Eurocinema is using a variety of on-demand technologies to open North America's eyes to a vast world of film. "Apart from the four or five Oscar- nominated films each year, people don't really have a lot of information on foreign films in North America," says Larry Namer, head of U.S. operations at VOD outfit Eurocinema. "Even if they end up on an online movie site like Amazon, they wouldn't really know where to start. So what we want to do is to build up a brand. In the same way as HBO built up its brand as a trusted producer of original film, we want to do the same for Eurocinema. "We don't want to just sell one film at a time. We want to sell the whole concept of foreign films,  so that when people want to watch a foreign film, their first thought will be to come to us."

Thanks to distribution deals with some of North America's leading cablers, among them Time Warner, Mediacom, Atlantic Broadband, RCN and Bresnan in the U.S., and Shaw and Rogers in Canada, Eurocinema is able to offer foreign films on-demand to a potential TV audience of 15 million subscribers. And the company doesn't  just deliver a movie, but puts together a package that includes an accompanying short on, say, a theme similar to that of the feature, or provides additional content from the same director. There is also an introduction and commentary by a host, maybe the director or a writer or actor, which Eurocinema shoots and packages itself.

The company promotes about 15 movies a month from a regularly updated 40-title library, with current programming including award-winning French movie Hypnotized and Hysterical, plus the Danish/Icelandic production The Seagull's Laughter, as well as a new lineup of leading Farsi- language films from a recent exclusive deal inked with Nina Entertainment, the agent for the Iranian Film Society. The movies and associated package cost US$3.99 a pop, and Eurocinema is also looking at introducing free ad supported content, such as interviews with some of the main players in the foreign-film genre. Eurocinema first hooked up with its cable partners when it launched as a fully branded service in fall 2005, and cable TV represents a huge market opportunity: Cable VOD revenues in the U.S. and Canada are expected to total more than US$1.7 billion in 2012, according to CM publisher Informa Telecoms & Media (see fig.). "Working with them [the cablers] means we were guaranteed a proven high-quality distribution service," Namer says. "But cable can also help us a lot with publicity, with advertising our films, promoting them on their networks as part of their VOD service."

Eurocinema has gotten into bed with other distribution channels too, and the VOD service is already available on the FiOS service, the IPTV offering being rolled out by leading U.S. telco Verizon. And the company is also looking at satellite and online channels. "We are in the testing phase with video-streaming and -download companies BitTorrent and Vividas and hope to be launching with Vividas before the end of the year," says Steve Matela, Eurocinema's head of affiliates. And if Eurocinema can extend its footprint to another 5 million subs, a target it expects to reach by mid- 2008, Namer says the company will have reached a tipping point. "At around 20 million subscribers, we can really start to think of ourselves as a trusted brand," he says. "We will then have enough critical mass to look at the traditional tools for branding and marketing, such as national promotions and advertising campaigns to raise the awareness of the foreign-film genre. Of course, other distributors will benefit too, but we will be the synonymous brand, the one most foreign-film fans will turn to first." However, Eurocinema still has to pull in actual paying customers in TV's movie-on-demand space, which is becoming increasingly crowded.

Online film sites, such as Movielink, Amazon and CinemaNow, have all extended their on demand provision from PC to TV through alliances, with IPTV/satellite service AT&T Homezone, DVR outfit Tivo and media-streaming firm Quatrics, respectively, and Eurocinema's television-screen advantage will be whittled away gradually. Namer says he's confident that as a brand specializing in foreign films, Eurocinema can hold its own against these generalist on-demand movie providers. But then there are niche content players, such as Jaman, which boasts a catalog of 1,800 titles from around the globe (CM, Jul 13, 2007). Jaman also says that social networking is a crucial part of its activities creating fan bases and film-discussion groups, exchanging reviews, recommendations and celebrity gossip. And that's a bandwagon Eurocinema wants to jump onto. "We're in the final phases of planning community building, entering the social-networking phase and bringing in the fans," Namer says. "That's all part of our 2008 activity. We've already started work with our sites on MySpace and YouTube, but we want to build and develop our own branded site in 1Q08. But we needed to build distribution first, get enough traction in North America before we did that."

David Simons

convergingmedia@informa.com

Converging Media December 14, 2007