Contraband : One Month later

I want to be honest about what that month looked like, because I think the honest version is more interesting than the polished one.

We launched with no content, no filmmaker relationships, and no guarantee that anyone would show up. What we had was a working v1 Quest app, a website, and a conviction that the shared experience of watching a film together at a set time was worth rebuilding for the people who missed it.

I had the analog for it: a bunch of us had a standing engagement every Thursday to meet and catch a movie. That went on for years - till COVID happened and people's lives took them in different directions. One of the ways we kept that shared moment alive was by watching something together via our VR headsets with a Google Meet session running on the side so we could hear each other. For some reason, it felt like building a polished version of that duct-taped setup would resonate with future audiences. The economics of theatres seem dire, screens are reducing, and it is increasingly harder for an indie filmmaker to hold on to an exhibition window. On top of this, audiences don't want to leave their homes.

The first post on r/MetaQuestVR brought in eleven signups in a day. That was the moment I knew the audience existed. People who own Quest headsets and use them to watch films are not a niche - they are a specific, self-selected group of people who have already made the leap and are looking for something worth showing up for.

While we built the filmmaker pipeline, we ran a couple of screenings of public domain films - Buster Keaton classics that are over a hundred years old and needed no permission to screen. They were not the point. They were the test. The infrastructure held up, the shared experience worked, and we learned what a CONTRABAND screening actually feels like when people are in the room together.

Over that one month, small small tweaks added up - the app went through 56 builds - getting better each time, making the experience nicer.

One of the places where I found unexpected support was in communities I stumbled into rather than sought out. A Reddit comment led to a DM which led to a Discord channel and an entire community of AI creators (Shoutout to AICCA) - at a time when some filmmakers were adamant about theatrical or nothing, that community kept the light from going out.

And then I found the NonDē Collective - filmmakers trying to take their work directly to market, talking honestly about the challenges they face, and the gap between finishing a film and finding an audience for it. The data we have built through Quanten Arc, Quanten Pulse and CONTRABAND could make that journey a little easier for them. More than anything, it was refreshing to hear about ground reality, challenges and the drive to build something different that doesn't just work for them, but for all. That felt right.

521 installs later, with audiences from 18 countries signed up, we have our first real film.

Handle With Care, directed by Matthew James Thompson, is a 93-minute comedy drama about a man selling off his unused wedding gifts after a short marriage ends, and the people he meets along the way. It stars Justin H. Min from The Umbrella Academy and Michael Cyril Creighton from Only Murders in the Building. It has not been released anywhere - apart from a film festival screening. CONTRABAND is its first audience.

That is what we built this for.

The first screening is August 28th for US audiences and September 11th for UK audiences. Both are on contraband.watch.

If you have a Quest headset and love films, the app is on the Meta Horizon Store. The First 100 founding community has 5 spots left.