ivi Online Cinema Celebrates its 10th Anniversary
This year, ivi online cinema, launched on February 26, 2010, is celebrating its 10th anniversary. Oleg Tumanov, CEO and founder of ivi, suggested that Internet users give up their accounts on pirate sites in return for the right to use the movie catalog for free for a week before the official launch. As a result, users gave up 50,000 accounts on pirate sites, and 180,000 people visited ivi.ru on the first day.
An entire decade has passed since then, introducing changes in technology and consumption habits: users switched from torrents to online cinemas, got used to paying for content, changed traditional TVs to Smart ones, gave preference to saving time and comfort by turning their smartphones into universal devices for studying, working, watching TV shows and short content.
ivi is online cinema No. 1 in Russia, with a monthly audience of over 50 million unique visitors. The film library of the online cinema includes over 80,000 units of content, such as movies by all six major studios and over 400 European and Russian independent filmmakers. A large number of movies are available in 4K.
Besides content licensing, ivi online cinema is a co-producer of more than 20 movies, and in 2020, the first own-production films under the ivi Originals brand will have their premieres. In the autumn of 2020, over ten projects are to be released. The online cinema co-invests in film projects: the movie Three by Anna Melikyan and the comedy Save Kolya with Dmitry Nagiyev in the lead will have their premieres in 2020. Such movies as Three, Get Lost, Vasya!-2, Inadequate People-2 are being made now. Early this year, the film Coma has already had its premiere, and in March, the sports drama One Inhale about Natalya Molchanova, world freediving record holder, will be released.
ivi online cinema is one of the few online cinemas working on three monetization models. A paid model (it includes a subscription and a transaction model when a user pays for a particular film) appeared in 2012 when people in Russia were not ready to pay for content. Today, the paid model dominates in the ivi’s revenue structure.
For ten years of the service’s history, the total viewing duration has exceeded 200 million days of continuous viewing, and this is more than a millennium. In 2019 alone, the total viewing duration amounted to1 billion hours.