At a time when copyright is being challenged by widespread P2P sharing and DVD sales are showing signs of fatigue it is refreshing to see the entertainment business partnering up with web entrepreneurs to hit what promises to be a social networking home run.

The site I’m referring to is The Auteurs, a movie streaming service and social network, whose social object is auteur cinema. In Danish that’s Lars von Trier, Carl Th. Dreyer and Christoffer Boe. This in turn means no 007, no Frodo and no Bridget Jones. But if you belong to the cultural sub-species that thrive on exceptional cinematic experiences, earmark a portion of your salary for film festival tickets or love to cuddle up in front of TCM cable classics, then you’re going to love The Auteurs.

It came out of hiding and into public beta 10 days ago. In their own words The Auteurs is “an online movie theater and gathering place for film lovers.” This description could perhaps be fitting of some BitTorrent clients also, but The Auteurs is playing on the right side of the street in several respects.

• The site is a visual and navigational pleasure to visit. Great design.
• Online distribution rights for every streaming movie have been cleared (but downloads or embeds are not possible.)
• The site hosts some of the best auteur material that can be hard to find anywhere else than on back shelf DVDs or in cinematheques.
• The streams are fast and the content high-quality, quite good enough to be shown on your home cinema set-up.
• The social networking service is also well designed with easily customizable profile pages targetting the film aficionado.

In short: The Auteurs doesn’t have pirate written all over it and you can easily browse and watch with a clear conscience. And as this short introduction video reminds us: It’s (mostly) free!

Hard work is obviously the foundation of this launch, but so is partnerships and business models. Drawing most attention to the public launch was the fact that The Auteurs has partnered with The Criterion Collection, a highly respected publisher of art cinema DVDs, to develop their new online cinematheque. Besides looking alike, the two partnering sites share a monthly selection of movie content. Some back catalogue movies that Criterion charges $5 to stream on their own site are made free to view on The Auteurs site – a move that has understandably garnered some critique during the past weeks, but it’s probably an issue hardly worth mentioning once both online libraries grow in size and users learn to benefit from the situation. This introduction video has more details on the Criterion ‘Rent before you buy’-scheme.

Other partners behind the launch are Costa Films and Celluloid Dreams, independent movie producers and distributors, working as strategic players in the continuous hunt for online distribution rights to art-house movies around the world.

However, the biggest challenge is probably not attracting international interest to the service, but distributing full site access to an international audience. We know this issue only too well from Hulu.com. Unfortunately, right now there are only few territories outside North America where you can watch most of the movies on The Auteurs. In Denmark (as in many other countries) we have to satisfy with the free selection from Criterion until further notice. But hey, that’s still a dozen high-quality movies for free every month!

And if everyone who reads this blog asks Santa for more free auteur movies, it might actually come true in a not too distant future. CEO and founder of The Auteurs, Efe Çakarel, seems to be buzzing around the globe, preparing deals and clearing rights issues so that more people can access the full library of auteur goodies. He is said to have been in Copenhagen just weeks ago, so who knows if we’re to become the lucky Scandinavian test subject?

Through the social forum I asked Melissa Miranda of The Auteurs’ team to work hard on the international rights issues. Quickly she replied: “We are!!! We’re going as fast as we can. Some distributors were waiting to see it launched first, so with the success of the last 2 weeks, the dominoes should begin falling.” That’s of course ‘global dominoes’, she reminded me, and we know who’s always first in line; the UK. But then Denmark!

I have $10 riding on it anyway…

Until then: Merry social cinema and look me up when you get there!

More Auterisms?

Poder 360°: The Auteurs betting good films will translate into good business [April 09]

MIT Convergence Culture: “The Canon Goes 2.0″ [December 08]

NewTeeVee: Criterion Collection Does Web Video [November 08]

TechCrunch: New Indie Film Site To Make a Splash at Cannes [May 08]