Online cinema ivi based in Russia launched private television ivi.tv with functions of conventional TV and set of recommendations. The service was launched earlier in May on LG SMART TV, and now started also operating on Samsung.
Oleg Tumanov, the founder and CEO of ivi declared:
Television has not changed notable for the past 50 years. It makes the same thing like transfering content to customers without asking their opinion and not allowing control over video stream. In the meanwhile, VOD, which made name in the last 10 years, makes something different, and at that it is not so simple and comfortable like conventional TV. We decided to combine those two solutions in order to give our customers an opportunity just to turn on and watch what they like and when they do not want to choose.
ivi.tv gathers several channels in a single video stream by personal preferences (with daily update) of each given user. In addition, ivi.tv commands 40 genre channels and over 25 thousand of individual content items.
It’s curious that near the same way of reasoning belongs to Netflix CPO. He says: What we managed to understand during the whole history of television was the fact that the content is consumed in a passive way, and not in the active one. The idea is that you don’t fish out content, as the content comes to you itself.
According to TMT Consulting, over 20 online cinemas operated in Russia in 2014. A number of projects were shut down, and Okko and ivi.ru go on leading as a year before. These two account for a half of the market: in 2014 the revenues of ivi.ru jumped up by 54% year-on-year and reached RUR 728 million, which was 28% of all OTT players. The number of paying subscribers exceeded 0.5 million people, with the total audience of over 25 million.
Last year, the largest growth (by people) year-to-year for all the players was shown by Smart TV – 64%, mobile devices – 42%, and the web – just only 3%.
The registered players earned 64% of their revenues on advertising. 36% of revenues derived from direct subscriber payments. The share of revenues from subscriber payments increased from 22% in 2013 to 36% in 2014. The leader in terms of growth was Megogo, as its annual revenues grew in 2.8 times. On average, the market grew by 58% and amounted to RUR 2.6 billion.
