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Comment by thenomad | Hacker News Reader

This is HUGE for the independent film world.

It's currently incredibly hard to sell an independent film online via a well-known and trusted channel that people are used to buying through. The nearest equivalent before this was getting onto iTunes through an aggregator, which costs $1500 or so per film.

I'm tremendously happy Amazon have taken this step: it'll be a huge benefit for indie filmmakers.

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Interesting. Isn't vimeo an avenue? https://vimeo.com/ondemand/startselling

Last time I checked they required you to create an account before buying a film. That's an absolute conversion-killer.

Also, there's a huge difference between most people's comfort level in buying from Amazon and buying from Some Random Site - and Vimeo still counts as Some Random Site for most people. (As does Gumroad and similar.)

Finally, the discovery aspect is significant. People are searching Amazon for films to buy and watch. They, by and large, aren't searching Vimeo for that.

YouTube also allows users to sell or rent their videos directly through the website [0], so this doesn't seem very different to me.

[0]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3249127?hl=en

Not exactly sure why but I personally feel more comfortable buying media from Amazon than from YouTube. I feel like I should be getting everything for free from YouTube.

I agree. Contrariwise, even though I'm an Amazon Prime member, it very rarely occurs to me that there are videos on Amazon that might be "free" for me to watch. I just can't help thinking of it as a place to BUY things.

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