VHX is bringing digital video distribution up to speed with this internet-fueled modern age, delivering DRM-free video, such as Aziz Ansari’s Dangerously Delicious and Indie Game: The Movie, directly to fans. Having launched as a social video community — a way to discover, share, and queue video for later — VHX could soon be seeing their distribution platform and consumption community interact in interesting ways down the road.
We talked with co-founder, Jamie Wilkinson, who describes how the timing felt right for VHX’s push to help small filmmakers and artists self-distribute their work: “It really helps leverage all the growth we’ve seen in social media for people to actually financially support themselves outside of the old studio distribution model. For filmmakers, it’s really great because we don’t take any rights restrictions or exclusivity, so we push things to market super fast and work in a way where every project is individualized and has a bespoke solution.”
Jamie also appreciates the bespoke solution that iDoneThis provides for the VHX team, with its flexibility regarding entries and settings. “Everybody uses it differently and it’s interesting seeing just how it’s evolved as people use it more.” For Jamie, iDoneThis’s most important function is providing talking points for the next morning. “It’s been really good just in terms of thinking about what will get accomplished that day.”
The VHX team is in the process of expanding (calling all hand models!). Jamie explains how, with the company centered in New York and remote team members like himself, “we lean really heavily on tools to make sure that everybody is up to sync all the time. I have a lot of experience, especially with open-source software development, so I know how critical it is having good communication lines.”
iDoneThis is one communication tool among many that VHX uses, including email, HipChat, Google Hangouts, Asana, and Github. “It’s a question of having a good Swiss Army knife.” Jamie elaborates on how one tool shouldn’t try to do everything, that instead, “it works having a Unix style, having small tools that do certain things really well.” iDoneThis is the small but powerful tool that keeps everybody in the loop. “With the chat, you’re going to miss things and you shouldn’t be expected to see everything necessarily. With project management tools, it’s more static, and you kind of tune it out because there’s so much activity.”
Many of us grapple with the challenge of navigating the relentless stream of information and activity at work. Jamie sees our daily digest feature as a great solution for dealing with the flood. “iDoneThis’s daily digest model has been really great because it’s a summary of what has been done and it gives you a high-level view. It’s exactly how start-ups probably should be run and how we try to run [VHX]. I think there are almost lessons for services like Twitter. I mean, they finally started pushing out these digest-like highlight emails that I think most people turn off, but if it’s something you know is important, you pay really close attention to your inbox and you’ll pay attention to everything that you’re looking at.”
We’re proud to serve as one of the handy tools on VHX’s swiss army knife of work solutions, helping VHX democratize the world of digital video!