I think it’s time to revisit this morning’s news on IFC’s future as a distributor, for as the day has progressed, there’s been some interesting discussion. Here’s a sampling of what the kids are saying on the webz.

Both the indieWIRE and the Variety pieces took IFC’s version of the story at pretty much face value. A common refrain in today’s reaction pieces has been, “Just because they’ve got the movies on the cable boxes, doesn’t mean anyone’s buying them. Have you seen download data? I haven’t. Someone should really get some.” Or, as Brian Newman puts it,

Excuse me, but “available” to 40 million subscribers is a worthless figure. IFC keeps spinning, as if their life depended on it (hint hint) … All this means is that four cable systems wanted to offer VOD, and IFC needed to suck up to them all in order to remain being carried on these services. IFC needs the cable operators more than they need IFC, and while a kid renting a film in Des Moines via VOD is great for Des Moines, its not ground breaking news. If Frankel was so happy with the numbers, perhaps he would have shared a few of them with us!

In response to that, Sujewa Ekanayake dug up this article, which contains a breakdown of box office grosses for a number of 2006/2007 IFC FirstTake releases. The article displays the figures to demonstrate that VOD is hurting theater business, and they’re certainly low enough to impress — of 15 films, only four grossed over $100,000, and most made less than $50,000.

But Newman says he’s “still not buying it” as evidence that FirstTake is making money, either in homes or in theaters. And even if IFC is breaking even, chances are filmmakers aren’t. “Net to producer - I don’t know, but rumor has it that IFC pays 50/50 after expenses. And after expenses can mean a lot of things.”

I maintain that IFC’s VOD distribution (of which, unlike Newman, I am a regular paying customer) is extremely good for the audience, and I think it must help films that would otherwise maybe play on two screens in New York and LA (if that) finder a wider audience. But to me the question is, what’s the end product? Already, I think most indie filmmakers on this level think of theatrical exhibition as an advertisement for a future DVD release. If we can safely say that no one’s getting rich off of VOD, is it at least functioning as a decent commercial for DVD sales? Or is it just eating into those potential profits, as this story suggests?

I type this from the Cleveland Airport, where I’m heading into hour 3 of an indefinite layover, but I couldn’t wait to get out of purgatory to tell you about a press release I’ve just received. Joe Swanberg’s Hannah Takes the Stairs, the current hallmark of the burgeoning “mumblecore” wave, will screen in New York and on cable this August, courtesy of IFC’s First Take day-and-date program. The film, which you surely remember from Spout’s SXSW coverage and from the recent mumblecore episode of FilmCouch, opens August 22 at the IFC Center in the West Village; it should be available for on-demand rental several days later. As a huge fan of both Swanberg and the IFC In Theaters model, I think this is great news–this hyper-intimate character study is ideally suited to the on-demand experience.

If you made it to SXSW this year, you saw at least one of the Festival trailers, directed by Swanberg and starring the Hannah crew. My favorite is embedded below.