Online video sites are a dime a dozen in 2011, but a new site called Fandor hopes to make it into your daily rotation. Fandor differentiates itself from the Netflixes and the YouTubes of the world by focusing entirely on independent films, offering a curated collection of quality content that is different than the kind you'd likely find at your local movie theater for $10 per month.

Launched Wednesday during SXSW 2011, Fandor offers a wide range of films, including shorts, documentaries, international offerings, film festival features, and more. "The idea is that it's hard for people who like indie films to find them and discover things they don't know a lot about," Fandor cofounder and CTO Dan Aronson told Ars. "We're trying to replicate the film festival experience where you can discover and share great films that aren't marketed to you by the Hollywood mainstream."

Fandor isn't the first to try and launch an indie-film-centric video site; in fact, even YouTube has an independent film channel where users can screen high-quality short films every week. There are a number of elements that differentiate Fandor from the others, though. For one, the site already has 2,500 films ready to go at launch—"That's huge compared to other sites!" Aronson said—and more are on the way as quickly as Fandor can get them online.

Fandor's films are also carefully curated for "artistic and historic merit." The company brought on Jonathan Marlow (of former Amazon and GreenCine fame) to do primary film curation, "but we rely on film festivals to do a lot of the curation for us," Aronson said. "There are a bunch of films out there that are of the quality that people are interested in that don't get seen, and we don't want people to have to hunt and peck. We want to increase the signal to noise ratio."

Another advantage that Fandor has over the competition is deep Facebook integration—not only can members log on with their Facebook accounts (and receive one free film screening), they will be able to post clips from the films to their Facebook walls thanks to a partnership with BlipSnips. "Instead of someone marketing specific trailers to you, your friend could share a certain scene instead," Aronson told Ars. "That kind of visual word of mouth will be really powerful in getting people to care about independent films."

Is this all worth $10 per month? If you're into independent films, it may very well be (as long as you trust the curation process, anyway). Fandor charges subscribers so that it can pay filmmakers directly for their work and hopefully spur them to create even better works in the future. In fact, the site pools up its revenues and makes payments based on two factors: inclusion in the library, and what's actually getting watched in the library. "Just by being in our library, you get something out of it," Aronson said, "but we also want to make sure the filmmakers who make the most popular films are rewarded."

I spent some time clicking through the site and came away generally pleased. Films can be watched in fullscreen mode and embedded in Web pages, similar to YouTube videos. One major bonus, though, is the closed captioning support—if you're presented with a foreign film or you're hard of hearing, the captions can be toggled on or off to fit your preferences. I did, however, run into some issues trying to view various trailers that were highlighted on Fandor's Featured Films page. When I tried to view the videos, I was presented with an error reading "This trailer is unavailable or does not exist."

Aronson offered up an explanation for this behavior. "Part of the challenge for a lot of these movies—both older movies and newer ones—no one has made a trailer for them. No one had the money to do that," he said. "If a film doesn't have a trailer or if someone hasn't clipped a scene from it, we display that message. Over time, when people clip more scenes, we'll have something to show for that movie, and you'll be seeing that message less and less."

That makes sense, but it's still less than ideal for the casual Internet user who has no idea why the messages are popping up or when they will go away. There seems to be no indicator as to which films have trailers and which ones don't when you go to their respective pages, so there's definitely some UI work to be done if Fandor wants to move forward with this plan.

Despite these issues, the site has some promise, especially if it can generate the kind of buzz that it's hoping for on Facebook. As we mentioned earlier this week, Facebook is beginning to gain its own embedded movies courtesy of Warner Bros., but those are largely meant for the mainstream crowd. Adding to Fandor's potential is the fact that it has its own Boxee channel, getting in on the set-top box bandwagon and in front of a whole new set of eyes.

"[The Boxee Box] is just the first of many devices," Aronson told Ars. "We're working as hard as we can to get on different devices, and moving forward, the iPad and iPhone will be huge for the kind of films we carry. These devices are what people already have, and they're going to be watching movies."