How a small streaming site became the Netflix for indie film

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.

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.

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.

This is a great question and one that probably merits a long-form discussion.

One thing I'm certain of is that aggregation of content directly in a way as to provide the holy grail of streaming everything is simply never going to happen because rightsholders are unwilling to cede control of distribution to a powerful entity like Netflix or iTunes (hence Netflix's pivot to focus on production and exclusives so they can control their own destiny).

But it's also clearly not viable for the majority of rightsholders to do their own distribution, at least not yet. As much as streaming technology is commoditizing and device manufacturers outside of Apple/Android are converging on web-based platforms, it's still a massive effort to build a good UX and make it available everywhere that counts. There is clearly huge opportunity for platform makers like Apple to capture value by enabling distribution like they did with the iTunes Store and App Store. There is also opportunity for new middleman strategies like white-label apps, or transparent aggregation that would be something akin to channels-within-an-app type of setup

At the moment there's so much churn happening and so many different strategies that it's very hard to predict what the landscape will look like in 5-10 years. The only constant is that cable companies are being rapidly disintermediated, because they were overly reliant on their monopoly status, and have no talent in either production or UX design so I don't see much chance for them to survive.

If I had to sum my thoughts up it is that the apps of today are replacing the channels of yesterday. The most successful channels are themselves becoming apps (eg. HBO). In the past channels were distributed either as broadcast or as cable, but there is not such a clear distribution pattern for apps. Already apps are available on numerous devices, all with their own idiosyncrasies, sometimes overlapping with other platforms and sometimes not. Platforms that were relevant just a few years ago (Boxee) are completely gone, and new platforms are launching every day. I agree wholeheartedly with Tim Cook's assertion that the future of TV is apps, but I don't have a clue what the platforms will look like in a few years. MUBI will continue to be one of those apps, mostly independent (although we rely on platforms so there's always a degree of cooperation involved), certainly not integrated exclusively into a larger offering ala Netflix or IPTV.

I see the price at the bottom on this page: https://mubi.com/films/showing €4,99 per month where I am.

Thanks for your comment, I've shared it with the team.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

The article says that MUBI is a London based company. Does that mean it is available in the UK? I would guess that is highly probable.

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.

I'm not authorized to discuss financials publicly.

Regarding your second point, I really understand this position - fair enough (re. zeitgeist and personal point in life of someone looking for films and rating films, etc.) I just wonder if it wouldn't be interesting to spend some time looking at recommendation systems which are not just simply about intersecting users' votes and presenting something "just what you've recently liked." But this would be more of a playful experimentation which is more hobbyist in nature, for sure.

I would pay $10 a month for a recommendation engine only. I'm able to find the actual video files easily enough. (And I often do so, even with Netflix has it, as Netflix's player sucks, quality is iffy, subtitles are spotty, etc.)

Netflix and the paradox of choice https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/netflix-paradox-choice-santos...

Netflix recommendations work really well for some people, not so much for others.

Even after using it for a few months, I found the success rate not much better than just trawling through imdb new releases lists. Yet a lot of my friends say they the recommendations are pretty spot-on and usually something they enjoy.

In reply to throwaway7767, who I can't seem to reply to directly, I think recommendations depend how thorough people are about using unique accounts for each user in the house.

I ended up just creating an Everyone profile after being asked once too often why Netflix wasn't keeping track of where people had got to in a series, and the recommendations now are utter garbage, as you'd expect when looking for the intersection of Breaking Bad, Period Dramas, and Fireman Sam. I have a feeling they'd be much better if each person's tastes were segregated.

The www.netflixprize.com data from 2009 is quantitative evidence about whether the recommender works (it is much better than random). I'm open to the idea that a curated collection might delight more people, but in my experience and based on this data, I can't agree that Netflix's algorithm is useless. Personally I find it's the unavailability of streaming content that makes Netflix frustrating.

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 recommendations for myself and for a friend who's interested in this make sense

* then do a more proper machine learning dataset split into "teaching dataset" vs. "testing dataset", to see if any of those algos can predict what films a particular user would be interested in watching and how much they'd like them

* and then to move onto something which may (I think) provide insights for this particular dataset, such as e.g. attempting to classify users into clusters, to see if there are any more homogeneous clusters of users, with some users acting as connecting "bridges" between clusters; I'd start with the kNN algorithm here, for example

* it would also be interesting to attempt to classify films as well, and see whether some curious non-intuitive/non-stereotypical clusters emerge (something beyond well-known genre categories, etc.) I'm not sure what I'd be looking at in particular, but basically this assumes that we really do trust the collective ratings of users. The latter may be very problematic - for starters, I'm quite sure it'd be difficult to attempt to "normalize" the different ways users vote (4/5 rating is one thing for one person and another for a different person - of course collective averages may help here, and that's one of the things with this MUBI community in particular that drew my initial attention: overall (subjectively and with bias) it seems that the overall community rates films quite responsibly and with a degree of (let's say) signal.)

* visualize classified clusters, include sliders which alter parameters for classification (including kNN's simple "n", but beyond that, too), etc.

Thanks for answering.

So the movie I wanted to see is currently available in another country or has been available in mine but not now. The UI could be tweaked to explain that and not (negatively) surprise customers but it seems that you already know that. Probably you have plans to improve it.

Your approach is similar to TV, a list of programs to choose from but not the full catalog. Given these terms I'm not sure I'll ever be a customer but this business model seems to be serving you well so I can hardly criticize it.

I have had a completely different experience. I like well-made movies, and am less picky about genre. It seems like if I rate a movie well, they suggest a poor movie of the same basic formula.

Wow. They routinely recommend bad for me. I even tried going along with a lot of their suggestions. Spent a day trying that out. It sucked. Now they show up in my "Continue Watching" list which requires going into preferences to remove.

Now, Netflix doesn't even pretend to recommend good stuff. The "Recommended For You" sort gives me items that Netflix itself suggests I will rate 1-star. I must sort by rating to see the better stuff. And even then, most of the top items I've already seen. I cancelled.

I used to pay Netflix (before streaming) while not receiving any DVDs. The recommendations were good enough for me to decide what to download. Not so much now.

Greenlight is not what I was referring to. http://store.steampowered.com/curators/

AFTER the sign up is a bit late...

$3.99/month if subscribed for 12 months.

Let me add to that. Starting from my own profile page at mubi, it took three clicks and a bit of scrolling to get to https://mubi.com/users/59108 — people know each other.