San Francisco-based LiberatedFilms, which launches today, is a great new video site for independent films. Founders Tobias Batton and Marcus Hogue wanted to create a place where filmmakers could get exposure for their work beyond the usual festival circuits, and where film fans wouldn't need to dig through large volumes of content to find original, independent films and animations. Although it's a cliché, this is essentially "YouTube for filmmakers", with a few key differences.
Once the clips are on the site, LiberatedFilms works in the same way as YouTube and existing video sharing sites - you can explore films by genre or tag, and rank them by recency, popularity, relevance and rating. You can also share films by email, add comments and bookmark them on del.icio.us, Digg and other social bookmarking sites. What LiberatedFilms lacks compared to existing sites is a player to embed on MySpace, hi5, Piczo, AIM Pages and the rest - that would be a useful addition. The interface is neat, too - slick, but not distracting. That's one of the issues I have with Vimeo, the video site that makes it hard to actually find any videos.
Users have profiles, too, of course, with a photo, comments and thumbnails of the films you've viewed. Members who register for free can leave comments, rate clips and access the forums, while for $4.99/month, you can get access to large screen high-resolution versions, and access new clips immediately without ads (the ads don't seem to be live right now, but they plan to have pre-roll ads served to users with free accounts).
LiberatedFilms faces one rival that also wants to serve independent filmmakers: Dovetail.tv. Dovetail.tv has some good content, but it suffers some major usability issues: they have an odd all-Flash player that opens in a new window and takes up the whole screen. Personally, I much prefer LF's YouTube-like interface. The idea could work too, particularly if they promote it at film festivals and reach a critical mass of talented filmmakers and fans. All in all, a good start.
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