Cinedigm debuts Cineverse, a next-gen streaming service

Cinedigm Corp. a premier streaming technology and entertainment company super-serving enthusiast fan bases, today unveiled its new, flagship streaming service – Cineverse.

Cineverse will focus on several fundamental areas that are increasingly being ignored by the major streamers:

• Content Selection – As the largest streaming companies in the world reduce their film and TV offerings in order to chase a big-budget tentpole model, hundreds of thousands of films and series are not available to consumers. Cineverse aims to build the world’s largest film and television library, offering the immense diversity and variety that viewers are being denied on subscription-based services. Fans can now easily access linear channels and on-demand titles in one place, browsing through the genres they love from anime and horror to sci-fi/fantasy, comedy, music, independent film and more. Cineverse plans to add more than 10,000 additional films and television episodes by the end of the year and several hundred thousand more over the next three years. Cinedigm will launch with entertainment content from its own streaming library provided by more than 600 licensors and expects to dramatically expand the licensor pool over the coming year.

  Also, at the center of Cineverse is a starting lineup of free, ad-supported streaming television (FAST) linear channels that showcase Cinedigm-owned and managed channels including AsianCrush, Bloody Disgusting, The Bob Ross Channel, The Country Channel, CONtv, CONtv Anime, Crime Hunters, Docurama, The Dove Channel, The Elvis Presley Channel, Fandor and Screambox.

Through the Company’s partnership with leading cloud-based SaaS technology provider Amagi, Cineverse will offer a wide array of (FAST) linear channels. In the coming months, the company anticipates adding a broad range of additional curated channels from Amagi’s CONTENT PLUS marketplace, monetized using Amagi’s first-party ad platform, Amagi ADS PLUS.

• Value – In a rapidly evolving marketplace where the largest subscription-based streaming services are now expecting viewers to pay more for less, and, in some cases, pay to watch ads, Cineverse will pursue a fully free ad-supported business model at launch.
• Ad Experience – Cineverse will dramatically lower the frequency of repeat advertisements and through Matchpoint’s advanced capabilities will utilize AI-based technology to ensure ad breaks that don’t interfere with the user experience by interrupting the flow of a movie or occurring mid-dialogue.

Cineverse was built fully utilizing the company’s proprietary streaming technology platform, Matchpoint™. This platform provides several key advantages, including the ability to scale up to millions of titles and millions of simultaneous users, AI-based content recognition and processing, and more. In the coming months, Matchpoint will bring significant new enhancements to Cineverse, including:

• Natural Language Search (NLP) – Cineverse will deploy natural language search in the coming months. This will allow users to conversationally interact with Cineverse’s guide through natural speech or text dialogue, the same way one would interact with a human recommender.
• Contextual and emotional search – Unlike most “like to like” search algorithms, Cineverse will focus on helping users find the right content, at the right time, suited for their current device and mood leveraging AI as well as advanced contextual tagging from partners like Katch and others.
• Next-Generation feature support – As the streaming market evolves, Cineverse is designed from the ground up to support new features, including gamification, NFTs, and loyalty rewards.

The Company plans on expanding application support for all major Connected TV platforms in the coming months, with Samsung, Amazon Fire TV, Vizio, LG, Apple TV, and Android TV apps coming to market over the next quarter. Next-generation search features are currently in development and will debut in the coming months.

Additionally, the Company has plans to rapidly expand consumer reach by distributing Cineverse on a white-label basis to Hardware OEMs, Telcos, Cable Providers, Theatrical Exhibitors and Retailers. The Company’s distribution team has successfully used this model to grow Cinedigm’s enthusiast channel business, which is currently available on more than 1.1 billion devices globally. The Company will also drive adoption of the service utilizing its 87 million viewer base and app install base across mobile, CTV and social footprints.

“With the Cineverse launch today, we begin an important journey as a Company,” said Chris McGurk, Cinedigm Chairman and CEO. “Our mission is to build the Spotify of Independent film and television, with the largest library of film and TV programming in the world. Beyond that, our fantastic R&D team is working on tackling one of the biggest challenges in streaming today: how to make content discovery fun, easy and rewarding. All our streaming efforts over the last five years have led to this moment, and I’m excited to see us graduate into being an even bigger leader and disrupter in the high-growth streaming space.”

“When we set out to build Cineverse, we decided that we weren’t going to build another standard streaming service,” said Erick Opeka, President and Chief Strategy Officer of Cinedigm. “We took a deep look at the market and asked ‘What can we do to add value and improve fans and users’ experiences?’ What we found was pretty simple: people love choice but are increasingly frustrated with the chore of finding something to watch. While these precepts are simple, the technology to accomplish them is quite complex. Leveraging Matchpoint, our team has built a service that can scale to tens of millions of users and mixes world class hand curation with next generation search technologies. We plan on rolling these innovations out to our entire base of services in the coming weeks and months.” BCS Bureau