20th Digital Studio will premiere a series featuring 60 diverse, genre-bending short films for Halloween. These range from horror comedy to psychological thrillers and everything in between. The entire series will be screened in September and October across Disney’s digital and broadcast platforms including ABC, Freeform, FX and Hulu.
Whip Media Group has named Pixelogic as a strategic supply chain partner. The companies say the partnership will provide media companies better transparency into their content workflows to maximize revenues, reduce costs, increase efficiencies, and get complete visibility and control over where and how television and movie titles are being distributed, both on a global scale and in real-time.
Nagra’s IP Blocking solution has won the top spot in the Protecting Content and its Value category of the Videonet Connected TV awards.
Nagra, a Kudelski Group company, has exceeded 1.5 billion multi-digital rights management licenses served by its cloud-based security services platform for the Airtel Xstream app. Airtel Xstream is the digital entertainment platform of Bharti Airtel, India’s largest integrated telecom company. Built as an India-first video network for premium digital content, Airtel Xstream offers more than 10,000 shows and movies, and 350 live TV channels.
The International Union of Cinemas (UNIC), the body representing European cinema trade associations and operators, today issued a statement condemning Universal Studios' reported decision to stream movies the same day they are released to theatres. Here is the UNIC statement:
Steve Munga is a truly inspiring entrepreneur. Four years ago he realized his dream and opened his first movie theatre, CineKin, and his first movie distribution company, MSKD, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. That they were the first movie theatre and distribution company opened in the country is only part of the story. To full appreciate the importance of that, it helps to first have a better understanding of the continent of Africa and, in particular, the country that is the DRC.
The Movie Studio, a vertically integrated motion picture production company, has signed a licensing agreement with FilmHub, an online marketplace for film creators and streaming services. Per the agreement, The Movie Studio will license FilmHub’s catalog for viewing on The Movie Studio App, which is available on Google Play and the App Store. The Movie Studio will also license its catalog to FilmHub for distribution via its online film marketplace.
Some event cinema distributors and their partners are getting creative in these challenging times. This Thursday, April 2, the Los Angeles-based event cinema distributor Abramorama and The Dollywood Foundation will present an online book-reading series entitled Goodnight with Dolly. Abramorama was originally scheduled to release the documentary The Library That Dolly Built in more than 330 cinemas on April 2. Due to the current COVID-19 crisis, the film will instead open nationally the week of September 21, to commemorate the Library’s 25th anniversary.
Wez Merchant, the founder and managing director of the public relations company Strike Media has a plan to support motion picture distributors during the COVID-19 crisis. He is launching a free newsletter that would include all the home entertainment, video on demand and premium video on demand movies being released each week.
For the first time in its seven-year history, the Digital Cinema Distribution Coalition has begun to pay all its customers rebates. After recently paying back its founding investors – AMC Theatres, Cinemark Theatres, Regal Entertainment Group, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. – initial investments in full, DCDC is now fulfilling the promise it made to all of its customers when it was formed to pay them rebates pursuant to the same mathematical formula in each of their agreements.
