Viddsee Boosts Promotion of Independent Films in Southeast Asia with New Website, Viddsee Buzz

One of the startups from Singapore, Viddsee, recently officially launched a new site named Viddsee Buzz. Viddsee's newest site is designed to help expand the reach of content to a wider audience in Southeast Asia – including Indonesia – through editorial content.

A little information about Viddsee, a startup that launched in 2013 this is a platform streaming videos that help independent filmmakers achieve wide publicity and distribution to large audiences. To date, Viddsee claims its service has managed to attract more than five million unique viewers. The platform, which is already in such a way, is in fact still considered to have an empty gap that is felt to be "lacking" in reaching out viewer more than ever, for that reason Viddsee Buzz was launched.

In accordance with the news reported by TechCrunch (15/4), Derek Tan as co-founder Viddsee Buzz said, the Viddsee Buzz site will help reach a large number of users with video content that comes with all the editorial grids. “Viddsee Buzz will be tasked with bringing the essence of the film closer to many audiences through websites. This can be done through research content, context, and opinions behind a film,” said Derek.

Like a film review site, Viddsee Buzz will implement a number of articles which will of course be related to various independent films that have been published.Submit on the Viddsee platform. The published articles will contain information about the film, ranging from reviews, the story behind the making of the film, to chat interview with the film creator to enrich the content and information that might attract the attention of many users to watch a number of interesting films from independent film creators throughout Southeast Asia.

For the Indonesian market, the Viddsee platform itself has not been seen inviting many independent filmmakers to publish their films on the Viddsee platform. So far, as far as I have looked, there have only been ten short films made by Indonesian filmmakers. The number is much different from films from Singapore, Thailand, and other countries.

Seeing this, even though it acts as a forum for the online short film community, Viddsee has not been able to attract the attention of independent Indonesian filmmakers who actually have many talented talents to compete with foreign independent filmmakers. In Indonesia, this kind of forum has previously emerged initiated by KickAss Underdogs, an independent film community site fronted by director Rudi Sudjarwo together with Wahyudi who is currently run a special school coding in Indonesia.

Although they do not compete directly, both Viddsee and Underdog KickAss both have a noble goal, namely to promote the works of independent films known as "underground" to be able to surface more mainstream without having to have the business strategy efforts common to larger film actors.

The biggest challenge of such a site, of course, comes from YouTube, which is widely known to a wide audience as a video sharing platform. However, as a very broad video sharing platform, exposure which is specifically related to the independent film industry, feels a little "unfit" if only through publication on YouTube.

Places such as Viddsee and Underdog KickAss should be put to good use by local independent filmmakers to not only reach local audiences but also gain attention from overseas audiences.

[photo illustration: Shutterstock]