15/05/2015 - CANNES NEXT: Will VoD kill the DVD stars? Are filmmakers ready to face new challenges in digital distribution? NEXT 2015 answers these questions and more with its first workshop

It's that time of the year again, and as actors and directors from all over the world return to Cannes, so has the NEXT Pavilion – three times bigger, and always one step ahead.

Thursday afternoon saw a huge crowd attend the first workshop of the 2015 edition of NEXT, entitled “VoD: The Challenges and Opportunities of Digital Distribution and How to Embrace Them”. Aided by their slides, FilmDoo co-founders William Page and Weerada Sucharitkul showed the audience how to make the most out of the VoD strategy when promoting and distributing a film.

“At FilmDoo, we help people discover independent films,” said Sucharitkul while illustrating the platform. "Film is a social experience, and for this reason, our website allows subscribers to search by region, theme, personalised film suggestion or even films liked by other users.”

This transactional VoD platform combines community engagement and curation highlights to make independent content accessible. FilmDoo has already launched in the UK and plans to roll out globally.

Maxim Jago, chief innovation officer, then took the floor, following on from Sucharitkul's speech. “We are moving towards an economy based on intellectual property – that's why the core is the story and the way we tell it. In this process, word of mouth is essential.” When asked about the best way to get a film discovered, he replied that embracing VoD as a means of sharing ideas with people is the key to success. “VoD platforms can be the medium, helping filmmakers to add semantically meaningful information, but it's up to the creator to make his or her story amazing, so that the word of mouth will be unstoppable.”