My film, Under the Boardwalk: The MONOPOLY Story, was initially passed over by Netflix. However, I believe that after seeing our film's modest success on iTunes as well as our grassroots campaign to get folks to add the film to their Netflix DVD queue to show interest in the title, Netflix made a purchase of DVDs for their DVD service. A few months later, Netflix made an offer a for a 1-year non-exclusive streaming license in the low 5 figures to our DVD distributor, New Video Group. Both them and us thought it made sense to take it, so we accepted the offer, and Netflix began streaming it in July 2012. That week, we peaked at the #2-most streamed title in the US according to InstantWatcher.

Netflix is paying the license fee in quarterly installments to our distributor. While my film is not a studio title, I imagine they conduct business similarly with other license holders. The downside is that Netflix does not release any viewership metrics, so if Netflix wants to renew the contract at the end of a year, it will be hard to negotiate a new fee when we won't have the same viewership data they will.