Everyone likes to say Netflix revolutionised film distribution. It didn’t. It digitised it.
The pyramid stayed exactly the same — theatrical, then DVD, then cable, then whatever comes next — Netflix just moved the whole thing onto a server. The gatekeeper changed shape. It didn’t disappear. And for an independent filmmaker trying to get a film in front of the people who’d actually love it, that distinction matters more than almost anything else in the room.
Here’s the part nobody puts on a panel: when you hand your film to a single platform, you’re not just choosing a distributor. You’re choosing to let someone else’s algorithm decide who gets to find you, what they pay, and whether you ever hear from them again.
The vanished travel agent
Twenty years ago, if you wanted to book a trip, you called a travel agent. They had the relationships, the inventory, the knowledge. Then the internet arrived and travel agents mostly vanished — except they didn’t really vanish, they just got replaced by an algorithm that decides which flight you see first, which hotel gets the top slot, which price you’re shown. The intermediary didn’t go away. It got automated, and it got a lot less accountable.
Streaming discovery works the same way. The platform is the new travel agent. It decides which films surface in a recommendation row and which sit invisible in a catalogue of forty thousand titles. Except this travel agent doesn’t work for the filmmaker. It works for engagement metrics, and those two goals only sometimes overlap.
What you actually lose
Three things disappear when a platform’s algorithm becomes your only discovery channel:
The relationship with your own audience. You don’t get their email. You don’t know if they were moved, confused, or half-watching while scrolling their phone. The platform knows. You don’t.
Control over your own economics. A large-scale academic study of YouTube’s creator economy found the platform keeps roughly 45% of ad revenue and pays out the remaining 55% to creators — and that’s the generous end of the spectrum. The same study found channels with 10 million-plus subscribers average $1.7 million a year in ad revenue, while channels with 1,000 to 10,000 subscribers average $295 a year.¹ Not $295,000. $295. Plenty of licensing and aggregation deals in the independent film world land nowhere near the favourable end of that range either.
Stability itself. A 2026 market analysis of the creator economy found that platform algorithm dependency can cut a creator’s visibility by 30 to 70% overnight, following nothing more than a single policy change nobody voted on and nobody can appeal. Imagine building a five-year release strategy for your film on ground that can shift that much before breakfast.
The gap between where you are and where you’d want to be
Ask yourself honestly: right now, do you know who actually watches your film? Not who streamed it — who watches it, who talks about it, who would pay to see whatever you make next?
If the honest answer is “the platform knows, I don’t,” that’s not a failure on your part. It’s the design working exactly as intended. Platforms were never built to hand that relationship back to you. Why would they?
New models, built the other way round
The alternative isn’t “abandon platforms.” It’s building the parts you can own — your list, your pricing, your direct relationship with the people who already love your work — before you need them, not after a platform decision reminds you that you needed them all along.
This isn’t a call to reject distribution deals or aggregators. Plenty of them do good, necessary work, and for many films they remain the right first move. It’s a call to stop treating audience ownership as optional infrastructure you’ll get to eventually. The filmmakers who’ll have the most leverage in the next five years won’t be the ones with the biggest single platform deal. They’ll be the ones who never let any single deal become the whole strategy.
If you don’t know and love your audience, you don’t have a distribution plan — you have a hope.
Ben Lachaise Wiener is Founder of Syloe Group and TribuShare, a Paris-based company working at the intersection of independent film production and audience-first distribution strategy.
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