Peter Gerard grew up in Missouri, where as a teenager he made his first award-winning documentary and created and ran the Bargain Basement Film Festival for several years.

He then founded Accidental Media and relocated to Edinburgh, Scotland, where he finished the feature documentary “Just to Get a Rep“ for international television distribution. Running Accidental Media for more than ten years, Peter produced and directed a range of documentaries, music videos, and short films, and picked up many awards, including a BAFTA Scotland New Talent Award.

Peter also built award-winning websites and is webmaster for The D-Word - the premiere online community portal for documentary professionals.

In 2010, Peter founded Distrify to pioneer “direct-to-fan” digital film sales by inventing a shareable movie trailer that included a built-in buy-button and the easiest affiliate rewards system ever. In 2013 Peter won the British Council’s Creative Enterpreneur Award and was named in the h.Club 100 list by The Hospital and The Guardian Culture Professionals Network.

As a thought leader in digital distribution and marketing, Peter is regularly invited to speak at film festivals (Cannes, Sundance, Amsterdam, London, etc.) and to teach workshops for film producers.

In 2014, Peter moved to New York to join the team at Vimeo as Director of VOD. Peter executes and manages marketing campaigns and partnerships for Vimeo’s Audience Development team, with a particular focus on expanding the Vimeo On Demand solution for selling films and series.

Tom Roston is a journalist and author whose work appears in The New York Times, The Guardian and TED.com, among other publications. His book, I Lost It at the Video Store, was dubbed "one of the best books of 2015" by Kirkus Reviews. A former senior editor at Premiere magazine, he also writes a weekly blog about documentaries for PBS' award-winning POV website. He lives in Brooklyn.