![]() “You need to have a very solid product market offer and brand before expanding to other countries,” he said. The next targets will be South America, then Asia, Europe and Africa. and Canada for a year or more before expanding to other countries because the market is already huge, and he expects to build a multi-million-dollar business before expanding. Max et les ferrailleurs (1971) © CinessanceĪccording to Monnet, the company will be in just the U.S. Current funding for the start-up is angel investors and what is called “friends and family funding”, but Cinessance is preparing for a venture capital round in both France and the U.S. Even though obtaining licenses is slow, the company has worked fast to develop a catalogue of French movies for the U.S. The Cinessance team has proven its business acumen by building a company within a year and offering services starting mid-November. They are representing the rights of the producers and they have to check with them, so it just a lot of manual dealing.”īeing the Silicon Valley techie, Monnet had an idea of a product that would speed up the process but decided that the industry wanted to move licensing slowly to make sure that they were doing the correct process and working with the correct partners. ![]() ![]() So, it takes a lot of time, resources, and … time. “You have big Excel spreadsheets with the different rights (TV, movie rental, subscriptions, theatre, non-commercial, music, producer and actor etc.) for the different countries and it’s a lot of tracking and a lot of manual information in their heads. “It just so slow and manual,” said Monnet. It typically depends on personal contacts and back and forth negotiations that are managed manually on Excel spreadsheets. ![]() The second thing was the long, slow process for obtaining licensing rights. Monnet also had a variety of strategic advisors familiar with the cinema industry and movie license negotiation best practices. Voom unfortunately closed because of the pandemic since so one was flying, but lessons learned in the tech/consumer industry work for Cinessance. Monnet did that with promoting his experience with start-ups including his last position as CEO of Voom, an urban helicopter taxi company that serviced Sāo Paulo, Mexico City and the San Francisco Bay Area in partnership with Airbus and Acubed. “Movies are a high value asset and they wanted to be selective to offer rights, so the first thing we had to do was to prove our credibility as a start-up, raising money quickly, building companies and understanding the French cinema industry, plus that we were serious.” “My first thought was that any studio would be excited to work with a new platform … and actually it wasn’t the case,” said Monnet. Even though Cinessance partners with the French studios (TF1, Canal, EuropaCorp, Orange, Playtime and in discussions with Pathé, Gaumont, SND and many more), the process was complex. Second was obtaining the licensing rights to stream movies and programs. First was obtaining credibility as a legitimate streaming company with French studios. Mes meilleurs copains (1989) © CinessanceĪlthough building the brand and getting the interest of the 423 million worldwide audience of French expats, Francophones and Francophiles, plus the additional 2.2 billion who use streaming services, is an obvious challenge, there were initially bigger challenges. That’s how the whole project started – analysing this gap.” We had to bring French cinema into the home, onto laptops, tablets and phones. “There’s a gap between the quantity of films that were produced and the quantity available on the new way of consumption. “This is exactly why I created Cinessance,” said Monnet. Streaming took off during the first pandemic year and the industry is trying to catch up. These include movie company inefficiencies in distribution and internationalising production along with changing habits of how consumers watch films. Local language subtitles will be added as the service expands.Īccording to Monnet, France creates about the same number of films as the U.S., but French movies are underrepresented in streaming platforms for a variety of reasons. Movies will stream in French with English and French subtitles. Cinessance claims to have overcome catalogue inventory, licensing and availability problems by offering a large catalogue of French-only films and programming that will appeal to Francophones and Francophiles around the world. and Canada only, with planned expansion to other countries. As of November 16, Cinessance is available in the U.S. Monnet’s solution is Cinessance, a dedicated French-only streaming movie platform that will ultimately be available worldwide. Cinessance CEO Clément Monnet © Cinessance
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