Questions & Answers

Open the title you want and choose how to watch it. The Ice Runner offers two routes: rent it for $1.99 and stream it without interruption, or watch the complete film free with advertising. The short films in the Petite Cinema collection stream free with advertising.

Playback happens in the browser you are already using. Press play and the film starts streaming — nothing is installed on your device and nothing is downloaded.

Not for the ad-supported tier. You can watch the complete film free, with advertising, without creating an account, signing in, or entering a card.

An account is required in two cases: renting a film ad-free, so the rental can be tied to you and restored on another device, and registering for The Clarion, which is free to watch once you have an account.

Any reasonably current browser on desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone — Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge are all supported. The player adapts the video quality to the bandwidth actually available, so it holds up on mobile connections as well as on a wired desktop.

Because playback is browser-based, the same link works everywhere. There is no separate app, smart-TV channel, or console build at this time.

The Ice Runner includes an English closed-caption track. Turn it on with the CC control in the player; the setting persists while you watch.

The Petite Cinema short films do not carry caption tracks yet. We add them as they are delivered to us, and we would rather ship a film without captions than ship an inaccurate machine transcript.

No. Every title is streaming-only. Rentals and historical purchases both grant streaming access rather than a downloadable file, and no tier has ever included download rights.

Yes. The ad-supported tier plays the complete film from first frame to end credits. It is not a trailer, a preview, an excerpt, or a time-limited sample. The only difference from a rental is the advertising.

The Ice Runner carries 10 breaks across its 98-minute runtime: one before the film begins and the rest placed at scene transitions chosen by the filmmakers rather than dropped onto a fixed clock interval.

The Petite Cinema shorts are far briefer and carry three breaks each — one before the film and two during. Witness To A Farce runs 21 minutes; Theatre of the Absurd runs 13 minutes.

Most ads can be skipped after a few seconds using the skip control on the ad itself. Whether a given ad is skippable is set by the advertiser, not by us.

If you would rather not see advertising at all, renting the film removes it entirely.

Ad blockers and some privacy extensions block the ad player before it can request an advertisement. When that happens the film itself still plays normally — playback is never held hostage to an ad loading.

The same is true if an ad server is slow or returns nothing: the player waits briefly, then continues into the film rather than leaving you on a blank screen.

Renting The Ice Runner costs $1.99 and gives you 7 days of unlimited ad-free streaming. Start it, stop it, and come back to it as often as you like inside that window.

The 7 days are counted from the moment the purchase completes, not from the moment you first press play. Rentals do not renew and simply expire at the end of the window.

No. There is no subscription and no recurring charge anywhere on Impromptu Originals. A rental is a single payment for a single title, it does not auto-renew, and there is nothing to cancel.

Not currently. The short films in the Petite Cinema collection stream free with advertising and are not offered as paid rentals.

Payments are processed by Stripe, and transactions are in US Dollars. Your card details are entered on Stripe’s own checkout and never reach our servers — we store a record that a purchase happened, not the card that paid for it.

Sales are final once playback begins. If a technical fault stopped you watching a film you paid for, email info@impromptuoriginals.com within 7 days and we will sort out a refund or a credit.

Tell us which title, roughly when you tried to watch, and what browser and device you were on. That is usually enough for us to find the problem without a back-and-forth.

Yes. Individual purchases are no longer sold, but every purchase made while that option existed still grants indefinite streaming access on the terms that applied at the time. Sign in and the title will show as yours.

Three titles are streaming. The Ice Runner is our restored feature presentation, a 98-minute Cold War thriller. Alongside it, the Petite Cinema collection presents the short films of Fran Forman — Witness To A Farce and Theatre of the Absurd are both streaming now.

The Clarion, a 7-episode limited series, is in production. Its trailer is up, and registering now means all 7 episodes are free to you when it arrives.

Petite Cinema is our curated short-film strand. Rather than scattering shorts through a general catalogue, each season is given over to a single filmmaker so the work can be seen as a body rather than as one-offs.

The opening season belongs to Fran Forman, an internationally exhibited visual artist whose staged, painterly imagery has moved from still photography into film. Her work has been selected at festivals from Amsterdam and Oslo to Hamburg, Vienna, and Tokyo.

We do not run to a fixed release calendar. Titles arrive when a restoration is genuinely finished or when a filmmaker’s work is ready to be presented properly, which is a slower cadence than a subscription service but keeps the standard where we want it.

The fastest way to hear about a release is to register on a title page; we contact registrants when that title goes live rather than sending general marketing.

The home page sets out the full shape of what Impromptu Originals is building — music videos, behind-the-scenes interviews, and premieres alongside the films. Strands still in development are labelled as such rather than presented as though they were already watchable.

Registration takes an email address and a password, or a Google sign-in if you prefer. We use the address to send transactional messages — receipts, rental expiry notices, and a note when a title you registered for goes live.

What we collect and who processes it is set out in full in our Privacy Policy.

Rentals are attached to the account that bought them, so this almost always means you are signed out or signed in with a different address than the one you paid with — a personal address instead of a work one, for instance.

Sign in with the address on your receipt and the title will appear under your account. If it still does not, email info@impromptuoriginals.com with the receipt and we will trace it.

Reload the page first — the player re-establishes the stream from scratch and that clears most stalls. If it persists, try another browser or another network, since a corporate or campus firewall will sometimes block video delivery outright.

If none of that helps, write to info@impromptuoriginals.com and tell us the title, your browser, and your device. We can check delivery logs from our side.

Yes. A rental follows your account rather than a single machine, so you can start The Ice Runner on a laptop and finish it on a phone within the 7-day window. Sign in on the second device and the title is there.

What you may not do is share access with other people; that is covered in our Terms of Use.

Email info@impromptuoriginals.com from the address on the account and ask us to close it. We will delete the account and its associated records, keeping only what we are legally required to retain for accounting purposes.