Withoutabox

» see withoutabox.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The independent film festival circuit is an American institution on an American calendar, and the one thing I knew about it in 2005 was that Sundance happened in January in the snow. Withoutabox is the company that took the paperwork out of it. If you were not making films you had no reason to ever learn the name.

David Straus and Joe Neulight founded it in January 2000. The first product was the International Film Festival Submission system, which did what the name says: one profile for your film, and electronic submission in place of an envelope with a disc and a check in it. Sundance went paperless through Withoutabox in 2001. At its height the platform listed over three thousand festivals and carried more than four hundred thousand filmmaker accounts.

IMDb bought it in January 2008 for a reported three million dollars, which made it an Amazon property. That should have been the making of it. Instead it became a well known case of a service that stops moving. Filmmakers complained for years about the fees and about an interface that aged in place, and in 2014 a free competitor called FilmFreeway launched and took the market.

~ the case file ~

~ how a submission used to work ~

Before this existed, entering twenty festivals meant twenty DVDs in twenty envelopes, each with its own handwritten form and its own check. Withoutabox made the film the unit instead of the envelope. You described the work once and paid all the entry fees in one place.

For the festivals it was the other half of the same deal. A listing put the event in front of hundreds of thousands of filmmakers, and acceptances could go out to everyone at once instead of being printed and posted. That is a marketplace, and for most of a decade it was the only one.

~ the free one ~

FilmFreeway launched in 2014 and charged festivals nothing to be listed. It was faster, and it accepted video uploads. Within a few years most of the major festivals had moved or were accepting through both. IMDb kept the lights on for five more years without shipping much.

~ what amazon kept ~

The service stopped on 30 October 2019. Seven years later the domain still answers, and what it serves is one sentence above a short table: as of October 30, 2019 Withoutabox is no longer in service. Underneath are links into IMDb and its professional tier, which is the company pointing at the parts it decided to keep.

That page is the most useful object in the whole story. A company that closes a service and leaves a dated sentence standing for seven years has done something rare, quite possibly by accident. Most dead services simply stop resolving and take the date of death with them.

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