The Sundance Film Festival kicked off this week in Park City, Utah and the buzz is palpable. Long considered a critical launch pad for independent filmmakers, the Festival has gained massive mainstream exposure in recent years thanks to a host of new promotional vehicles at filmmakers’ disposal—from the growing popularity of television’s Sundance Channel to the ability to view Sundance-related content on the web, and, of course, the indescribable influence of social media.
This year, the Sundance Institute has dramatically expanded availability of Festival content to those of us who aren’t able to make it out to Park City in person, including a first-ever live stream of select presentations and events, and the opportunity to watch five independent films making their debut at the show via local cable providers.
The organization is also offering a broad array of on-demand web content, including interviews with artists and filmmakers, daily video highlights and roundtable discussions throughout the Festival to meet audience demand for insider info. In recent years, the Sundance Institute began offering unique, interactive content to audiences via the Sundance.com website to promote the work of independent filmmakers—both during the Festival and on an ongoing basis.
As filmmakers have come to rely on the web as an essential channel to market and to distribute their films to audiences worldwide, Sundance has seen a substantial uptick in video downloads. In fact, from 2009 to 2010, video views for the Sundance Film Festival increased 76 percent!
Sundance understands the importance of delivering a seamless content delivery experience to each and every film enthusiast to keep them coming back for more—and that’s why we at Internap are proud to report that Sundance is relying on our performance-optimized Content Delivery Network to simplify and streamline the creation, delivery and management for ALL of its interactive web content for the sixth consecutive year. Over the course of our relationship, we’ve served up an average of 2.2 million views of Sundance content and 12 terabytes of data each year – and we’re looking forward to the future with Sundance as video streaming continues to become central to the film industry and its viewers.
