The company Viasat World launches its own OTT platform with movies. At the first stage, the service will mainly focus on Russian-speaking users living in the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, France and Israel.
However, the new service will be available in countries like Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Turkey, Ukraine, Croatia, Montenegro, Czech Republic and Estonia in the regional stream, as well as in other countries in the coming year.
The company stated that the decision to set up the project was taken after a relevant study, which revealed a deficit of certain content on the above markets.
At the Digital TV CEE Conference in Budapest, the CEO of Viasat World Irina Gofman was interviewed by the DTVE edition, saying that the platform, operating under the TV1000 Russian Kino brand, would offer the audience a vast variety of Russian movies for a relatively low subscription fee.
According to her, the company decided to prepare a direct offer for users, guided by the fact that the expected pricing policy of the project would seem attractive to potential users residing in those countries where such services were very expensive. However, the Viasat World also works with Pay-TV operators when it makes sense.
The service was run on the Amazon Channels platform in the UK and Germany. The TV1000 Russian Kino service is also available within the OnPrime TV offer by Sky and on the Virgin Media platform within the Worldbox app.
According to Irina Gofman, the target audience of the service totals hundreds of thousands of users, and the potential audience accounts for millions. She also emphasizes that the service is looking forward to a successful competition with pirated and semi-legal offers.
The Viasat World is also planning to launch a new service with premium drama TV series by the end of this year, focused on the audience in its key markets of Russia, Central and Eastern Europe. The new service will offer a collection of high-quality drama TV series through its partner platforms, and will also offer 80% of its content within the SVOD service on the same partner platforms.
According to the Viasat World, the Epic Drama Service will offer the audience the most popular drama TV series from across the world and will be represented within the actual Viasat World’s channel portfolio.
More than 70% of the entire content of the service will be exclusive, and, in general, over 600 hours of drama TV series will be available there.
