Combining the business and creative expertise of Arrowstorm Entertainment (The Outpost), Zombie Orpheus Entertainment (JourneyQuest), The Forge (The Rangers), and Recursor.TV (Nina_Unlocked), The Fantasy Network throws out the broken streaming video playbook to create a new kind of network that serves creators and fans, empowering both to produce and support their favorite stories from development to distribution. 

It is a funding and distribution network owned and operated by fans and creators, where the community helps bring new stories to life. Best of all, it’s made for everyone who loves fantasy film and television!

Content creation continues to be dominated by fewer and larger tech and media giants which control distribution resulting in a walled garden effect. Independent filmmakers face major challenges in the current media landscape:

• Scale: The budgets of the large streaming companies continue to increase making the economics of content creation more challenging for independents. Netflix alone had a 2019 budget for new series of about $15 billion Netflix Spent $12 Billion on Content in 2018. Analysts Expect That to Grow to $15 Billion This Year. Amazon, Apple, AT&T and Disney are each spending over $6 billion to produce content raising the bar on independent creators Streamers spend on content.
• Vertical Integration: In the past year, Disney acquired Fox while launching it's own streaming service, joining an ever crowded market of vertically integrated OTTs including Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and Apple. This trend consolidates control over what audiences will see into a few large companies versus the prevailing business model that existed when Netflix first launched its streaming service of separate content creation and distribution.
• Unsustainable Business Model: Netflix, the largest pure-play streamer, has amassed so much debt it is not expected to be cash flow positive until 2022. AT&T, Comcast and Disney have amassed large sums of debt causing some concern that the current business model might not be sustainable deeper into debt.

Independent creators and audiences who want to see independently created programming have limited options.

By combining the best features of Netflix, Kickstarter, Patreon, and online marketplaces, then adding free content and open accessibility, TFN makes it easy for a new viewer to join the network at any level of commitment, from...

• binge-watching a new series for free,
• to submitting their email address as a potential funder, 
• to pledging to an individual show they love, 
• to subscribing to the platform’s premium monthly service, 
• to tipping the creator, 
•  to ordering merch, 

...and even to creating their own licensed fan fiction and derivative works or submitting new projects for funding consideration by the community.

Your Class B shares entitle you to partial ownership in The Fantasy Network, along with unique investor perks, like an invite to our annual meeting and party in Indianapolis (during Gen Con weekend!), reading new scripts, and even beta access to new features.

EARLY BIRD INVESTOR PERKS

First 48 Hours – Friends & Family Early Birds | 15% Bonus Shares

Next Five Days – Early Bird Bonus | 10% Bonus Shares

*All perks occur after the offering is completed.

The affiliated companies of TFN have spent years developing an engaged community of fans through a vibrant online presence. Each of the founders interacts with fans through active websites, Facebook pages and groups, social media and YouTube. TFN estimates this group at over 600,000 followers and believes this group will continue to embrace TFN's content creation, crowdfunding support and other community building activities.

Not only have the studios that make up TFN exceeded $21M in total film sales, they have built their model around in mobilizing a crowd. One of TFN’s partners has raised over $2.5M in the crowdfunding space.  TFN starts with the known fan reach (Subs in Network) with the capture of 10%, we magnify that by known numbers of crowdfunding backers giving us a Crowdfunding reach of over $4 mil.

We took our combined subscribers from Youtube and Facebook to be our baseline reach (though we also have Instagram, email lists and others) = 624,563. We took 10% of capturing that subscriber base that may convert = 62,456. Then we used our combines crowdfunding average giving as a multiplier = $4.1mil.

*represents combined sales of prior studios

The Fantasy Network combines the clout of some of the industry-leading independent fantasy entertainment companies, who bring with them decades of experience.

The TFN owner companies have made over $20 mil in sales from films and series, with strong ongoing IP that can premiere on TFN. With the original network created in-house, plus partnerships with independent content producers around the world, TFN is positioned to distribute dozens of new films and series annually, even without additional growth.

The Fantasy Network is a digital platform designed to support sustainable storytelling in film and television, via the following services and features:

• Free and Subscription Streaming Video On-Demand

• Single Storefront for crowdfunding, subscriptions, sales, and digital/physical merch

• Digital/physical fulfillment

• Crowdfunding support for partner producers

• Open World Wiki

• Social Platform and Connection

• Global Distribution and Syndication to third parties

• Live Streaming

• Identity Management and SSO Server

We’ve already unified many of these services and features to work with a single login across our entire ecosystem, from mobile apps to television to browser.

The Fantasy Network operates as an independent entity with a clear mission, serving producers of fantasy and science fiction content with a streaming, fulfillment, and distribution platform. 

As content producers themselves, TFN’s parent companies are motivated to run a corporation that grows the audience for independent fantasy, deals ethically with content producers, and frees creators to focus on content.

ZOMBIE ORPHEUS ENTERTAINMENT (ZOE)

Creators of four ongoing series – JourneyQuest, The Gamers, Strowlers, and Demon Hunters – plus a number of feature films, shorts, and several weekly live streamed shows, ZOE has crowdfunded millions of dollars for their shows, produced content around the world, and is sustained by a passionate global fandom.

ARROWSTORM ENTERTAINMENT

Arrowstorm Entertainment is a rapidly expanding film production studio, headquartered in Utah, south of Salt Lake City. With over 20 internationally distributed feature films in the science fiction and fantasy genres, Arrowstorm is a powerhouse of creativity, giving life to undiscovered worlds that aim to capture the imagination of audiences worldwide.

THE FORGE STUDIOS

The Forge Studios is a Washington, DC area based production company that primarily focuses on the fantasy and sci-fi genres. The Forge looks towards stories of light and hope like their family friendly film, The Fellows Hip: Rise of the Gamers, or their epic fantasy The Rangers. They also hosted the VIP Film & TV Summit bringing industry professionals to the DC market.

RECURSOR.TV

Recursor.TV (owned by Iota Capital LLC) is a Webby Award winning site featuring science fiction content most of which has been independently produced. The founder of Recursor.TV produced Nina_Unlocked, winner of the Boston Sci Fi Film Festival 2017 Best Series and is currently in post production on Mayfield’s Game starring Sean Astin and Academy Award winner Mira Sorvino. 

TFN’s position in the streaming and crowdfunding industry is unique. As streaming platforms have proliferated and the market has fragmented, generations of streaming companies have come and gone. Most platforms are reactive: they see Netflix’s success and want to replicate a market demand that’s already being met, rather than asking what comes next and how to plan for that future demand today.

According to REDEF, the industry also suffers from Walled Garden Syndrome, or a “Build it and they will come” mentality. This expects viewers to subscribe to a service in order to access any of its content, putting stories into a locked silo. The problem is that silos inhibit discovery, forcing potential viewers to spend money before they’ve made an emotional commitment to a story. Meanwhile, market fragmentation creates consumer frustration, with complaints about the total cost of subscriptions to multiple streaming services a constant refrain on social media.

That means shifting our core success metrics from the number of units sold to building a sustaining and loyal audience. With multiple revenue streams and the ability to pivot based on market demand and interest, TFN reduces reliance on any single model and allows the community’s experience and input to help direct our attention.

In a market where companies and equity are looking for a fast exit and large profits, our focus on long-term sustainable growth makes TFN even more unusual. Because we are primarily creators with stories to tell, pursuing a buy-out from a larger corporation or equity investment firm is antithetical to our goals. That clear, public commitment in turn motivates long-term brand loyalty from the TFN audience.

TFN makes most content on the platform free-to-view and shareable. Thanks to nine years of detailed market data and experience from parent company Zombie Orpheus, we’ve developed our business with the motto “You can’t pirate the future.” By making access to quality content free, easy, and painless, we empower viewers to act and renew their favorite shows. If enough people pledge to renew a show, it is funded and a new season is greenlit. We also make it easy to support producers and individual creators via Patreon-style monthly subscriptions (scheduled to launch in Q3 2020).

The unified system makes it easy to offer and fulfill not only standard crowdfunding rewards, but for each campaign to offer bonus subscriptions to TFN Premium, our umbrella subscription service that provides first access to new titles. Those premium subscriptions make it easier to cross-promote network content and introduce viewers to new titles.

• Original Content by Unique Voices - By combining forces with independent content producers from around the world, we can all leverage our collective strength to reach markets and build partnerships that are typically only open to larger studios or aggregators.

• Shared Cinematic Universe License Agreement (SCULA) - A unique and optional copyright alternative, inspired by the Open Culture movement and Creative Commons licenses. Shows that opt-in to the terms of the SCULA allow third-party creation of licensed commercial derivatives, from fan fiction to entire spin-off series. Example licenses are available at http://scu.la. Strowlers, Fartherall, and Demon Hunters, our test cases, have been using the SCULA successfully for two years.

• A Healthy Community - By explicitly disallowing hate speech on the platform, it’s become a place where diverse and global audiences can coexist peacefully, without negative financial impact on operations and growth. TFN is committed to supporting marginalized voices, the telling of their stories, and building a common culture of acceptance and respect.

Because we begin with content, our existing reach extends to the global audiences for independent successes that include JourneyQuest, Mythica, The Gamers, AFK, One Hit Die, Ren: The Girl With The Mark, Strowlers, The Rangers and many more shows. The combined fan base has been thrilled to offer support to these creators with crowdfunding campaigns worth millions of dollars. Even without additional growth, TFN is already delighting these audiences with our focus on sustainable storytelling and creator-focused operations.

TFN is designed to appeal explicitly to fandom, an umbrella that encompasses viewers who are actively and passionately engaged with the content that they love. From the freedom to create offered by SCULA shows, to the ability to renew their favorites directly, within TFN fandom is empowered do so what they do best: turn the love of good stories into communities that support those stories.

TFN relies on six distinct revenue sources to support its ecosystem:

• Subscriptions

• Crowdfunding platform fees & campaign management

• Profits from funding and producing original content

• Digital/physical merch sales and distribution

• Direct contributions to creators (tip jar & SCULA profit-sharing)

• Aggregation and distribution to third-party services and platforms

Unlike streaming-only services, this diversification allows streaming revenues to flux with demand and interest, with the majority of ongoing revenue and growth coming from the other five sources. This keeps the platform from relying on endless private equity raises to produce original content, beyond the size or capacity of the subscribing audience. 

We first built the core proprietary systems that enable platform independence, including SSO and identity management server that connects our back-end services and front-end experience seamlessly.

Our most recent achievement has unlocked the ability to integrate video-on-demand streaming, pre-funding, crowdfunding, sales, wiki editing, and subscriptions into a unified, single-page experience. With this technical milestone due to begin a phased release to the public in February, we hope to move to our next phase of development by Q3.

Upon achieving sufficient capitalization, we’ll enter a long process of executing new milestones that open up the potential of our new platform, including a unique video player that makes our integrated system shareable and embeddable, plugins to enable creators to use our technology on their own sites, improving our crowdfunding dashboard for creators, and reducing interface friction for viewers and subscribers.

TFN is preparing a slate of content crowdfunding campaigns for partner producers in 2020, beginning with season two of Ren: The Girl with the Mark and season three of AFK. We continue to license content from third-party creators and our parent companies all have numerous projects in the crowdfunding and production queue for 2020, including new seasons of JourneyQuest, The Rangers, and Strowlers. 

We are also pursuing partnerships with distribution companies who can offer pre-sale agreements for TFN content, as well as more opportunities to license our library on other platforms.

Because the film industry is in constant flux and because most deals never reach production, it’s important to note that while we have many additional projects and partnerships in development, it’s safer to assume that they don’t exist unless and until contracts are signed and funding is released.

To date our marketing has been entirely based on word-of-mouth and email outreach from our parent companies. A successful raise on Start Engine will allow us to retain dedicated marketing services to begin formal campaigns and outreach as the platform and our content library mature.

We are booked to exhibit in 2020 at Gen Con Indy, where we hope to again sponsor their film festival (as we did in 2019).

A successful raise on StartEngine will enable us to move from incubation to independence, hiring new staff across key areas, including individual management of our technology, marketing, distribution, production, community-building, and crowdfunding initiatives.

The best technology means nothing without content that people want to watch. 

With decades of combined experience, dozens of successful shows and movies, and multiple passionate global fan bases, our team knows how to deliver content, engage audiences, and maintain lean, efficient businesses. 

As Zombie Orpheus, Arrowstorm, The Forge, and Recursor, we have collectively raised millions of crowdfunding dollars, distributed and sold film and television projects for millions more, and maintained a creative focus on original storytelling. Audiences return to us for more, again and again, because we understand that a compelling story with relatable characters is fundamental.

A great company also calls for a great team!

We've assembled an experienced board of advisors from a variety of professional backgrounds, but with one common factor: everyone involved with creating The Fantasy Network is an accomplished storyteller who believes in the power of fantasy and science fiction to say something true about our own world. We tell stories that are true to our hearts, stories that matter to us and to our communities, and that passion drives every decision that we make. The Fantasy Network is not only a business, it's a labor of love from storytellers who care about the future.

Because TFN is focused on empowering a global community of fans and creators, we are funding on StartEngine so that fans and creators can become stakeholders in our mission and company.

If you want to own a studio that will fund films by and for Hollywood celebrities, you’re in the wrong place. 

If you want to own part of a community-focused studio that empowers YOUR voice to watch, create, fund, and distribute independent fantasy film and television, this project is for you!