Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How a small streaming site became the Netflix for indie film

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 88 posts

Re: How a small streaming site became the Netflix for indie film

#51

Post by lemiffe »

bazzargh wrote: post #12

I used to use mubi back in the Auteurs days but it was frustrating that the selection was so much smaller in the UK than the US (I recall it being around 10% of the films; anything that had had a mainstream cinema release was missing). They still seem to have that restriction, but they've taken the 'show me what's available in my area' filter away. I can understand why they'd do that, but it feels a bit off being ask…

Exactly the same issue, kind of fell off my radar as a result of that, now I'm curious to see the selection.

Re: How a small streaming site became the Netflix for indie film

#52

Post by intopieces »

dasil003 wrote: post #15

Whoah, it's awesome to see this posted here in my native habitat! I've spent the last 8 years of my life building MUBI as Co-Founder and CTO (even longer than I've been on HN!). Please AMA.

Why do you no longer parter with Criterion/Janus? Was it just more profitable for them to move to Hulu? I signed for The Auteurs a few years back but didn't follow through with t.

Re: How a small streaming site became the Netflix for indie film

#53

Post by yabatopia »

dasil003 wrote: post #15

Whoah, it's awesome to see this posted here in my native habitat! I've spent the last 8 years of my life building MUBI as Co-Founder and CTO (even longer than I've been on HN!). Please AMA.

Why exactly a 30 day rotation schedule? To me it puts a lot of pressure on the subscriber to view a particular movie within that timeframe. Sometimes you're too busy or on vacation and you don't have enough time to view all the movies you're interested in. How about a hybrid model that combines the 30 day streaming service with a 3 month VOD service? Or a plus version of the regular subscription that offers a 90 day window for a slightly higher monthly fee?

On Android you can download a movie and view it offline for 7 days. What are the obstacles to offer something similar on other platforms?

Re: How a small streaming site became the Netflix for indie film

#54

Post by dasil003 »

intopieces wrote: post #52
dasil003 wrote: post #15

Whoah, it's awesome to see this posted here in my native habitat! I've spent the last 8 years of my life building MUBI as Co-Founder and CTO (even longer than I've been on HN!). Please AMA.

Why do you no longer parter with Criterion/Janus? Was it just more profitable for them to move to Hulu? I signed for The Auteurs a few years back but didn't follow through with t.

Essentially that's correct. We partnered with them early before we had a user base, and they were just trying to dip their feet into streaming. From our end we were not able to provide the audience to monetize their films, and from their end the economics of streaming were a completely different world from what they do with DVD, even for a company with the content and reputation of Criterion. We are still close with them, and hopefully we can do something again in the future.

Re: How a small streaming site became the Netflix for indie film

#56

Post by qq66 »

> "We didn't even know [he was a member] because he was using an email that was not descriptive, and he was not using his real name," Cakarel says.

This implies that the company looks through their subscriber rolls for famous film-industry personalities, which is an unusual thing to glibly admit to.

Re: How a small streaming site became the Netflix for indie film

#57

Post by dasil003 »

6stringmerc wrote: post #49
dasil003 wrote: post #15

Whoah, it's awesome to see this posted here in my native habitat! I've spent the last 8 years of my life building MUBI as Co-Founder and CTO (even longer than I've been on HN!). Please AMA.

How do you feel about your ability to reach your target audience? Furthermore, what assumptions are you comfortable sharing about your business model's target audience as financially viable in the short/long term? Just a quick FYI, you might benefit from some outreach to sites like The AV Club, as the top voted comment was essentially a joke picking on your lack of exposure to certain groups: http://www.avclub.com/ar…

Our ability to reach our audience is strong, just not in the US because we don't do marketing here yet. If you are in the UK there is a much greater chance you've heard of us. This is commensurate with the quality of our library in the UK where we've signed much more significant content deals. In the US our library is not where we want it to be yet, so it's a slow burn while we improve the core product and get the deals in place. One mistake we didn't do that you often see with video/music startups was to raise $10M and blow it on content licensing before we had the audience. We're ratcheting up step by step, and we're lining things up for a bigger US presence very soon.

Re: How a small streaming site became the Netflix for indie film

#58

Post by dasil003 »

hyperion2010 wrote: post #40
dasil003 wrote: post #15

Whoah, it's awesome to see this posted here in my native habitat! I've spent the last 8 years of my life building MUBI as Co-Founder and CTO (even longer than I've been on HN!). Please AMA.

It seems that the major focus of MUBI is rapid and ongoing curation. Do you guys have a defined process for how you do this so that you achieve a desired distribution of films or is it more down the the individual curators? One other thing I wonder about curation of media in general is whether you think your customer base is willing to try new things because they trust you rather than simply trying to find something…

This isn't my department, so I can't comment on the details of processes, but there are teams working on content acquisitions, and there are individual curators, and there is also an algorithm for non-curated countries. We definitely look at the data for analytics on the past programmings to understand what worked or didn't, but it's more as a guideline for the curators who have significant latitude to program things in a culturally relevant or timely fashion (eg. programming The Iron Lady the day after Margaret Thatcher died).

As I mentioned in another thread, we did try the data-driven recommendation engine approach and did not achieve great results. We definitely believe that the human element of our editorial voice leads to a greater level of trust with our subscribers, and enables us to introduce hidden gems and lesser-known films to a wider audience.

Re: How a small streaming site became the Netflix for indie film

#59

Post by jessaustin »

dasil003 wrote: post #24
ohbleek wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the site and found it through filmspotting. Any plans for adding support for kodi? (there's an addon already but it isn't updated regularly)

We've put a hold on new platform development for most of this year in order to move towards a standardized API and tighten up our QA process, so no plans for this year. I can share that the top two platforms which we are seeing interest in are Roku and the new Apple TV.

Yes Roku please.

Also does "Android" support include direct (not tab-cast) chromecast support, or is that another thing entirely? (I'm not home now so I haven't tried this myself.)

Re: How a small streaming site became the Netflix for indie film

#60

Post by dasil003 »

davidovitch wrote: post #35
dasil003 wrote: post #15

Whoah, it's awesome to see this posted here in my native habitat! I've spent the last 8 years of my life building MUBI as Co-Founder and CTO (even longer than I've been on HN!). Please AMA.

Only discovered MUBI today via HN. Looks great! There is one annoyance (which I also have with Netflix): I live in Denmark, but I am not fluent in Danish. Not all your movies have English subtitles though, so how can I watch anything else except the three languages I master (English, French and Dutch)? Are licensing issues preventing you from offering English subtitles on all your movies as a default?

In short, yes. Language/subtitle licensing is a mine field. Often times the small local distributors we deal with don't acquire anything but the local language rights, so it becomes almost impossible to go upstream and get the remaining rights even though we may well have the assets for use in other countries.

We are doing what we can to move the ball forward on this issue industry-wide, but historical rights arrangements are working against us here.

Post reply on HN