LOS ANGELES—Cinedigm Corp. has launched its new flagship streaming service - Cineverse. The previously announced free streaming service can be accessed via cineverse.com, and across iOS, Android and Roku apps.
Separately, Cinedigm announced a new deal with America’s premier college sports, news and entertainment streamer, Vidgo.
Vidgo will become the first virtual MVPD to agree to distribute Cinedigm’s flagship streaming service, Cineverse. Vidgo plans to launch Cineverse this Fall.
Cinedigm reported that Cineverse plans to offer the world's largest streaming film & television library, which it hopes will be a competitive advantage in a period when major streaming services have been reducing their film and TV offerings and focusing on big-budget tentpole originals.
Cinedigm said it will launch with entertainment content from its own streaming library provided by more than 600 licensors and that it expects to dramatically expand the licensor pool over the coming year.
"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."
The service is also offering 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.
It is offering additional FAST channels via its partnership with leading cloud-based SaaS technology provider Amagi.
Cineverse was built using the company's proprietary streaming technology platform, Matchpoint. It has the ability to scale up to millions of titles and millions of simultaneous users and offers AI-based content recognition and processing.
In the coming months, Matchpoint will bring significant new enhancements to Cineverse, including Natural Language Search (NLP). This will allow users to conversationally interact with Cineverse's guide through natural speech or text dialogue.
