Up until now, iTunes has made it difficult for independent filmmakers to sell their work through their service. They want to deal with big studios or distributors, not a million little guys who require a million little checks once a month. The alternative has been to give away iPod friendly files in podcast feeds, but you don't make any money that way.

There are a couple distributors who are dipping into the indie well for content to sell. One such is ShortsInternational at britshorts.com, which handles a lot of high end award winning shorts.

A recent episode of This Week in Media alerted me to TuneCore.com , which will take your hard copy submissions and run them by the "editorial staff" at iTunes. Users pay iTunes, iTunes pays TuneCore, and TuneCore pays you. Not a perfect solution, but it's a start. This is similar to the way CD Baby works with indie musicians, although I doubt there's a gatekeeper that judges the content of songs.

While iTunes is the holy grail for filmmakers -- as it's already being used by a huge chunk of the population -- there are some alternatives. MeDeploy.com is a competing service, an "iTunes for indie film producers." There's also Amazon Video On Demand (formerly Amazon Unbox), which works with CreateSpace.com (formerly CustomFlix). These services sound great, but are they really that different than video-on-demand sites I've submitted to in the past, like Dave.tv and Vuse.com?

Most likely not, but Amazon does have something going for it -- a name that people trust. And that is a huge deal when it comes time to promote. If I send out an email blast saying "buy my film," I think people will be more likely to pay if they already have an Amazon or iTunes account. Asking someone to pay AND download a program they've never heard of is a hard sell.

Edit 10/06/08

See the comments for a clarification on MeDeploy.

I was also contacted by Indieflix, which I've considered using for DVD sales in the past. Indieflix now distributes films through iTunes, the first of which should be up late October early November.

Edit 10/08/08

Since posting this article, I've heard feedback that Shorts International is notorious for not paying royalties to filmmakers. That's reason enough to be wary of them, along with their exclusive contracts that restrict you from selling to other online distributors.