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How a small streaming site became the Netflix for indie film

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

#61

Post by dasil003 »

gjkood wrote: post #38
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.

I have to say, your sign up process (including payments) was one of the simplest/smoothest I have ever experienced. And I especially loved the welcome email that felt so personal (I know this is an automated form letter. I specialize in CRM systems). This is a fine example of great customer service. I am sure the content will be as discerning.

Thank you! We are still fine-tuning, but it's been a lot of effort to get to this point.

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

#62

Post by dasil003 »

sequence7 wrote: post #43
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.

First off this looks amazing, congratulations on building something I'd love to use and good luck. I have two questions. 1) Is MUBI available in the UK? 2) Do you support or are you planning support Plex?

UK is our biggest territory and best film selection, however we do stream globally, so if you subscribe you can take MUBI with you wherever you go, albeit with a different selection in each country.

Plex is currently not on our roadmap (though I do run a plex server at home).

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

#63

Post by Arnt »

wfn wrote: post #26
Arnt wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please describe some neat things you'd like to do.

For starters, I'd like to * index every piece of data properly, for easy reference to (a) films, (b) user ratings (per user per film) and (c) users (seeing the latter as simply sets of ratings on films) * then run a few collaborative recommendation algorithms on the indexed dataset - basically taking things from the scikit-learn python package and running them * then see (naively and heuristically) whether any recomm…

What you want isn't an API, it's a data dump... thank you though. Definitely helpful to hear.

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

#64

Post by gingerlime »

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?

I seem to share a similar question / problem.

I live in Germany, but I don't speak German. Well, not enough to watch films or feel comfortable browsing the site. Took me a while to find the browse films link as a result.

I was wondering about changing the interface language, and more importantly, whether the film selection will be heavily skewed towards German films (and perhaps without subtitles??).

...I guess I could use a proxy to access it from the UK, but it feels like I'd be trying to trick the system.

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

#65

Post by 6stringmerc »

dasil003 wrote: post #57
6stringmerc wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

Thank you for the explanation, and distinction regarding your approach. The release of the Paul Thomas Anderson film (and getting publicity) definitely tracks with what you state herein. My hunch is your strategy really did avoid "putting the cart before the horse" by way of prioritizing. I sincerely wish you well in pursuit of audience and content licensing in the most effective ways possible.

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

#66

Post by 2xlbuds »

reubenmorais wrote: post #4

Sounds like Netflix needs to take a lesson from Valve and let its customers do the curation for them.

Greenlight has widely been seen as a failure in the gaming community though. Steam users have been sold on hype and greenlit games only to get unfinished buggy messes all too often.

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

#67

Post by dasil003 »

yabatopia wrote: post #53
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…

30 films fits nicely on one large screen or scrollable list. It's also worked out quite nicely for licensing as it allows us to squeeze stuff in to short licensing windows, and just generally softens the negotiations a bit.

We definitely have a million other ideas about how to expand this model in many different directions, but I won't comment on any of those yet as its all speculative at this point. For now we are trying to get people familiar with the model and improve the design because it is a bit unintuitive at first.

As far as downloads, we only offer them on Android and iOS for the time being because those are the two platforms that it was feasible to implement easily. We are always looking at the possibility of bringing it to other devices and even the web, but so far it's too much effort for our small engineering team.

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

#68

Post by dasil003 »

rs232 wrote: post #46
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.

Tried to sign up with a 100 long password, was told max length is 32. What is the reason for this limit?

Embarassing! This is for historical reasons, but rest assured the password is salted and hashed internally. I've put in a ticket to fix this.

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

#69

Post by Steko »

danso wrote: post #6

> MUBI has spent years cultivating that audience with a selection of artsy, obscure films that don't usually appear on Netflix or Hulu. (It originally launched under the name "The Auteurs," before rebranding in 2010 as MUBI — a play on accented pronunciations of "movie," and after a city in Nigeria.) On Monday, the titles available on the company's US site included Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970 classic The Conformist, a…

Have they added the Korean language version of (the original) Oldboy to Netflix or is it still just the dubbed version? I got tired of checking. Funny was just thinking about this last night when their recommendation engine threw Drunken Master II at me and the only option was English dub.

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

#70

Post by neves »

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?

Me too! But my problem is slightly different. I'm learning Spanish and would like to watch Spanish movies with Spanish subtitles to improve my understanding.

In Kodi player, I can connect to subtitles sites and have it automatically downloaded. Why don't you do allow it? I know that it is a muddy copyright terrain, but would be a Good Thing for more advanced users.

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