To put a film on sale on watchmycreation you need the master file, your exact runtime, a portrait poster with no type on it, a title and description you are happy to keep, an age rating, and — before any money can reach you — a PAN and a UPI id or bank account. A trailer on YouTube or Vimeo is optional and worth having.
Know the runtime first: it sets both your listing fee and the lowest ticket you can charge, and a film longer than 600 minutes is refused at upload. Export the master as H.264 in an MP4, at the resolution and frame rate you finished in, and do not compress it down first — it is re-encoded for delivery either way, so a file you have already squeezed gets squeezed twice.
Whatever you upload is a source, not a delivery copy. It is transcoded into the renditions a phone on mobile data and a laptop on broadband actually stream, and that settles most of the export questions people agonise over.
The file goes from your browser straight to our storage and never passes through our servers, so the progress bar you watch is the real upload. Do it on the best connection you have and leave the tab open.
Know your exact running time before you start, because it drives both numbers that matter. Streaming is billed by the minute, so a longer film costs more to deliver on every ticket, and it occupies storage whether or not it sells. Two boundaries come first: on watchmycreation a film longer than 600 minutes is refused at the point of upload rather than accepted and billed for, and self-serve listing stops well below that — above 180 minutes there is no price on the form, because a film that long is a conversation about storage rather than a bigger number on the same one.
The listing fee buys 90 days of catalogue presence and is paid once your film has passed review, not when you upload it. It is a step function of runtime, so what matters is which band you land in — and band ceilings are inclusive while runtimes round up, so a film a second over a boundary is in the next band.
| Runtime | Listing fee |
|---|---|
| Up to 15 min | ₹99 |
| Up to 60 min | ₹500 |
| Up to 180 min | ₹1000 |
| Longer than 180 min | No self-serve price — talk to us before you upload |
The other price runtime sets is the lowest ticket you are allowed to charge. There is no flat platform minimum sitting above it: a film’s minimum is what that film costs to show. Streaming is billed by the minute and the platform fee is a flat rupee amount rather than a percentage, so below some price a ticket stops covering them — and that price climbs with runtime, so a longer film starts higher:
| Runtime | Lowest ticket you can set |
|---|---|
| 10 min | ₹4.32 |
| 42 min | ₹11.46 |
| 600 min | ₹114.53 |
Those are examples, not bands. The floor is computed from your film’s own exact runtime, so a film sitting between two of those rows has a floor between their figures; the earnings calculator gives the number for yours. Pricing at the floor is allowed and is almost never what you want: a 10-minute film sold at ₹4.32 leaves you ₹0.01 a ticket, because the floor is the price at which the costs are covered and nothing else is. A price under it is refused rather than quietly settled.
The other end of the range does not climb with runtime the way the floor does: the ceiling is the same figure for every film, ₹1000. Where you land between your own floor and that is the whole of the pricing decision — read how to price a film ticket before you pick a number.
A poster here is artwork only. The site draws your title and the runtime-and-language line across the foot of every tile, over its own scrim, so a poster carrying its own typography collides with the chrome word for word. This is the single most common thing to get wrong, and it looks wrong everywhere at once.
One thing the poster is not used for: the preview card when someone shares your link on WhatsApp or posts it. That is a landscape frame taken from the film itself, a fifth of the way in — far enough past the opening titles to be a real image. You do not have to supply it, but it is worth knowing that a shot roughly a fifth of the way into your film is the one strangers see first.
We do not host previews. A trailer lives on your own YouTube or Vimeo account and you paste the link; we validate it down to a provider and an id and build the embed from a template. The reason is money, and it is worth stating plainly: a preview clip served from our own video infrastructure is delivery we pay for from viewers who may never buy anything, and a film that goes viral would produce a bill with no revenue against it. A trailer on YouTube costs us nothing however many people watch it, and it is discoverable somewhere we are not.
The trade is real and it falls partly on you. The trailer lives on a platform we do not control and cannot fix, next to recommendations for other people’s films, and some of the people who watch it there will stay there. We took that trade because the alternative is unmetered delivery that we pay for and you do not — a cost that ends up inside the ticket price.
A trailer is optional — a film with none shows its poster and description. If you have one, cut it before you upload, because a dead or missing embed sitting above the Pay button is a real cost to you. A trailer that breaks later can be fixed on a film that is already on sale without taking it down, but not from the studio: write to us and we will replace or clear the link.
Your title and description are what a search engine and an answer engine read, and they are all a stranger has. The runtime and the language are already printed on the tile and the film page, so do not spend the description on them: write what happens in the film, who made it and who is in it, and why someone who has never heard of you should spend the ticket. Festival selections and awards belong here rather than on the artwork.
Two mechanical things about the title. Its web address is generated from it, transliterating Devanagari rather than dropping it, so a Hindi or Marathi title produces a readable address rather than a random string. And once a film is published that address never changes, because it is already shared and indexed — so settle the title before you publish, not after.
You will be asked to classify your own film before it can be submitted. The rating is required; the warnings are not, though a film with nothing to warn about should still be looked at honestly. One warning carries a statutory consequence rather than an informational one: if your film displays tobacco products or their use, Indian law requires the anti-tobacco health spots and the audio-visual disclaimer to be in the film, in the same language as the film itself, along with the static on-screen warning while the depiction runs. For content published online that obligation falls on the publisher as well as on you, which is to say on us — so ticking that box asks you to confirm they are already there, and a film that does not carry them is one we can refuse or take down.
Rate an adult film 18+ and its trailer will not load until the visitor declares their age, and the purchaser declares it again at checkout — that declaration is recorded. Being rated here is not the same thing as being certified; if you are wondering whether you need a CBFC certificate at all, that is a separate question with a separate answer.
Worth doing and usually skipped. Captions serve viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing, and they also serve anyone watching with the sound down in a shared room. There is no self-serve caption upload in the studio yet — that is a gap, not a policy. If you have an SRT or VTT, write to us with the film and we will see whether we can attach it; the player shows a CC control only when a film has a track.
Selling needs none of this; getting paid needs all of it. A payout cannot be generated without somewhere to send it, and it cannot be generated without a PAN on file. That is a hard requirement here rather than a preference: without a PAN we cannot report a payment correctly, and deduction at source runs at a higher rate under section 206AA of the Income-tax Act where no PAN has been furnished. Add a UPI id or a bank account with IFSC, and your PAN, on your profile. If you are GST-registered, record your GSTIN there too. None of it blocks an upload, so it is easy to leave until the day you wonder where your first payment is.
Upload the master and wait for it to encode — the runtime comes back from that, and the runtime is what unlocks the price. Fill in the details, poster, trailer, price, rating and warnings, then submit. We review it. Once approved you pay the listing fee, and then it is published and on sale. What a buyer gets is one link and a code: 12 hours from the moment they first press play, and 1 complete playthrough. Get the master right because it is the one thing that cannot be replaced at all; get the title, description, price, rating and warnings right because submitting freezes them, and publishing fixes the web address permanently. Of the rest, only the poster and the trailer can be changed on a live film, and only by asking us.
Published by Sajai Digital, which operates watchmycreation. We describe how our own platform works and what Indian law requires of it; this is not legal, tax or financial advice, and rates and rules change. Check anything that matters with a professional. Something wrong on this page? Write to support@watchmycreation.com and we will fix it.