Few markers of success are as universally agreed upon as getting your likeness plastered on the side of a New York City bus. There’s something about seeing a jumbo version of yourself looking down on the average-sized humans below that signifies I’ve finally made it.
“Yeah...that shit cray,” Katja Blichfeld says with a laugh. Just last week she saw the face of her husband, Ben Sinclair, on a bus for the first time. Blichfeld and Sinclair write, direct, and produce High Maintenance, a web series about a NYC weed dealer. Sinclair stars as The Guy, an unnamed, bike-riding dealer who doubles as a therapist of sorts to his clientele. Today marks the premiere of its second season.
The bus is just the beginning. Wander the city and you’ll see advertisements for the show everywhere: Phone kiosks, taxi toppers and, perhaps most noticeably, a two-story rendering of Sinclair’s face---surrounded by weed leaves---on the side of a brick building in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood. Few web series get this kind of promotional push. But High Maintenance is at the center of a new online video experiment: It’s the first original series fully funded by Vimeo.
Earlier this year Vimeo announced it would sink $10 million into supporting original content. So far, most of that has been spent licensing and marketing the films sold on the company’s Vimeo On Demand platform, but a chunk of it is going toward creating original programming like High Maintenance.
For a company best known as a platform for hosting user-generated videos, it’s a significant, though not entirely surprising, move. Video streaming companies across the web have been pouring money into original programming to distinguish themselves from competitors (both online and off) and attract and retain more viewers. The benefit is relative to the business model: For sites like YouTube, bolstering original programming (hopefully) will lead to more viewers, which brings more advertising revenue; for Netflix, it means more subscribers joining and (fingers crossed) staying with the service.
For Vimeo, the best explanation is an original series will draw attention to its relatively new Vimeo On Demand service, a library of nearly 14,000 titles customers can purchase a la carte like they might from iTunes. And there’s the catch about High Maintenance: Vimeo expects you to pay for it.
New episodes will debut in cycles of three; three today and three more in January. Each will cost $1.99, or you can buy all six for $7.99. Paying to watch the series shouldn’t be a big deal---"It’s coffee money," says Sinclair---except the first season was, and still is, free. This requires not just a moment of reflection (are these 15 minutes of entertainment worth the price of a Snickers?), but a significant change in engrained viewer behavior. “It’s an opportunity to be on the team of the viewer and be like, listen, you’re supporting pure artistic expression,” says Sinclair. “It’s not about you acquiring some crap, and it has nothing to do with you being manipulated through advertising.”
Like Netflix, iTunes and Amazon, Vimeo believes the future of online video is not ad supported, but customer supported. Vimeo already has a booming business with creators. When the company launched in 2004, it was mainly a tool for independent filmmakers to upload and manage videos. Today it has half a million subscribers who pay anywhere from $60 to $200 a year to do just that. But it’s also grown into a watching platform with more than 170 million viewers visiting the site each month. The big difference between Vimeo and most streaming services is that Vimeo’s platform is open. Like YouTube, any creator can upload a film and charge whatever he or she wants for it. “You can't go to iTunes and go, knock knock, hey will you carry my film?” says Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor. “They’ll go, ‘No, get a distributor, leave us alone.’ But you can do that on Vimeo.”
Trainor compares the rise of open, direct-to-consumer platforms like VOD and VHX to the shift that occurred in the television industry decades ago. In the beginning there were big, mass-market networks (ABC, NBC, CBS) that were free to watch and made money through advertising. In today's streaming ecosystem, YouTube is the equivalent of that major broadcast network. And certainly, the ad-supported model works well---if you have enough scale. Problem is, most independent artists don’t bring in enough viewers to make a living that way. And the stuff that does get those clicks tends to be aimed at the lowest common denominator. “YouTube shows just how insanely massive user-submitted content can be, but it comes with one massive drawback: it’s often a huge sacrifice of quality," says Trainor. "It’s one thing when it’s free and it’s cats on skateboards. It’s like, OK, you may never get that two minutes of your life back, but you didn't actually put down your credit card.”
Then came paid cable and the high-quality entertainment you see on the likes of HBO and AMC. Trainor believes we’re in the early phase of shift toward online paid premium television, where artists will be able to circumvent traditional distribution deals and sell their work directly to fans (Vimeo’s deal gives artists 90 percent of revenue). Right now this means customers pay per episode, though the company just announced that it’s looking to launch a Netflix-style subscription model early next year.
Selling your work directly to consumers rewards a dedicated community (as evidenced by Louis CK’s direct-to-consumer win a few years ago). Some of the artists on VOD built their following on YouTube, only to come over to Vimeo where they can sell longer-form content to fans for whatever price they choose. This has worked well for artists like Angry Video Game Nerd, who within 12 hours of releasing his movie, Angry Video Game Nerd The Movie, sold more than 12,000 copies at $5 per rental and $10 per purchase---not a bad return. Vimeo is hoping the same will hold true for High Maintenance, which already has a cult following.
High Maintenance was a safe bet for Vimeo’s first foray into original programming: It came with an established fan base, which makes it a much less risky development prospect than building a show from the ground up. Blichfeld and and Sinclar made the first episode in 2012, mostly as a way to work with each other and showcase their friends’ talent. When they started, Blichfeld had a day job in casting and Sinclair was an actor and film editor. “I really thought I would just be casting for my whole life,” says Blichfeld. “And I was trying to start a composting company,” Sinclair adds. “But this thing ended up happening instead.”
Early episodes were brief snapshots of Sinclair’s encounters with customers. You never learn the dealer’s name, but you get an intimate (and often funny) look at the lives of the people he’s selling to. A great early episode focuses on a homeless girl who mooches money and food---and, yes weed---from prospective love interests. But it can skew melancholy at times. For all its excellent comic timing, High Maintenance doesn’t shy away from highlighting the inherent loneliness of humans. And that’s the beauty of the show---the characters you see on screen mirror the complex, neurotic, but ultimately lovable, people in our own lives.
The new episodes will continue be fleshed-out personality sketches, but thanks to Vimeo's funding they’re more ambitious. They’re slightly longer (on average about 15 minutes); you’ll meet more characters and see them in more settings. “The reason those first several episode happened inside four walls was out of sheer need to keep it contained,” explains Blichfeld. Of the budget Trainor says, “Its definitely not House of Cards-level investment,” but it was enough for Blichfeld and Sinclair to pay their actors and crew. It’s important to remember, this is still very much independent filmmaking.
And it's prudent for Vimeo to start small. After all, this is an experiment on multiple levels for the company. It’s early days yet in the world of on-demand content, and no one can be sure how willing people are to pay for something they used to get for free. But if it works, it's a win for everyone. Certainly for the filmmakers who now have incentive (and money) to make more ambitious work. But let's be real: It's also a win for viewers who get to sit back, partake of whatever might be legal in their state, and watch quality shows in more ways than ever before.
