YouTube Adds Indie Film Screening

YouTube has opened up a channel/section/whatever for long-form indie films, The YouTube Screen Room.

Check out Are You The Favorite Person of Anybody? written by Miranda July and directed by Miguel Arteta, from the Wholphin DVD series.

The YouTube Screening Room is a platform for top films from around the world to find the audiences they deserve.

Every other Friday, you’ll find four new films featured in the YouTube Screening Room.

These films always appear with the permission and involvement of the filmmakers, so be sure to rate, share and leave comments. This is your chance to not only watch great films from all corners of the globe, but also to converse with the filmmakers behind them.

While the majority of these films have played at international film festivals, occasionally you’ll find films that have never before screened for wide audiences.

All films playing in the YouTube Screening Room are displayed within our High Quality player to give you the best viewing experience possible.

Be a part of a new generation of filmmaking and distribution and help us connect films and audiences in the world’s largest theater!

Silicon Alley Reporter runs some numbers:

Because YouTube bypasses CDNs and peers directly with big Internet exchanges, YouTube pushes data on the Web more cheaply than anyone. Their cost of streaming is a tiny fraction of a penny per user per hour. If it were 1/4 of a cent, we’re talking about $250 to stream an hour of video to 100,000 users — and we can make informed guesstimate that YouTube is paying even less than that. Meanwhile, assuming YouTube can sell at least one Adsense For Video ad at a $15 CPM, that’s $1,500 in revenue.

Storage costs? Yes, there are some, but they’re tiny. The going rate is $175 per terabyte (1,000 gigabytes), and that’s subject to Moore’s Law, so it should likely drop by half every two years or so. Meanwhile Assuming YouTube can sell at least one Adsense For Video ad at $15 CPM, that’s $1,500.