THINK INDEPENDENTLY and satisfy your craving for quality films at the Film Festival Flix Farmer’s Market. 2014 has been a year of massive change within the Independent Film Industry on the marketing and distribution front. DIY Filmmaking has been a reality for the past 10 plus years. However, we’ve been lulled into a false belief that distribution via the emerging Internet and Digital platforms for Indies is the Holy Grail. In the early stages of growth, these platforms had to stock the shelves, yet didn’t have the critical mass to garner studio level titles. Thus, they turned to the least expensive and easiest to acquire content… Indie Film. However, they must now satisfy audiences in the tens to hundreds of millions and support multi-billion dollar bottom lines. Films that appeal to tens of thousands don’t warrant the space on their servers much less support marketing. The platforms are declining new acquisitions, slashing thousands of titles from their servers, ending output deals as they’re up for renewal, and moving more and more to TV content, specifically originally produced, exclusive content. Aggregators are exiting the business in droves no longer to even earn back their onboarding costs. Social Networks, which were thought to be the marketing savior for the Independent Filmmaker have also become Studio domain. The day the social networks went public and had to start generating revenue, Algorithms were re-written, positioning the companies with the deepest pocketbooks as the favored competitors. These networks are now little more than digital billboards. There’s more content being produced than ever before in history, but proportionately not more quality content. We’ve gone from approximately 12,000 films a year being produced to more than 50,000 [...]