Mubi is an innovative VoD platform founded in 2007 providing an audience of cinephiles a collection of arthouse movies and aiming to create a real community of cinema lovers: users (around 100.000 worldwide) can rate the listed movies, leave comments and reviews of the selected works, as well as read the blog which is edited by the platform and related to the main international film festivals.
Mubi, whose capabilities are still rather limited, had to clash with a reality which CEO Efe Çakarel defines “an all-you-can-eat business model”, referring to the giant VoD distributors, Netflix and Amazon. A small reality like Mubi could not compete with such an intensive distribution, so it tried a model aimed not to the quantity of movies in the catalogue, but to their confirmed quality: Mubi offers a list of thirty movies at once (one replacement a day), divided in independent and classic works and films winning awards at most important film festivals such as Cannes, Venice, Toronto and Berlin. In doing so, Mubi closes unique and short-term distribution contracts which are different in every country due to the different distribution legislations. This strategy complies with Mubi’s cinephilic view, aimed to make a wider public access to a non-commercial cinema which is usually excluded from screenings in cinema because of that.
Ten years after its foundation, Mubi is trying to expand by developing new distribution strategies that go beyond the simple offering on the online catalogue. Many titles on Mubi are screened at the independent sections of the film festivals and remain unknown because of the lack of commercial and distributional interest. Mubi has started planning some screenings in the British cinemas (following the example of Amazon in the U.S.A.). Right now, there are five films on Mubi which are in the British cinemas thanks to the platform even if only for a limited period. Nobody still doesn’t know if this strategy will make Mubi competitive internationally and if it’ll create some alliances between the different platforms, which could allow the survival of those films after the thirty-day period.
