Priorities: iPhone App and Current Work

I mentioned earlier that by now we would have an iPhone App. That has not happened and I feel I owe you an explanation.

Two new factors came into play:

1. The current DVDAF setup can no longer handle the number of users it has.
2. Our revenue (donations and commissions from Amazon) went down and our costs are going up.

Both of these are "life-support" type issues and need to be addressed quickly. That is the reason why the iPhone App kind of took a backseat.


Here is what we are working on:

Increasing Capacity for DVDAF

• More, bigger, better machines. We are moving from 3 older servers to 5 newer ones. The new machines are bigger and more powerful.
  
  Until now the DVDAF database was in a single machine. In this new setup the data is distributed over 3 machines. The challenge we will be facing over the next few weeks is that in each machine the information gets written at different time. Therefore we will need to add smarts into the website so that it knows where to get what when.
  
  It is also possible that what was fast in 1 machine becomes slow when you use 3 machines. It is not intuitive and the explanations are complicated, but it happens. What matters is that it is possible that things get a bit rocky until we iron out all the kinks.

Obviously 5 bigger machines cost more than 3 smaller machines and that leads us to the second issue.

Addressing Revenue Shortfall

The approach has 3 fronts:

• Increase the number of members. With more members we hope that donations and more Amazon sales will rise accordingly. To that end we want to make DVDAF more accessible, changing landing pages, providing simplified ways to sign up and enter a collection, a sexier skin, etc. We want someone who has never seen on the site to be able to sign up and have 100 titles up in less than 5 minutes.
  
  
• Add Advertisement. We resisted adding ads to the site for almost 10 years, but we can use the extra boost now. We will experiment a bit. Currently we are thinking 1 vertical ad on the right side of the page.
  
  
• Get film-talk.com to stand on its own. We do not have formal data on this, but it is my opinion that in the past film-talk has relied either on DVDAF or on me to pay its bills. To this end we have added advertising and are now tracking film-talk commissions from DVDs and other Amazon sales separately from DVDAF. We also have been using a few tools related to traffic and advertising to learn a few things which will help us with DVDAF.

As you can see we have a large amount of urgent work. That is why the iPhone app is a bit late.

Thank you for your understanding and support,

-Ed