On the heels of its merger with Renew Media, the Tribeca Film Institute launched  Reframe (www.reframecollection.com) today, a distribution website that will work with individual filmmakers, broadcasters, distributors, and other media owners to digitize, market and sell their classic and hard-to-find titles, using the Internet. In its first year, the site aims to make available 10,000 titles from all indie genres—classic public television films and videos, documentaries, features, shorts, foreign films and vanguard cinema. Right now, the site boasts 337 documentary titles, from as recent as Alexandra Lipsitz’ Air Guitar Nation (2006) to as far back as Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927). Such organizations as the Center for Asian American Media and Documentary Educational Resources have made available selected titles for distribution through Reframe.

Among the partners in making the Reframe initiative possible include CreateSpace, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, which, through its DVD on Demand technology, will distribute content through Amazon.com as well as digital download to own or rent through Amazon’s Unbox service. Reframe was funded in large part by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The way it works is this: 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.

“Too many films remain unavailable to the public, even the best researchers and scholars, because they are literally ‘stuck on the shelf’ in analog formats, or in hard to find catalogs,” said Brian Newman, CEO of Tribeca Film Institute, in a statement. “Reframe will essentially digitize our visual heritage and give these important works new life. Reframe opens up an additional revenue stream for rights holders who may not otherwise have had the resources to reach the educational marketplace.”