Insiders have been waiting for this one… Tribeca Film Institute (now merged with the former Renew Media) announced today the launch of Reframe, a portal to locate and buy tough-to-find titles. The aim of Reframe is to aggregate and make available content that now isn’t due to high cost of digitization. Distributors won’t bother investing in converting older titles if they are unsure of being able to recoup their costs in sales, besides hosts of collections living in libraries, private vaults, basements and other nonprofit organization archives without the cash to digitize. Reframe might wind up being a huge boon for film preservation, and also will hopefully eliminate the problem of hard to find titles. From the press release:

Many filmmakers, distributors and archives can’t afford the high conversion cost to the digital format, and have been reluctant to invest in digitizing “niche” content. Reframe converts all content to high-quality digital files; Works in video formats will be digitized for free, and film formats will be digitized “at-cost.” In a unique arrangement, Reframe returns a digital copy to the rights-holder for free, and allows them to make their content available to others in a nonexclusive arrangement. Reframe then makes these works available for sale to the public, sold at prices based on the suggested retail price set by the rights-holder. All content is made available for sale on DVD on Demand at Amazon.com as well as digital download to own or rent through Amazon’s Unbox service. More About Reframe>>

Part of the community building portion of the site is curated lists. Here is a link to my previously mentioned Hybrid Documentary list. We were limited to films that are currently available on Amazon, so this is by no means meant to be all-inclusive. I did send a long a few titles that aren’t available on Amazon, which I’ve been told will help Reframe staff when reaching out to content holders to get them on the site. I’d love to hear your additions to my list, or if you make your own, please let me know!