Owning Your Distribution with Uscreen CEO Allison Yazdian

You're an independent filmmaker, you've made an epic film, and you want to release it, obviously, to audiences worldwide. So you try to find a distributor. Sometimes they ghost you, sometimes they don't give you the right deal. It's very frustrating. You want to put it on to, say, a platform, a streaming platform. So maybe you'll go on to YouTube, but you'll get lost on YouTube, you think, or you're not going to get any revenue because you don't have a YouTube channel. So you're really sort of confused, maybe a little bit frustrated, because you don't know what route to take. There is another route, the one that I like best, and that is taking control of your destiny and doing it yourself. But that can be overwhelming. Starting basically your own streaming platform would be like making Netflix for yourself. One, you don't have enough content really to do it. Two, it would be technologically too difficult to actually pull it off. But can you do it? Yes, you actually can, because there are companies that do this for you. And when you discover them, it could change the trajectory of your whole career and of your content. And today, my guest is the CEO of one of the best companies that does that, creating streaming platforms for you. Hold on to your seats, this is a great one. If you want to be a successful indie filmmaker, you You need to know a lot about not just the production of movies, but the business. We are going to tell you the truth and reality of what really happens in the indie film business. Hi everybody, welcome back to Indie Filmmaking Truth and Reality. I'm your host Jeff Deveritt, and today we have a very special guest, Allison Yazdian. Did I say that right?

That's perfect.

Okay, and she is the CEO of Uscreen TV. She's going to tell you more about it, but Uscreen, I you happen to be a client, Uscreen is a platform that is designed to help content creators like me and you release your content yourself, take total control of your destiny, and actually operate your own streaming platform. So you can kind of build your own, for lack of a better term, Netflix for yourself without having to build it. As a client, you basically have, you know, a subscription, whether it's monthly or annual or whatever, at different levels. And how much content you have and how in-depth you want to get. You could build your own community and run your own streaming platform. When I discovered this, this is self-distribution on steroids. This is basically saying I don't have to go through all the other streaming platforms anymore. I can focus my audience and drive my audience to my own streaming platform, hopefully get them as subscribers and/or maybe just a transactional view. And monetize without having to go through several levels of distribution. So hopefully I kind of described that right. But Allison, welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Thank you for having me. Yeah.

First of all, tell us about you first and then tell us about the platform.

Okay, great. So I am the CEO of UScreen, and that's spelled with the letter U for anyone who's Googling us, UScreen.tv. And my background is very much geared towards supporting entrepreneurs. So won't go into too much detail here, but a lot of, um, the companies I've spent time with have been very much focused on helping entrepreneurs realize their dreams. I've done that at technology businesses focused on dentists, on real estate agents, on creators, um, and now at Uscreen, I feel like it's really all coming together because essentially we service entrepreneurs, video businesses, creators from a lot of different walks of life, a lot of different verticals who all have this dream, who all have this vision of really getting their, their content, their ideas, their skills out into the world. Um, but to your point, it's, it's not as easy as one can hope it would be. And we really try to make it as easy as possible by building the technology, building the tools, not only to help them host a video catalog and be able to monetize through subscription, but also just to manage that entire business so that these entrepreneurs can continue to invest their time in what they love doing, which is building those communities and really putting their content out into the world and helping them to scale their impact.

Yeah, so I call this taking control of your destiny and of your business. And it's very overwhelming for independent filmmakers to even think about doing this. Often I'll say to them, you know, at least have your own YouTube channel so that you can control that, but you can't control the revenue stream or the subscription base. You can't get any of the analytics. Analytics. That's right. You're removed from basically controlling sort of the business side of it, although your content is out there in a big way. And so sometimes I'll say, you know, create your own website where you can stream, but that is not as efficient as having sort of a streaming platform. But when I discovered your company, I said, wow, this is exactly what I've been looking for— the ability to build a streaming platform without actually having to build it.

Right.

Because, you know, as a content creator, what do I know about technology? I don't want anything to do with that. It's going cost me way too much and I'm not gonna get it right. So when I went onto your platform for the first time and, and I explored it, I was blown away just how exactly on target it was for a content creator like myself. I have 9 films, all of which will go there. So it's funny, I just met you last week. I mean, I knew about your company, I've been a client for several months now, and you— the Uscreen had a summit last week. It was called Uscreen Connect. Connect, that's right. And they do this sort of once or twice a year and they invite creators to come and introduce all of sort of the new technology. And it was great because you meet other creators at the summit. It was fantastic. There were a lot of fitness people. I noticed a lot of fitness people because let's say you're a Pilates or yoga instructor and you're doing weekly classes or even daily classes, whatever, and you just don't want to put your stuff up on YouTube. You actually want to create your own community. So imagine this gives them the ability to have their own streaming platform which they can build an audience and have subscribers and All of them were there, and, you know, a lot of them spoke, and it was super enlightening. And I feel like your platform is giving people a whole new lease on being a creator of content. I mean, a content creator.

That's absolutely right. I mean, I think, you know, YouTube, they just celebrated their 20th anniversary and really sort of changed the way people consume content. First it started on computers to mobile, and now they're sort of number one on living room television sets because It's opening up this opportunity for creators across the world to be able to get their content out there. Before YouTube, it was so difficult. I mean, this is everything you teach to get, to get your content out there. Yeah. And YouTube plays a very important part in this ecosystem where it's a great way for creators to start to build an audience and get discovered and really get their content out there. And a lot of the creators who work with us, and we've launched thousands of creators, over 3,000 TV and mobile apps that we've launched. We serve nearly 16 million end users. A lot of the creators who end up coming over to Uscreen, they're ready to take it to the next level. So maybe it's, it's going really well on YouTube. They're making some AdSense revenue, they're building a community, maybe they're getting some brand deals, but they want to take it to the next level where they start to own the data, they start to own the audience, they start to own the revenue. And subscription revenue is such a beautiful way to be able to sleep better at night.

Fantastic.

It's passive income. You have a direct relationship with that audience. You're giving them the content that they want more of. You're building the community within the app that really allows them not only to connect with you and have direct access to you, but to, to connect with each other. And it's a very like-minded group if they're willing to pay a subscription fee to sort of join the community. And our whole thesis is how can we help you take your skills? How, how can we help you take your content and really create that sustainable revenue behind it? Um, and it's, you're absolutely right. We have a ton of fitness instructors because I think consumers are really used to paying a subscription fee for fitness. They go to classes, they join gyms, and this is just sort of the digital extension of that. But when I start to look in and dig into a lot of who our customers are, it really runs the gamut. We have filmmakers, we have pro wrestlers and stock car racers. We have a community called Yarn Hive of women who like to yarn together. A lot of coaches, educators, breathwork, you name it, any YouTuber. And they don't have to have these massive communities that they built on YouTube. They just have to have an engaged audience who are really there for them and for each other. And so we've really tried to make it as simple as possible. We built the foundation, we built the technology where we can help them get their video catalogs live, um, quickly. We can help them with all of the monetization because there's a lot that goes into getting someone to give you their email, put down their credit card. Um, and we're constantly optimizing it. We have a team of over 100 people, and we're even building out a lot of like CRM and marketing automation features. And, and there's so much more behind it so that when a customer decides to work with us, not only are we giving them like the tools and the technology to launch the streaming platform, but also to manage it. And then, and this is a lot of what you saw at our summit last week at Connect, there's also a lot of the, the skill and the coaching behind it. We have a whole coaching division that will help a new customer think about how do you market How do you think about retention? What is your content strategy? What is your pricing strategy so that this can be as successful as possible so that you can build out that sustainable revenue stream?

Okay, so I'm gonna represent, 'cause I am an indie filmmaker. Yes. And I'm sold on the platform already. I'm already a paying customer of yours.

Thank you for your business.

And I'm very happy about it. Very happy. I mean, I have lots of work to do 'cause I have to, now that I've seen all the features and functionality in the platform, I have to do a lot more. But I'm gonna represent the film, indie filmmaking community. And I'm gonna ask the questions that they would ask if they were sitting here. Great. Okay, so in no particular order, one of them is, I've only made one movie, and does it make sense for me to have kind of my own streaming platform with just one movie? Like, is that cost-effective and affordable and in terms of time and everything, or do I need to have a certain amount of volume to make it sense, make sense of it?

So if you have one movie, subscription is probably not that's not the route for you. And you had sort of highlighted this earlier, but we can set it up where it's sort of like a pay-per-view, a—

Like a transactional.

A transactional. And so we do—

Which makes more sense.

Right. And so we do have customers who start that way, where maybe it is one video that they are making and able to monetize, but also we're helping them collect email addresses. Right. So that is—

By the way, that's who I am. I'm accessing the transactional side right now.

Exactly.

I'm not even bothering with the subscription because I don't have enough, which I'll talk to a little later on.

That's exactly right. So yes, like we, we have, um, sort of like a product for that group. Um, and we are seeing, uh, really interesting, there are some creators who are sort of coming together because they know that as individuals, maybe they don't have enough content, but if they come together, um, that there may be a way for them to, to set up a subscription with a lot more content. I think that's what's what a lot of our customers really love about Uscreen is that there's a lot of different applications and use cases all under the guise of how do we help people get paid for the great work that they're doing.

Right. Okay. So if they were doing subscription, it would be like going to an Apple or an Amazon or where people would say spend $4.99 for a rental. You guys would manage that transaction. You know, you take a transactional fee like all the other platforms do.

That's right.

But it's a very fair fee. I would get my data directly. I see who my customer is. There's a lot of transparency. The dashboard is fantastic. I'm talking as a customer, so I already know this.

I love this.

Thank you. Okay, now you said something that's really interesting, and actually it segues into where I want to go. Okay. So as an individual with one film, it's going to be difficult. It doesn't almost make financial sense to access. I mean, that was— let me ask this question before I go into this. What are the various price points? I mean, I know them, but do you want to just talk to more or less the affordability of your platform for a content creator?

Sure. I mean, essentially we, we do have different packages that are very much self-serve. If you want to put some content up and start monetizing it, you can actually go and set up an account and start doing it immediately. And we even have folks who can sort of show you how to do it, make sure you can make the most of it. As creators get deeper into this and really want to build these subscription businesses, we can also sort of build custom packages for them where maybe they wanna launch mobile apps or maybe they want TV apps, maybe they wanna do live streaming a couple of times a month or just take advantage of different features that we offer. And we basically can put together these customized packages for them where we lead them through an onboarding process, a migration process. So depending on maybe if they do have a big catalog of video sitting somewhere, we can help kind of get all of that— Right. —ingested, including the metadata to go live. Our packages range anywhere from $199, although we might be doing a holiday promotion coming up soon in December. $199 per month, and it could go, again, depending on how big the catalog is, et cetera, could range into like the thousands.

Right, okay, so filmmakers right now are saying, $200 a month, $199 a month, I mean, how much revenue am I gonna make? Am I gonna even make that amount to make it affordable, and how much do I share? Do I get the whole amount, or what is the transactional fee when something happens? Let's talk transactional, not subscription.

Yeah, for non-subscription transactional, we charge a 5% fee. So basically you're keeping 95% of it. And we, you'll get access to a lot of tools that will help you from a marketing perspective. So to your point, you know, I wish it were, if you build it, they will come, but you have to put a really solid marketing effort forward. And there's things that we can actually do to help you generate interest and give you tools and techniques to be able to drive that traffic.

Yeah, you were talking, Danielle, one of your, you know, I don't know if he's chief of marketing or whatever, was talking about different email campaigns, different social media campaigns, and sharing, you know, a lot of creators were sharing ideas on what they do to kind of get the word out, the message out. Exactly. Okay, so this is kind of where it segues. So now a lot of people I know, talking to my audience, I know who they are, I'm one of them, all right? Is it affordable, $200 a month? Do I need to really manage my own platform? It seems like a lot of work, it seems crazy. But then you said maybe some creators get together and do this. So the one thing we didn't have enough time to talk about at the summit, because you're the CEO and you were busy and everybody needed your attention, so I'm so glad that you came on to the show because I'm going to ask you this in front of my own audience. Okay. So the major initiative that I am taking— so I run this platform called the Indie Film Community, and my UScreen platform is called Indie Film Stream. It's not Devret Media, it's not my company, it's not just my films. The idea behind it is I can help other creators put their films onto the platform and we can work as a group. Because I know that a lot of indie filmmakers have one or two films, aren't going to want to go it alone and don't want to spend that kind of money. So I'm saying, no problem, let's do it as a group. It makes way more sense to do it as a community. Now at some point, if you grow, outgrow that, then you just go it alone. But until you get there, it could be a way more cost-effective way to do it. So I've been inviting filmmakers to say, hey, do you want to try this? We'll put you on the platform. I'm basically going to give them all the revenue so that it's, it's transparent and completely flow-through, because it's in some ways it's a test for me. So that's how I'm managing that. And filmmakers out there, if you're interested, I'll provide more details on how to become part of that. So you don't have to go it alone, you don't pay the monthly fees. You'll pay something, you know, fair is fair. I'm not pay the whole burden of everybody, but it'll be way more cost-effective. All right, the key is marketing. And I talk about marketing ad nauseam. My audience is so tired of listening to me talk about marketing. But now think about this. Now you've got your own platform. You've got your own Netflix basically. All right, you are part of a streaming platform. And if you can drive, build and drive your audience to your own platform, You can keep all the revenue, less the 5% transaction fee. You could be way, way, way more effective and successful and build a whole community to the point where you don't have to rely on YouTube anymore. You don't have to rely on a distributor getting you on any of the SVOD platforms, which likely aren't going to happen. Or how about all the AVOD platforms, the Plutos, the Tubis, all this, where yeah, are they great? They have big audiences, yeah, but you don't see any money. You don't monetize. Okay, you get a little bit here and there, and there's these myths and legends of some people making some real money, but not a lot. Most filmmakers aren't getting anything, and whatever they're getting, it's getting lost in 2 levels or 3 levels of aggregators and distributors and all this kind of stuff. So the idea of bypassing all that, controlling your platform and controlling your audience, and having direct access to the audience, albeit it might not be as big an audience, but it's an engaged audience that you can connect with. But to be successful, it's all about marketing, getting people to know about it and to want to come there because you're asking them, say, in the transactional model, maybe to spend $5 to watch your movie. I personally believe if you do a good job marketing, you will be able to drive that traffic. What is your experience being Allison Yazdian, and not just from this business, from all the businesses you've been in? Because marketing is universal across every business. I don't care what business you're in, you need to tell your customers that you exist and you need to get them excited about your product offering. So talk to us about marketing. Like, that's the struggle for indie filmmakers.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's really interesting because we are working in a time where social media really does create an opportunity for anyone to create a brand around themselves. So even if you think about like the next generation of, of talent, like actors and actresses, more and more of them are crossing over because they're building these social media profiles and followings. And so my advice, and this is advice I'm giving myself, is it's never too early to start to build your own personal brand. Right. And so that is is posting regularly on various social platforms, being super authentic and telling your story. This is how you are going to start to build that community before you even have something to sell, right? Like maybe down the road you may have that film and you want to drive someone to go and, and transact and watch it. Yes, of course you want to start marketing it then, but in my mind it's almost a little bit too late. If I'm in film school right now, I'm going to start building I'm gonna start posting super authentic content. And yes, it's super daunting. Some might call it crazy.

Very tough, very tough.

But this is how you are going to start to build an audience. If it's a quick selfie video telling them what you're taking in classes, behind the scenes as you're starting to build and film the actual movie to start to build interest in it. These types of tactics, first of all, are free. Okay? Like you're, you're going on these social platforms, it's giving you this pedestal. You are going to start to build engagement in, in who you are and in the film. And people love this notion of building in public, right? If it's, if it's building a company, if it's filming a movie, if they see your behind the scenes footage, if they start to understand who you are as a person, they're gonna start to root for you and rally for you. And then when it's time to say, okay, the, the movie is ready, now you can go and see it here, you're probably gonna get a lot more engagement than if it's the day it launches or a couple days before you start to, you try to build that interest. Now ideally, and you were sort of alluding to this, I think again, this is why a lot of our creators want their own platform is because you may see who follows you, but you're not necessarily guaranteed to be able to reach them, right? Like it's, you're very much beholden to the algorithm And sometimes the algo will love a post and sometimes they won't. And so the goal is, is to start to build an email list, right? Now we help our customers do that and we help them broadcast emails and messages out to them even based on where they are in their life cycle. But as soon as you can start to have your own list, it's really worth gold. Even in a world where, where SMS and all these other things take hold, like email still has It's a massive opportunity. Well, it's connection with your audience.

Exactly. That's what it is. And it might be something else. It might not be email in the future, but it's still connecting directly with your audience.

Yes, a way to reach them. Correct. And so that is probably like the cheapest way to market. Like if you don't have these big blockbuster budgets to put behind a film, is just to start to build that grassroots interest on social. So then when it is time to send them over to the platform to watch the film, they're gonna be a lot more vested than if they see your post for the first time saying, come watch my film. Okay, fair enough.

Allison Yazdian. Yes. Again, I'm one of them, right? Yes. So here's what they're thinking right now. They're thinking, that sounds all good and fine, but you're the CEO of a big company and you have presence and you have a story to tell. I'm just kind of a lowly filmmaker who's made a film or not yet or trying to make a film. Who am I? How am I going to build an audience? You know, I'm just— it's going to be very daunting. So here, I have some advice. Please. I say, look it, at the very least, everybody's got 50 people. Like you've got family, you've got friends who will at least watch your film. So I say if you're gonna send your family and your friends somewhere, send them to your own platform.

Yes. Don't send them to YouTube.

Okay, send them to your own platform because 50 people can each tell 10 people, you know, if they want to support you, those 50 can each tell 10, all of a sudden that's 500. And those 500 can each tell 10 or 5, then that's— and that's how it's gonna grow. And I'm not even sure social— on the socials, you know, yeah, obviously try hard, do your best on the socials, but a lot of people are overwhelmed by that as well.

I, of course, and I'm overwhelmed by it as well. And my marketing team is like, you need to put yourself out there more. Like, I get that. I will also say, arguably, filmmakers are some of the best storytellers in the world. And what does really well on social is telling a story.

Fair enough. But filmmakers are focused on content creation. For sort of storytelling as opposed to— this is what they would call marketing. And marketing, I know, for some reason it's like the cobbler's shoes. You don't want to tell your own story, or you get a little, you know—

well, worst case, you could start a social channel not for yourself but for the movie that starts to show BTS or other things that could build it. But I, I completely hear you.

Okay, so, so part 2, part 2, part 2 of what I'm gonna do on your platform is I am going to— and I'm constantly pushing my clients and indie filmmakers to understand, do more marketing. But we have come to the conclusion over years and years of talking about this ad nauseam, saying, I get it, filmmakers don't want to do that. They understand and appreciate that it has to get done, kind of like a studio would never make a film and not release it, you know, big time, right? But a studio has a marketing department. Indie filmmakers do not have marketing departments. So what this platform is, the reason I became a client is because not only are we going to use this to deliver the films directly and get that mailing list, but we're actually going to support it with basically a marketing department for indie films. That's really where my sort of my focus is on, is working with filmmakers and actually doing their marketing campaigns because they're not going to know how to do it, they're not going to want to do it. Marketing is what the other people do. It's what the business people do. Filmmakers are the content creators. They just want to make the content. All right, so we're going to do the marketing. Now we're going to charge for it, okay, because it takes a lot of time and effort, just like making a film does. So we're going to charge a fair price, but, but we're going to become the marketing department for all these indie filmmakers. And then we're going to say, okay, we're going to send that audience that we're marketing to, to this platform so that you can monetize. So it's going to be kind of a closed circuit type of thing, and hopefully you can start to build your own audiences. Do you think that's viable? Absolutely. I mean, it's a big task.

I mean, it's scale, right? I mean, I think that's— it's just the next evolution of where everything is headed, where people are able to own their distribution, which was not available, you know, let's say 20 years ago, even 10 years ago. But there's a lot of support that anyone needs to be able to do this, right? And so to be able to have access to a firm who specializes in this, that can help with the marketing and help with some of the logistics. I mean, it's a lot of how, how we view it as well. Like we want to handle a lot of the technology. Absolutely. So that our creators can focus on what they do best, which is telling stories, creating content, having an impact on their community. So I think it's very viable.

Okay, good. So because for years— when I first became a filmmaker about, I don't know, I made my first film 13 or 14 years ago, and I'm super entrepreneurial, and I've always said, "Gosh, I just wish I could release it myself," but it's too expensive to build that type of technology. Then, you know, then YouTube and all these platforms came along and said, "Okay, I wish I could do this, but I can't control it," and I can't I can't get the analytics I want and I can't kind of monetize it the way I want. And then I saw PJ's video years ago. By the way, I teach at two film schools. I remember maybe 5 years ago he did this video. He's the founder of your company and I've shown it in every class ever since because I say this is the ultimate in self-distribution. This is the ultimate in taking control of your destiny. It's not for everybody because it's super entrepreneurial And, but this is the ultimate goal, and you attach marketing to it and you have that. Okay, now I'm going to go in a little different direction, and you addressed it at the conference, and so I know that you're thinking about it. Everybody's thinking AI. What is AI going to do? How is it going to change things for your business, for our business, for, you know, the world in general?

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a great— and I sort of said this when I when I brought it up at the conference last week, it's hard to not have the discussion about AI and it almost feels like it's a buzzword or a fad. It's not a fad. It is— It's not a fad. It is here and it's evolving rapidly. And my take on it is that generative AI, agentic AI, it is evolving at such a fast pace that in the next couple of years, we're gonna look back on today, 2025, and feel like things were so primitive, just like when we look back 2 years ago, it feels that way. It is accelerating rapidly. And it's very easy to dismiss it or just to, you know, not be happy about it and sort of ostrich and put your head in the sand. My take is you cannot fight progress. It is— Certainly not technology. Especially. And it is what it is. And it's better to be part of of understanding it, mastering it, leveraging it to advance business, um, to advance content creation, to advance anything in your life versus ignoring it. Because the, the future of the world is not going to be replaced by AI. The future of the world is going to be led by people who embrace AI. And so when you think about companies, when you think about businesses, and this is a huge, huge focus for us at Uscreen, it's all about about now that this piece of technology is available, how can we leverage it to supercharge our business? And, and that is finding ways to take administrative tasks, work that was very cumbersome. How do we actually leverage AI to help us be better, better at serving our customers, better at delivering products, just better at growing the business? And we take a very similar approach when we think about how we can bring in artificial intelligence decisions to help our customers. And it's interesting because especially with content creation, there seems to be a little bit of a dichotomy. I think there's a school of people who are all about, let me leverage AI in any way, shape, or form. That's AI videos, that's AI storytelling, any AI content creation. And there's a lot of people who've sort of like dr— drawn a hard line around storytelling, content creation is for the humans, and I don't want AI to be involved. Solved. Our take is let us at least help with something that everyone agrees with, which is that cumbersome, boring administrative task. How do we infuse artificial intelligence within the Uscreen experience to really help our creators get their content out there faster so that they don't have to spend as much time tagging content, building a catalog, et cetera? We do that. We also think it can help create a much more personalized experience for their end users. So if you think about a consumer logging into a video catalog where there's hundreds, if not thousands of video for artificial intelligence to deliver them the exact right video at the right time versus what happens now. If you log into Netflix, you take 20 minutes just to figure out what to watch.

And sometimes you come up with nothing. Exactly. Yeah.

I mean, it's almost like going back to radio. It's overwhelming. It's overwhelming. Yeah. And so we think there's a lot of opportunity there. Now we are seeing, I mean, you look at what OpenAI has come out with, with Sora. It's crazy. Um, there is a lot of dollars going into a lot of different startups in the AI space who are building some pretty incredible pieces of technology that, I mean, truly it's mind-blowing. And, you know, I think these are the conversations we're having with our customers, which is how can we support you? How can we help you? It's hard for us to draw that bright line because we have customers who are embracing digital twins. They want to have an AI version of themselves that their community can have a conversation with.

And so— I haven't even heard of that.

Digital twin. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, There's— that's the thing, there's this whole gamut out there. My advice to anyone, to friends, to family, to people who work for me, is if you are not already experimenting with AI, and that is, you know, opening up ChatGPT, opening up Claude with Perplexity, and just starting to understand its potential— and that is truly level 1 out of maybe 10 different levels— you are going to start to feel left behind because you are going to be walking around the land where there's a lot of other people who are using AI to supercharge their lives. If whether that's meal planning, travel planning, managing their calendars, managing their entire lives. I think it's better to embrace it and really think about how you can harness it to make your life easier.

Yeah, and I think you'd agree with me that, you know, in the creative world, the world of, you know, 'cause I have a law degree in intellectual property, so there's all kinds of intellectual property issues and all this kind of stuff. In that world, creators aren't thrilled about it. Sure. 'Cause, you know, they want humans watching humans and that kind of stuff. Lots of issues and discussions about this. But I do agree with you that you kind of got to get on that train and then kind of figure it out. I talk about it as the train has left the station, it's a freight train, it's going 100 miles an hour, and you're standing on the tracks saying stop. It's just going to run you over. Right. All right, so there's got to be another way to embrace it, and we're not sure what it is. But it's funny, every time I talk about AI in one of my podcasts, I think this is going to be dating itself because AI is moving at such a fast rate that, you know, like you mentioned Sora, there's going to be 50 other platforms like that.

Right. Absolutely. I mean, and there's, there's going to be a lot of companies who launch and then don't make it. And there's a lot of investment going into it. But I think everybody agrees that there is a world, and I'm an optimist, but there is a world where artificial intelligence can make a lot of the problems of society, maybe not eradicate, but at least make them a lot less significant. And I think that's— there's tremendous potential for everyone to understand that, and even in, like, your personal life, to make it— make your life that much better.

Yeah, there will be applications that are good, some that aren't, but we'll see how that all plays out. Right. Okay, so, so last sort of question and direction. Now that you've, you know, kind of met a lot of the creators and who you deal with, and, and you're very involved in this world, this entrepreneurial world, if you were a young a young filmmaker, and I know you, you don't come from that world, and I say filmmaker, let me say content creator, having spoken and seeing sort of the experience of, of who your clients are, how would you point people— like, I teach at two film schools, and, you know, every year semester there's 50 new aspiring bright-eyed students who are looking at the future. I mean, I'm a big advocate of your company, obviously, and of your platform, right? And I think that's the direction to but it can be daunting. And I know you have young kids. I mean, what do you think the future is and sort of the direction that content creators should be thinking about now that we've talked AI and all this other stuff?

Yeah, I mean, I think the keyword for me— I mean, there's probably a few, but the keyword is authenticity. And so this goes to like broader themes that I think are going on in society right now, not to get a little abstract here.

I like this. I think it's very relevant.

Irrelevant to say that. Poetic, if you will. But, you know, I, I feel like, like it or not, a lot of people's attention have moved from a physical analog world, right, where everyone knew their neighbors and everyone had different community places that they would go maybe over the weekends or after school or what have you, or office space, to a world where a lot of people's time and attention is on screens. If if it's with work, if it's, um, on the little screen when they're passing time, if it's watching TV, et cetera. And what that means is that there is this massive opportunity for content creators to create content that will speak to an audience. And it's, and, and I think what's happening, and I think again, it goes back to the testament of YouTube where there's a lot of niche audiences out there. There are a lot of people who have very specific interests where it may not have gotten covered on like a cable TV show, but is now because YouTube, you can have an N of 1 watching your content, there's gonna be someone who's gonna wanna see it. And so what's going to make those niche audiences want to view your content is if it feels authentic and if it feels like you're telling a really great story. It, because there's gonna be people out there who are gonna look for that connection. They're gonna look for that community. And so my advice is, is if you have an idea of content that you wanna get out in the world or a story you wanna tell, just do it. It doesn't have to be perfect. I think that's the other thing too. Like you think about filmmaking 20, 30 years ago, like it had to be final cut, ready to go out, tons of time editing, et cetera, for long form. Now it's more about you gotta get the content out there. You can start to get feedback, you can start to get reactions. And you just have to put it out there. And if you look at a lot of content creators who now have 50, 70, hundreds of millions of followers, they'll even say like, for years I was doing this and no one was really paying attention, but I knew that there were people who liked it, and then it sort of took on a life of its own. And I'm not saying this is the path to get to 100 million followers. Yeah, no, no, I know. But I think it is like, have confidence in what you're putting out there. It is a little bit— you You have to have courage, you have to be bold, you have to get it out there, be authentic to you, tell your story.

But have a voice and be it your voice.

Have a voice. And even on like a YouTube or a social platform, you can start to understand what your audience cares about. You can look at engagement rates, you can look at their comments, you can have them, you know, complete polls within the platform to understand what sort of content they want. And I think that's my other piece of advice is like listen to your audience, understand what they're interested in, and continue to get that content out there because people's attention are on on these platforms and they are looking for your content. So why not sort of put it out there for them? And I truly believe that a lot of our content creators who've been really successful on Uscreen, not only do they have this incredible content, but their community that they've built really feels like they have a connection to the content, to the creator that is portable, that they're saying, okay, yes, we have this relationship on YouTube. We're going to sort of take it to the next level, um, on a Uscreen platform.

I felt that because I'm, you know, in the fitness world, super competitive. There were lots of fitness people at your summit last week. Yes. But they all seem to have their own sort of voice, persona. That's right. Authentic, you know, even though half of them are teaching the same thing. Exactly.

They just have their personality. They have their own angle. Correct. And it is interesting because I've worked with many different like Pilates instructors and I have my favorite. And they're all teaching me to do the exact same thing.

Exactly. Pilates is Pilates, but just how you kind of— in our business, we say there's the story and then there's how you tell the story. Exactly. Yeah. So the story can be the exact same, you know, the lessons in Pilates, but it's how you deliver it. That's exactly right. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to give you one chance. I'm going to first plug what I'm doing. Okay. And then I'm going to let you plug, even though I think we've already done a lot of accolades for Uscreen. What Allison Yazdian is talking about, I think, is revolutionary. Company's doing great things. I'm a big fan, obviously, and I didn't bring her on to say that, all right? I brought her on because I wanted to have this discussion. What I'm doing is I'm creating a community so that you don't have to go it alone, all right? So that we can do your marketing for you, so we can do your, your distribution for you, which is basically driving it into a community that you're going to own and, and be able to make it sustainable and monetize. And I think that's the future. I think that everybody, all these indie filmmakers, are getting lost I love YouTube. I think it's a great platform and I think it's done fantastic things for the world, but as an indie filmmaker, you kind of get lost on it and you really don't make any money. And that goes for Tubi and Pluto and all the big streaming platforms, which are all fantastic as a consumer because you can access a lot of stuff. It's just hard for an indie film to break through. So this would be maybe smaller, but you don't have to go it alone. I'm creating that community where we can do it together. We can basically act like a studio and do it as a studio would do it, have a marketing department, have a legal department, have a piracy department, have a distribution operation where we can get our own analytics and monetize directly. So that's my pitch for why I'm going down this road. And you get the final say and you can pitch UScreen. I'm not sure you could do it any better than that.

No, I mean, I appreciate all of the kind words that you said. And personally, I am just so inspired by every single one of our customers. And, you know, after spending some time with you on Friday and hearing you today. It's just, it is inspirational to hear how much you care about this next generation of filmmaking, um, because it is truly a craft, it is truly an art. And, you know, the whole notion of distribution is getting turned upside down.

It's, it's, it's a disaster. It has been for decades. That's the truth. Just nobody has, has said it out loud.

That's right. Yeah. And so just to hear what you are building and knowing that Uscreen can be a big part of it is really what gets me and our entire team excited.

I could not do this without a platform like Uscreen. I'm not saying you're the only one. There are other ones. But we're the best. You are the best. No, I did my research. Like, I teach this stuff. I know who your competitors are because I teach that to my students. I say, here's the competitors in this space. This is the one I chose. Here's the reason why. That's right. Again, I feel privileged that you came on the show, but not for that reason. I'm just being honest. I'm your customer. Like, I'm already a paying customer of yours, and I feel good about it. But you can't do this alone. It's too— this is ridiculous. I mean, think about your technology team, what you guys do. You have created the ability for creators like us to have our own Netflix. I mean, that's crazy.

It's crazy.

When I discovered that, I said, hip hip hooray, this is exactly what I was aiming at. And you're right about the indie film— the filmmakers. Like, I spent most of my life in distribution. I was on the other side of that. I was the guy who was not, you know, giving the fairest deals to filmmakers and everything. I didn't know any better. That was my world. And when I became an indie filmmaker and I saw sort of the daunting task and the road that they had to go and all the challenges, it's overwhelming. It is just— it's such a turn-off for creators. I just want to pave a new path for them. And everybody says, oh, distribution's broken. I say, no, guys, distribution's not broken. It never was working. It was never working. I can tell you, 30 years go, I would have said the exact same thing. It was never working. It works for the studios because they have their own marketing department, they have their own distribution channels. Now they're totally vertically integrated, they have their own streaming platforms, right? Think of you as an indie filmmaker. You don't have that. You need it. Now we're going to have it. We're going to have our own SVOD and TVOD streaming platform because of Uscreen, and we're going to have our own marketing department. And that is going to be a major breakthrough. That's a game changer for indie filmmakers. Makers. Hopefully they'll come on board. I couldn't agree more.

It's all being democratized now.

Now you have access. Exactly. Exactly. And you don't have to go it alone. That's the secret. Because going alone is, is just almost impossible. 100%. Yeah. All right, Allison Yazdian, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. It was sort of last-minute notice. But good luck with the platform. I look forward to obviously engaging a lot more. And by the way, I was overwhelmed at the summit. I just had no idea how much functionality your platform has. So I'm going to have to figure out— I'm going to have to figure out—

we offer a lot of different features.

I'm going to have to hire somebody, honestly, to help me navigate all that because I know what I know and I know that I'm just not good enough to manage all the functionality.

Well, that's— I mean, not to get into AI, but like we even want our customers to be able to log in and for us to be able to recommend here based on what we're seeing, go take advantage of this one feature. So yeah, I think We're, we're here to help you and we want to make it even more usable. But it is a pretty sophisticated piece of technology that we've built very thoughtfully over the last 10 years. And that's really a testament to the founder, PJ, and the co-founder, Nick, and the entire team at UScreen.

Okay, well, good luck with it. And I look forward to engaging a lot more in the future.

Thank you so much for having me. It's great to see you. Thanks a lot. Thank you.