and mouse race with the powers that be, like being alerted to speed cameras on his sat nav.

Yet, the proposed new Digital Economy Bill will allow any foreign company to block a British website or disconnect a British business, school or family from the web without first having to go to court (and with no penalty if they make a mistake).

Some organisations have even argued that it shouldn't even be debated by MPs before it becomes law. And indeed it appears that on Tuesday the Bill is expected to get one or two hours debate rather than the 80-90 hours such a bill would normally receive because of the planned election announcement. As a result, the most substantial piece of legislation about the Internet in British history is likely to be pushed into law without any debate by elected representatives.

There has, however, been much online discussion of the Bill, with some 18,000 letters sent to MPs, with The Register's Andrew Orlowski describing it as 'the political issue for people who don't want to do politics'. He defines the polarised positions of the debate well:

"On the one side is [the] idea that coercion will cause "behaviour change", leading to the public embracing the current set of retail choices. This permits them to apply the might and logic of physical distribution control in a digital world, and avoids embracing structural reform. On the other side is the idea that music just had to be free, just because some people demanded it must be - therefore it had no value... The possibilities that new technology opens all go legal eventually, as black markets go white. To deny this - as both sides do - requires self-interested and incredibly unimaginative arguments. We got no shortage of those."

At this point I would like to state categorically that I am not a 'freetard'. I have pointedly avoided downloading music and films illegally, against the incredulity of many friends and colleagues - in part so that I could one day write this article. I have - I confess, downloaded one episode of Heroes, after my iTunes purchase went thru but didn't download and I couldn't wait to see it, and I also tested the Tribler software after learning it was being used in a major EU-funded project with the BBC, by successfully streaming a Torrent of a Harry Potter film (an activity that combined with an IP Spoofer would be untraceable under the Bill). Beyond that my only torrents are from filmmakers who chose to distribute their work that way as it costs them nothing (unlike the £1.50 or so per download it would cost via Amazon S3 storage).

I am - as I have been since setting up Netribution ten years ago, and trying to map the world of film finance - concerned about the future for indie filmmakers if everyone takes the attitude of Jack. Nevertheless, this rushed Bill as it currently stands would be a disaster if it was ever implemented and I urge you to ask your MPs to give it the debate it deserves - if not to block it altogether. Here's why:

1 - The consequence of site blocking = you can't visit this website

A late amendment to DEB by the Liberal Democrats (as a way to prevent control over Copyright Law being subject to the whims of the Secretary of State at the time) will let any copyright owner ask that a website be blocked from the Internet if there is a 'substantial' amount of infringing content on it. Although the process can be opposed by an ISP and taken to court, if the ISP loses, all legal costs must be met by them so takedown requests would only be refused with the biggest sites such as YouTube or MySpace. With no financial incentive to defend websites, ISPs may start blocking hundreds of thousands of them on demand, regardless of the non-infringing content also hosted there. Writing about 120A on her blog panGloss, Lilian Edwards of the Sheffield Faculty of Law illustrates how obliging ISPs will be:

"In one amusing study , an Oxford team posing as rightsholders asked ISPs to take down a chapter from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty - out of copyright for several centuries. All the ISPs complied without a murmur."

Picture this scenario. Netribution publishes an article with an exclusive that a big movie star punched a TV producer backstage at a London awards ceremony. The studio representing the star submits a site blocking request for Netribution and - given that as a user-generated website, where we do not own the content that has been posted here by our users - our site would get blocked. Most of our photos are publicity stills and posters, yet it would be easy to argue in a court that a substantial proportion of the images on this site were 'infringing' as we've no paper-trail to show these we were assigned a license - and of course Netribution is not worth enough to any ISP for them to consider fighting the studio request in court. So Netribution (and your blog or website) could get blocked as the UK adopts a law that goes one further than the great firewall of China in that it allows foreign companies to decide which websites British people can and cannot access.

2 - The consequences of web disconnection = I can't run my business

I share a nice home with four other creative people. Sometimes they go away for several months and rent their room out - and occasionally these new folk aren't the best sort and leave without paying their bills - it happened last summer. So it's entirely plausible that they could also use our web connection to download. Easily, then, visitors to the house - not to mention my flatmates' partners and close friends - as well as mistaken infringement where a wrong link is clicked or something is downloaded that appeared to be legitimate - could add up to three infringements and we get disconnected from the web indefinitely.

Our flat is packed with legal DVDs (I'm not a BAFTA member), hundreds of CDs and we spend a fortune on trips to the cinema and live music. Yet through an automated process - the mechanisms for which is about to be signed into law - I could suddenly be unable to update this site, check my bank accounts, administer the websites I manage, submit my VAT and tax returns, look for new jobs, promote new films and - well - do my job. Nor would I be able to go to the nearest coffee shop or pub to use their Wifi as no business will be able to risk running free wifi any more. I probably won't even be able to plug my laptop in a paid web cafe via ethernet, as they couldn't risk the chance I was downloading something.

In short my business goes bankrupt, I sign-on yet can't even search the web for jobs, and the British Digital Economy has become one of the least competitive places to do business in the world.

3 - The consequences of Clause 43 = large corporations still can rip off creators

After the sad death of British casting legend Mary Sellway, we were flattered to see the New York Times quote her interview with Tony Pomfrett on Netribution in their obituary. That same week Screen International printed an obituary and reproduced a photo by Tom Fogg from the same interview - again without permission or fee, but also without credit. Having credited them as source to countless news stories over the years, we were a little miffed, not least because they rarely returned our calls (but we moved on!). Clause 43, a peculiar addition to the bill, enshrines the right of Screen to do this, into law. In an attempt to deal with orphan works, ie works where the author cannot be found, the bill somehow assigns a right for use for any photos or images online where it's not immediately obvious who owns a photo (eg if the photo credit was on the first page of an article, while the article was found on page three).

It's the Alice in Wonderland part of the legislation which contradicts the arguments of the rest of it. Businesses and households risk ruin by losing web access, in order to protect commercial copyright owners. Yet your family holiday photos posted online can be exploited by commercial entities without asking your permission. More can be learned at the Stop 43 website.

 ooOoo

The Bill has arrived at the demands of US studios, yet goes further than anything that America, would consider implementing domestically. Given the potential problems, open questions and the drastic last minute changes - one or two hours of Parliamentary time to discus it and no third reading is really insufficient.

Britain is a world leader in the creative industries - across film., TV, music and video games we are remarkably successful, and the sector contributes £112bn or 7% of GDP - almost 4 times more than agriculture - to our economy. Understandably, the support for DEB is built on a desire to protect this sector. Yet this proposed solution to the content sector's problems is built on misguided assumptions about how the web is won.

The Internet was meant to unfetter indie creatives from the stranglehold of studio distribution control, which long forced independent movies out of cinemas and off the shelves at Virgin, yet instead we have new battles - to get on the front page of YouTube or to persuade iTunes to sell our films. The biggest earner for content online is ads, yet Google have most of that market sown up - and we can't even get them to pay tax on the £1.6bn they earned in the UK last year. 

Indeed, Britain is largely a web failure, beholden to the US giants (just as with film distribution). Of the top 250 most popular websites in the world, only two are British - the BBC and the Guardian. The BBC sits on healthy license fee income (tho it's budget is illogically threatened with 50% cuts), while the Guardian was the first UK newspaper to go online for free fully, and has stated that its business model, in opposition to Murdoch's, is multifaceted, with the free website supporting other profitable activity. But elsewhere we are tiny fry - the subscription business model of pioneering Friends Reunited, for instance, losing to the free, yet billion dollar turnover, 400 million member Facebook; QXL and Last.fm surrendered to foreign buyers.

The government is dependent on our high tech sector to help us into recovery. Yet while San Francsico looks set to implement free city-wide Wifi and continue to rule the Internet, the UK is just a week from effectively banning free public wifi and handing control over which website is visible and which homes and business have web access, to foreign companies. If the world's leading high tech economy - the US - isn't debating such laws, is it wise that the UK should?

So what can be done? Five steps to removing piracy losses

It's easy to condemn the bill, but there are scarce few alternatives around, so a critique needs to be accompanied with some alternative thinking.

I would firstly echo Paul Carr's excellent description of the Bill at Tech Crunch and suggestion that above all the legislation must not be rushed through before the election, as it is too important. If we get it wrong it could cripple British new media (and creative) businesses for the next decade. Furthermore, badly written legislation could be easily manipulated for censorship and backfire on the media industry as a whole with a public backlash against commercial media. Paul makes other good suggestions at the foot of his article: penalties for copyright owners who file spurious claims, and more protection for businesses/libraries/universities who offer free wi-fi. TechCrunch have also backed the creation of Coadec - the Coallition for the Digital Economy which looks at the Bill from a business perspective (unlike the excellent campaigners the Open Rights Group whose focus is more about civil rights).

But for the more pressing concerns of the content industry - for whom this bill may appear the only hope of salvation at a desperate time - I suggest five things that can be done to tackle piracy losses...

Written by sandip mahal | 21 March 2010 | in media and representation

When Avid and Lightworks systems came out in the dawn of the digital editing age there were specialist outlets that provided specific training courses to make the transition seamless. Equipment like that was expensive and you really had to be lucky to work for a company that invested in one (I was).

Obviously the courses were aimed at those in the industry (with the tab usually picked up by the facility houses) and very few people outside the system invested in the courses with Film Schools taking up the slack, as the prices were pretty steep...

Written by Nic Wistreich | 21 March 2010 | in media and representation

About eight years ago I sat in a cosy Islington pub with BECTU acting general secretary Martin Spence to discus his problems with Shooting People's posting of non-union (and non-NMW) jobs.

Flickr CC image from tompagenet

It was the first time I'd found myself conflicted with the pro-uinion leanings I'd been brought up with. My parents met in the Salford communist branch and as a teen I cut my teeth in graphic design making the monthly newsletter for my mum's college union, NATFHE. I can't dispute the wonders of unions in protecting workers the world-over from unscrupulous employers, saving lots of lives in the process.

But sometimes passions cloud judgement and indie film is a strange fish*. No-one would suggest a musician who gets out her guitar at a house party should earn Musician's Union rates, yet because a film require a group of workers working with an employment-like relationship, there is room for confusion.

I'm not talking about broadcast TV on cost cutting cable networks, or commercials and pop promos shot on the cheap. But the shorts, micro-budget features and documentaries made by crews often with little experience, frequently helmed by a director shooting their first or second, that may never make it to any screen beyond the local pub or Vimeo. There's very rarely funding and a huge number of people keen to help out on them. Many are terrible but a few are masterpieces. And it's so rare that any of these films recoup their costs, let alone make a profit, that no-one worries about cash other than getting their expenses covered.

Martin Spence's point when we met was, as it is now, that people working for free should be collaborators, and therefore co-investors. He saw the co-op model as a suitable structure, and having explored the co-op principles myself in recent years I agree that they are great structures. But there is still an admin overhead - a co-op requires a legal framework, eg. a limited company - to be formed. So for one short film there would need to be a company created, annual accounts and returns made, as well as a co-op members agreement drawn up, which all parties should sign up to. Annual accounts would then need to be distributed before the company was eventually wound up. 

Written by sandip mahal | 22 February 2010 | in media and representation

Written by Nic Wistreich | 02 February 2010 | in editorial

Sometimes it takes a good film to put things right. Like when your computer needs to be rebooted to get it working normally, or the benefits of a good night's sleep. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada was just that calibration, a tale of doing the right thing, of endurance and redemption, and a reminder that of how important cinema is to me, and how great cinema has far less to do with technology than it does to do with the questions, hopes and problems that face us as a species.

Ten years ago, on the second of Februa

ry 2000, Netribution formally launched, after a month of tests, at Peeping Tom's short film gathering at Global Cafe in Golden Square.

It's hard to recognise myself in the photo from the night - alongside fellow co-founders Wendy Bevan Mogg and the legend that is Tom Fogg - bubbling with passionate naiveté and blind optimism. A more innocent time, before YouTube and torrents and Bush and 9-11, when David Cameron was still head of PR for Carlton TV, and publishing a new issue once a week seemed impressive. Now tweets come every few seconds I miss that space which was forced upon us in the early days by dial-up modems - the gaps between thought, writing, coding and the reader that might have prevented some of my more indulgent rants of later years.

I can't find the launch page of the site anywhere. The first front page I can find is pulled from the Wayback machine and is Issue #24 from May of that year, there's other front pages with broken links from Issue #47 (our 2000 Christmas issue), Issue #56 and Issue #62 which has more of the site intact. The old features page probably gives the best idea of what we were about then.

As I searched my hard drives to find our first issue, I found the first barely coherent business plan from November 99 through to the Netribution 2 presentation from November 04 which reads like a naïve sales brochure for Web 2.0. Even in 99 our plan was filled with talk of 'open source webisodes' that people could remix and add to across the world and a network of indie screening venues and groups across the country for filmmakers to distribute their work to directly.