California News Reporter

Los Angeles, Calif. – March 18, 2021 – Headlines about influencers and gamers earning millions of dollars on platforms like Twitch and YouTube are ubiquitous. Content streamers make their money through a variety of means, including sponsorships, paid subscriptions to their channel, a share of advertising revenue, commissions from affiliate marketing, and fans simply cheering them on and thanking them through donations. 

All of those earning opportunities, however, require a massive following in order to produce significant revenue. For micro influencers and content creators with more modest followings, the path to making money is far from clear.

SideStream, a movie-sharing startup, offers a way for movie lovers with communities of all sizes to monetize their following. SideStream was created as a way for communities large and small to gather together virtually for private screenings of their favorite films. These screenings can be hosted by anyone with an interest in movies and a desire to share them with others, regardless of audience size. A SideStream host could be the organizer of a movie club, a social media influencer, or a film-industry insider.

Hosting a SideStream is simple to set up and only requires a computer and an internet connection. The host selects a film from SideStream’s growing library, sets the ticket price, schedules the event, and invites guests. A custom link is generated for the event. Virtual tickets to a SideStream have two components – the movie price, which is fixed, and the commentary fee, which is determined by the host. After three tickets to a given event have sold, the host begins to earn revenue, receiving up to 75 percent of the total net proceeds of each ticket sold. The result, assuming the minimum price point, is a path to earning revenue 43 times faster than with an ad-based live-streaming platform such as Twitch or YouTube.

“Our platform is focused on movies and monetization,” says co-founder and Chief Product Officer Kevin Pereira. “With SideStream, influencers with audiences of any size can instantly engage and monetize their followings in ways they can’t with ad-based services, which require massive scale to generate revenue.”

Many streaming services, including Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video, offer a “watch party” feature, enabling groups to virtually watch a movie simultaneously. But each of those services is limited in functionality, differing from SideStream in four key ways. First, while some of the existing “watch party” features include a text chat function, none of these services allows for the host to provide live video and voice commentary, which is a key component of SideStream’s features. 

Next, these other streaming services’ co-viewing capabilities aren’t built for scale, having a limit in terms of capacity to any single event. For example, Disney+ only allows for seven guests, Amazon Prime Video goes up to one hundred. With SideStream, there is no limit to the audience size. A third differentiator is access. In order to participate in a watch party through these subscription services, each guest must have a paid account with that service. With SideStream, no subscription is needed: guests purchase a ticket only for the events they are interested in, without any recurring fees. Finally, none of the existing platforms offers revenue sharing models around movie co-viewing, so there’s little incentive for people with a following to organize virtual viewing events or promote them to their communities.
 
“It’s time to innovate the way we watch movies from home,” says Neal Tiles, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of SideStream. “Whether you’re talking about on-demand or subscription services, not much has changed in the past several years. It’s been little more than a ‘Virtual Blockbuster Video’ model. Meanwhile, social media has exploded and live streaming has become a huge business. SideStream brings social engagement to the online movie experience.”

SideStream offers another significant benefit for live streamers: The company is studio-friendly, giving live-streaming hosts the assurance that they can offer treasured films to their guests without any concerns about intellectual property and legality. An initial SideStream distribution partner is Universal Filmed Entertainment Group (UFEG), a division of Comcast Corporation, with plans to add on other studios, both large Hollywood entities and smaller independents.

SideStream’s unique approach has not gone unnoticed. In 2020, Google’s Android TV recognized the startup’s ground-breaking concept by accepting SideStream into its inaugural Innovation Initiative. This highly selective, global program seeds developers with resources that help them bring a shared vision for communication and entertainment to life. 

SideStream’s vision, born of a passion for movies and the recognition of the desire to share that passion with audiences of all sizes, is changing the way audiences watch films, while at the same time offering opportunities for influencers and live streamers across the spectrum to share their voices and earn revenue in return. 

SideStream recently launched an equity crowdfunding campaign on MicroVentures to help fuel their continued expansion. For more information, visit their MicroVentures page.

Media Contact
Company Name: SideStream
Contact Person: Neal Tiles
Email: Send Email
Phone: (802) 489-6660
Address:1112 Montana Ave, Suite 656
City: Santa Monica
State: CA 90403
Country: United States
Website: https://sidestream.com/