An Open Letter to YouTube: Give Independent Filmmakers a Rent/Buy Button

It could change everything for us filmmakers, and my Mom trying to watch our movies.

Dear YouTube,

I’m a filmmaker who lives at the crossroads of two worlds that shouldn’t be separate anymore: YouTube and cinema.

I’ve directed two theatrical releases — Dating & New York, distributed by IFC Films, and 31 Candles, which I got into theaters by literally knocking on the door of the Quad Cinema in Manhattan and convincing them to program it. I’ve made films for major streamers: EXmas on Amazon and At Midnight on Disney Plus and Hulu. And I’ve built a YouTube channel where hundreds of thousands of people watch my filmettes every month.

My next film, Busboys, starring David Spade and Theo Von, will be released this year and confirms the thesis I’m about to pitch you below.

I’ve seen every version of how movies reach audiences. And all of that experience has led me to one conclusion: YouTube should be the home base for independent film distribution.

I’m asking for one thing that would change everything:

A rent/buy button that creators can add directly to their own uploads, on their own channels.

That’s it. It would be quite lovely and amazing so if this is convincing enough, and takes about a few lines of code, no need to keep reading, and THANK YOU for making it better for us thousands of indie filmmakers out there!

But if you need convincing, as Casey Neistat would say - let me explain.

We’re living in a paradox of independent film distribution. There have never been more pathways to get your movie in front of an audience — and yet remarkably few of those pathways actually work at getting people to show up in a meaningful way.

In my opinion, the landscape essentially breaks down into three tiers, and none of them are good enough.

The first is acquisition by a major or well-resourced distributor — an A24, a Neon, a Searchlight. These companies have real marketing budgets, legacy relationships with theater chains and streamers, and the infrastructure to actually launch a film. But that infrastructure is expensive, and even the cooler, more filmmaker-friendly versions of these companies are still backed by private equity or significant institutional capital. You’re playing in a world where access is gated by money and relationships that were built long before you showed up.

The second tier is the smaller independent distributor. Some of these companies are run by passionate people who genuinely care about cinema. But if you’re being honest about what they actually provide, it’s often a preexisting relationship with a handful of theaters and access to an aggregator that places your film on SVOD or AVOD platforms. Meanwhile, your revenue is being split across multiple intermediaries before a dollar ever reaches you — the distributor, the aggregator, the platform. This has been the standard model for a long time, but given what’s now possible with direct-to-audience distribution, it’s increasingly hard to justify handing over that much of your film’s economic life to middlemen.

And then there’s full self-distribution. You build a website, you host your film, you own everything. Which sounds great in theory — until you realize your mom doesn’t know how to find it (sorry Nancy), and neither does anyone else. Without a platform that audiences already trust and already visit, you’re essentially opening a store on a street with no foot traffic.

Every indie filmmaker knows this nightmare. You finish your film, and then you’re told to get it on as many platforms as possible. So your movie ends up on Fandango, Vudu, Trader-Joes-Flix (the new one of the week) who the hell knows, and a dozen services nobody in your audience has ever opened on purpose.

The person who’s followed your channel for three years has to go create an account on some platform they’ve never heard of.

YouTube solves every single one of these problems. And would live in tandem with a limited theatrical release.

Reachability? YouTube has over two billion logged-in users a month and an algorithm that is essentially a free, perpetual marketing engine. If your content resonates, the platform will find your audience for you — something no independent distributor on earth can promise.

User experience? On the front end, audiences get a clean, technically seamless viewing experience on any device they own. YouTube is already on every television, every phone, every tablet, every Roku and Fire Stick in the world. The app is installed. The credit card is on file. Someone can hear about your movie at dinner, pick up their remote, say the title, and be watching in sixty seconds. No other platform comes close. On the back end, filmmakers get robust analytics, monetization tools, and complete creative control over how their work is presented.

But here’s the thing that matters most — YouTube is the only option where you retain full ownership of your film. Forever.

You don’t sign over your rights for seven years. You don’t grant exclusivity to a platform that might shelve your movie. You don’t watch your revenue get carved up by four different middlemen before you see a cent. You keep your film. You keep your audience. You keep your data. That is genuinely unprecedented in the history of film distribution, and I don’t think enough filmmakers have fully internalized how radical that is.

What I’m describing is YouTube becoming the place where Substack meets Patreon meets a seamless viewing experience — all in one. A creator builds their audience on your platform, makes their work on your platform, and monetizes their work on your platform. No five different services duct-taped together. No sending your fans on a scavenger hunt across the internet.

You might be reading this and thinking, “YouTube already does this.” It doesn’t..

YouTube offers Memberships — a monthly subscription where creators can gate bonus content behind a paywall. But that’s a subscription model, which sets the expectation of regular, recurring content. We’re not trying to become a content treadmill; we’re making films, and films don’t work on a monthly drip schedule. On top of that, Membership videos aren’t even surfaced by the algorithm, which defeats the entire purpose of building on YouTube in the first place.

Then there’s the other end of the spectrum: YouTube’s transactional movie rentals and purchases. Yes, those exist — but they live on an entirely separate part of the platform that creators have zero access to. That pipeline runs through traditional distribution aggregators with layers of splits and a messy back end that has nothing to do with the creator economy YouTube has built.

What I’m proposing sits in neither of these buckets. It simply does not exist on the platform today.

And the thing is — this isn’t a massive engineering lift (at least I think!). The rent/buy infrastructure already exists. You built it for studios. It’s one button of code. Just extend it to creators.

Quick edit: if your immediate thought here is that one of the issues with this would be the chain of title, the series of documents that proves the person who owns the film owns the film, I believe that could be a very simple upload process. Considering all of us independent filmmakers need to create a chain of title no matter what distribution option we go through - that exists in a Google Drive. Thank you

This would change everything. Not just for me — for every filmmaker who built an audience making shorts and behind-the-scenes content but has no way to monetize their actual feature on the same platform. For every director who made something great and watched it disappear into the void of services nobody uses.

YouTube, you’ve already changed how the world watches. Now change how independent filmmakers distribute.

Give us the button. We’ll do the rest.

Much love,

Jonah Feingold, Romantical

Oh and P.S. - progress! Thank you Fede!