Canada's National Film Board online archive: a success story

By Cory Doctorow at 8:44 am Friday, Jan 22

It's been a year since Canada's National Film Board -- a publicly funded body charged with promoting the cause of Canadian filmmaking -- put its archives online in embeddable, streamable wrappers. A year later, they're calling it a success, and they've released a TON of crunchy stats to prove it.

Since the beginning, our philosophy has been to try to be open, transparent and accessible wherever we could. Not only does that mean making our films free to the public - but it also means opening the way we work. Using open source software, sharing code that we develop and participating in conversation wherever you want to participate.

Part of this "opening the NFB", also means sharing our statistics. We want filmmakers (and the film industry in general) and the Canadian public to see these stats and possibly benefit from them.

Here they are...

Total Film Views on NFB.ca (Jan 2009-Jan 2010)

* 3.7 million total online film views since we launched a year ago
* 2.2 million online film views in Canada (59% of views)
* 1.5 million views International (not including Canada) on the web
* Total international views: 1.45 million views
* Total views: 3 768 628

One year after putting NFB films online - Here are the stats... (via Michael Geist)