Tribeca Film Institute Launches One-Stop Resource for Film and Video Content

Tribeca Film Institute has launched Reframe, an innovative project which will help individual filmmakers, broadcasters, distributors, public media organizations, archives, libraries and other media owners digitize, market and sell their classic and hard-to-find films and video content using the Internet. The Reframe website, http://www.reframecollection.org/, goes live today and will be a one-stop location and an important resource for filmmakers and distributors wanting to bring films to educators, film scholars and the general public; it will be a destination for scholars, artists, teachers and film enthusiasts to easily search for and locate content. Reframe is working with CreateSpace and is created with major support from the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Many filmmakers, distributors and archives can't afford the high conversion cost to the digital format, and have been reluctant to invest in digitizing "niche" content. Reframe converts all content to high-quality digital files; Works in video formats will be digitized for free, and film formats will be digitized "at-cost." In a unique arrangement, Reframe returns a digital copy to the rights-holder for free, and allows them to make their content available to others in a nonexclusive arrangement. Reframe then makes these works available for sale to the public, sold at prices based on the suggested retail price set by the rights-holder. All content is made available for sale on DVD on Demand at Amazon.com as well as digital download to own or rent through Amazon's Unbox service.

Reframe's website is designed to become a community hub that will collect content from numerous sources of independent and alternative media, and allow users to find content in new ways. As more works become digitized, and video proliferates on the internet, Reframe will be a trusted source to help guide quality content. Reframe will help end users find the best films through a combination of expert and user generated curation and specialized search functions as well as by combining the best features of social networking, recommendations from friends and colleagues, good cataloguing, and other methods to help find the best films online.

In its first year, Reframe plans to have more than 10,000 titles available, including classic public television films and videos, documentaries, independent features, shorts, foreign films and vanguard cinema.