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2nd Feb 2000, the back of a guy looking at a computer screen with the first Netribution website on it.

Netribution@25: month 1

Written by Nicol Wistreich on . Posted in Edito. No Comments on Netribution@25: month 1

25 years ago tonight Wendy Bevan-Mogg, Tom Fogg and I arrived at Dawn & Pete’s Peeping Toms Screening Night in Soho to unveil Netribution, having announced it to nice comments on Shooting People earlier in the day. This feels a time where some reflection may be helpful, so to mark this, Tom and I have decided to make a 12 x monthly mini-edition of Netribution.

In the last few days, a theme of ‘home’ has emerged. Maybe it’s on my mind – in the middle of moving house – yet the two pieces to arrive before copy deadline were from people I lived with in the two incarnations of the site…

The first came from Elio España, who I shared a student flat with, and author of Netribution’s first interview – with Steven Soderbergh. He’s one-half of one of the hardest working documentary duos you’ve probably never heard of (making over 100 feature docs) and brings good insight into the last 25 years for indie film distribution.

The second is from Eric Dubois, who moved into my Glasgow flat as Netribution 2 was taking off – on an adventure before settling down as an art professor in Paris. He ended up illustrating every Carnal Cinema satire interview, and all of the regular writers.

25 years ago we’d cockily call ourselves ‘the home of UK film’, which I later attributed to Private Eye after they’d copied the phrase on their links page, in cheeky self-promotion. But after that Web 1 era of home pages was fully replaced by Web 2’s algorithmic home feeds, it’s hard not to wonder whose home, exactly, independent creators ended up in?

The heart of this update, however, is in tribute to Leslie Lowes, know to many as James MacGregor. originally our Northern editor – but known across Shooting People, Moviescope and the Film Finance Handbook. Les played Claudius to Alun Armstrong’s Hamlet at school (and beat him to the role of King Lear), and later was the voice of BBC Radio Shetland, and helped run Radio Riyadh. Thanks to everyone who shared memories – especially his son Robert. My planned memorium for Stephen Applebaum unfortunately must wait until next month.

– – –

We’re in this strange point as a species. The speed of change seems to accelerate while we’re over-informed about a climate emergency we’re mostly incapable of impacting. Wealth inequality is growing while the web deepens division by reinforcing bubbles of belief, making the co-operation we need to improve stuff seem less likely than ever. It feels (thinking of my young kid) it’s simultaneously hard to picture we all get thru this, YET *essential* to believe we do: we get thru this, or we’re done for.

Maybe Jacobean Londoners said the same, having in one generation gone from watching the premiere of The Tempest to surviving civil war, the decapitation of the king, the bubonic plague and the fire of London. The world must have felt almost over, but it wasn’t. Each of us are the surviving descendants of billions of generations of survivors, who got here bringing out a new release, evolving, trying again. If we only look back thru time, the odds seem ok. 

Discussing these last 25 years with Tom this last six months has awakened in me a sense that this is a good time to look back. Netribution was born between the forest fire of the first dotcom crash, and the exponential growth of Web2 & smart phones, out of its smoldering, fertile soil. It feels we may be in a similar transition era – a time of shepherding the new and hospicing the old, to use the Berkana Institute’s Two Loops Model lingo.

Tom has a wonderful idea to launch a podcast interviewing everyone we interviewed or knew back then on the lessons of the last two and a half decades. The challenge is time, the story, as ever, is working unpaid: because the funding model still isn’t solved. 

*Will it be? Can it be?* 

I’ve only really had one question in relation to the web, publishing and film – can we fix web1’s major bug of paying creators without needing a paywall? A few years ago I got incredibly hopeful that we could, just before America split in two over the events of Jan 6, and Russia invaded Ukraine, then October 7th. The web is wilder and more fragmented now than it’s ever been. 

But the reasoning that a medium billions of people gaze at and stroke rhythmically for hours every day shouldn’t be exclusively in the hands of a few unpredictable techno-feudal demigods has never been more clear. What happens next, though, is anyone’s guess.

Still, **We get thru this or we’re done for.** So, for what it’s worth, here’s a kind-of issue, or one 12th of an issue at least. Til next month…

@nic

A big old DV camera pointing at an old typewriter

25 years of Netribution…

Written by Nicol Wistreich on . Posted in Edito. No Comments on 25 years of Netribution…

Netribution turned 25 years old on New Years Eve. The ltd company doesn’t reach that date until later this month, and the hard-launch of the first website wasn’t until 2nd Feb 2002 – but it’s soft launch onto the internet was December 31st 1999 (an ambition to launch ‘last century’).

Netribution had three 8-ish-year long acts – focusing on Publishing, then Research, then Development. I know most people here from projects associated with one of these stages but perhaps most from the first act – publishing – and within that, again most from the first scene – Netribution v1 – which ran for 99 weekly issues.

Netribution 1 grew in the fertile ashes of the dotcom crash, before learning during my two years as Shooting People’s employee how free user-generated ‘content’ can build a business. Netribution 2 took that knowledge and naîvely attempted to implement it on a Joomla CMS from January 2006 while a new world of Web 2.0 titans, built on AJAX, gamification and dark patterns emerged, flattening and hoovering up any who stood in their way. People still posted there until 2014 (mostly filmfests, PRs and spam farms) – and I shared half-baked thoughts for a few years more, Netribution 2 peaked towards the end of 2008, when I began to shift focus to R&D, mostly staying there for the next 16 years.

Netribution issue 24, July 7th 2000 - with a new series about 'filmmaking on the Internet'

Netribution 1’s editor Tom Fogg and I have been discussing for some months how to mark these 25 years. Netribution 1 had the antiquated but fully curated format of a weekly issue and email; Netribution 2 was rolling 24/7, open access, with low barriers to posting. This time we fancy something in between, perhaps one single curated issue marking the 25 years towards the end of the year, with a rolling work-in-progress website and periodic (no more than monthly) email updates.

Why now?

There’s obviously a lot happening in film and TV with AI threatening artists, creators and copyright holders, while also offering the potential of studio-grade CGI to the masses (plus the carbon footprint of a small country or cryptocurrency).

But the big subject for me is we (web evangelists, optimists and hopers) failed in delivering on the web’s promise from 25 years ago. We never succeeded in building a viable independent space for creative media, connecting filmmakers directly with audiences. Yes you can connect via a handful social media platforms, but you’re forced to accept their business terms, perform and conform to satisfy their algorithms, while keeping your audiences forced to consumer whatever messages the platforms want to wrap around your work, this week. This isn’t like the indie video store, fleapit cinema in town or the late night pic you VHS’d off the TV; this is very opinionated free cable TV with some small perks for the most prolific (and a couple of lottery-winning super-influencers to keep everyone else motivated as they work every waking hour while mostly not making minimum wage).

Screen grab of netribution contacts section in 2000

But ignoring the money (and I know one indie production company making £2k/month from YouTube for their back-catalogue, so it’s obvs not all bad) – one specific thing is worse than before the web came along…

Entities that controlled IP and audiences in the old media world were known as vertically integrated studios: they could shoot films on their own facilities, from a library of IP they own, then release on their TV channels, video stores and cinema chains (and theme parks, retail stores, etc). But alongside sat an independent sector that controlled only one side of the equation: IP (the indie producer or distributor) or audiences (the arthouse cinema, TV channel or video store). And the indie and studio sectors crossed over – they weren’t separated in their own bubble. Producers had access to public market data on success and failures so financiers, commissioners and development execs could make informed decisions about what to fund next, and share in (rare) profits.Independently financed film could get an audience and pay back its investors (or satisfy its public funders) enough to get the next film made.

But none of that really exists online for video: there’s only vertically integrated studios controlling IP and audiences: be it shorter-form ad-funded (TikTok/YouTube/Instagram/etc) or longer-form subscription funded (Netflix/Prime/Apple/Now/Max/YTPremium/etc). That studio/indie structure from last century doesn’t exist for TV, film or micro-budget influencer video. Platforms control IP and audiences, there’s no way around that – and – it really wasn’t meant to be like this. At every step of Netribution’s first act I was convinced it wouldn’t end up like this, until 2008 – struck by the dominance not of Netflix, but of Facebook – it became clear that film has a monopoly problem online.

However there’s an exception to this: media spaces online that have thriving indie and mainstream sectors separate from each other: Blogging – powered by RSS; and Podcasts – also powered by RSS. Both have lots of indie platforms, players, apps, tools and service – and people make their living blogging and podcasting, mostly without being tied to one platform.

Screengrab of netribution's calendar section 25 years ago.

Without jumping into a technical discussion, there’s lots of smart people working hard to try to bring the decentralised simplicity of RSS (which stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’) to everything online – social media, video, music, chat-rooms, commenting – everything. In these developer’s visions of the web you could follow your YouTube subscriptions from your Instagram App, and post your content on your own website but get it seen on all the platforms.

They want web-based media to be less like one tech baron’s soapbox, and more like email – which like RSS is based on a protocol, and so isn’t controlled by a single corporation, app, site or service. They’ve been working on this for many years, and I only realised how advanced they were four years ago because as they’re not funded by the big tech giants they don’t spend on marketing. I won’t say it gives me hope, as 25 years online has left me seeing most hopeful new web tech enshitified, killed or ignored. But it’s still one of the more hopeful web things I’ve seen in these 25 years, and it’s been a part of my focus for most of Netribution’s third act.

But it’s not interesting enough to bring out a year-long special edition of Netribution. It only made sense to try to bring out a new issue when I started talking with Tom. Tom – currently spending winter on the Greek island of Paros – is one of the best conversationalists I know. This makes him both a brilliant interviewer, friend and coach. He’s interested in opening conversations with the people we interviewed and worked alongside 25 years ago, to find out where they are now, and what they’ve done or learnt or wish to share. What could they have told their younger selves? Some might not remember us – others may want to forget the gap between their ambitions and reality – but it feels quite compelling in a world where AI, war and climate crisis are forcing us to reflect on the future – to instead pause and consider the recent past: the web before smart phones, social media and mass video streaming.

So that’s the plan… will keep updating here, or you can join our no-more-than-once-a-month email list. Or – better, say hello to 25th@netribution.co.uk.