🎬Behind the Scenes Revolution: KINO’s Pioneering Approach to Fan Engagement in Film & TV
What if our experience with our favorite movies didn’t just start with the trailers and end when the credits rolled? Something that kept you engaged throughout? The entertainment Industry, traditionally film and television productions, often save fan engagement for the final sprint and only begins marketing efforts ten weeks before a project’s launch.
However, the rise of the internet and increasing access to celebrities’ lives has redefined fan engagement, allowing fans to engage with celebrities through Instagram Lives, Snapchat, and various online communities. Despite this shift, the conventional promotional strategies often appear out of sync with the depth of fan interaction and frequently fall short of generating substantial revenue.
Avoiding going straight to DVD
Over a year has passed since the significant upset at Netflix, marked by its initial subscriber loss and subsequent stock decline, leading to exaggerated claims that television, as we knew it, was over. During this period, it became evident that the prevailing business model in contemporary Hollywood was fundamentally flawed.
The old model of producing, releasing, and engaging fans through a massively profitable long-tail of revenues is gone (reporting $20 billion in losses since 2020). And yet, the most significant opportunity for capturing record fan revenues is right before Hollywood.
This is where KINO comes into the picture, where they partner with movies, TV shows, and OTT platforms to provide exclusive behind-the-scenes content on their platform. By doing so, they are giving the fans extra content to binge on and connect with their favorite celebrities more effectively, capitalizing on previously untapped assets, thereby enhancing profitability even before a project’s official release.
Moreover, this approach allows for a more comprehensive understanding of fan sentiments and identifying the target audience, mitigating some of the financial risks associated with production.
Kino essentially partners with movies, OTT & shows to get exclusive rights to their behind-the-scenes content, which currently needs to be done.
In return for these rights, Kino offers these productions actionable insights on what their customer base is saying and how they react to movies early, enabling them to capitalize on these behind-the-scenes moments.
KINO focuses on three significant aspects:
1. The KINO App has a built-in superfan community and tools to monetize engagement.
- Shorts provide free, unlimited content in 15- to 90-second short clips, including trailers, behind-the-scenes footage, and more. These short clips serve as an acquisition tool, enticing users to subscribe by offering various calls to action.
- Stream: The paywalled section that hosts long-form KINO BTS content, such as recorded live streams from sets, interviews, tours, and playlists related to different projects and genres.
- Studio: Offering up-to-date information from sets, limited merchandise, events, and giveaways, exclusively accessible to KINO subscribers.
2. Blockchain Integration: All video and photographic content is hosted on the blockchain, reducing the cost of traditional web2 data storage. This integration also extends to fan ticketing, digital collectibles, and merchandising, providing users with a secure and transparent experience.
3. Ambassador Program: KINO’s recent ambassador program targets superfan groups and encourages celebrities or super fans to promote the platform through their social media channels. Ambassadors are rewarded with cash incentives, lifetime subscriptions to KINO, and even tickets to red-carpet events.
A Star Is Born
KINO supports multiple blockchain technologies, ensuring broad accessibility for users. All video and photographic content is securely hosted on-chain, lowering the cost of traditional web2 data storage. Moreover, tickets to both in-real-life (IRL) and digital events are now seamlessly managed on-chain. This results in enhanced speed, reduced fees, and expanded collectibility and transferability of fan ticketing options.
In a user-friendly manner, wallets are automatically generated and abstracted, ensuring that users require no prior knowledge of blockchain operations to participate. This streamlined approach opens the door to a broader audience. This strategy aims to tackle one of the industry’s biggest challenges today: maximizing revenue through strategic data utilization.
KINO will also have two big features for release to introduce to their user base for film and TV enthusiasts in the coming year.
The first, Fan Rewards, will change how audiences engage with their favorite content. Viewers can earn tokens that unlock a range of fun Hollywood experiences by simply watching films or TV shows. These include owning signed props, meeting the stars, and visiting sets. Additionally, these tokens can be redeemed for discounts at various brand partners, introducing an innovative approach to generating advertising revenue without relying on traditional advertisements.
The second feature to look forward to is the Live Premieres on KINO. This goes beyond behind-the-scenes content, offering live premiere events of films or shows directly to fan communities. These premieres will feature the cast and crew and include fan Q&As, special digital meet-and-greets, and other interactive elements.
These opportunities give the films and show Industry leverage with the collected data to find ways to maximize revenue while also keeping users engaged, before moving on to other streaming platforms.
Current State of the Industry
Thousands of films and shows are produced yearly, involving transactions of millions of dollars over typically 6 to 24 months. There are between 300 and 500 productions, each worth multi-million dollars. The global film and television industry is vast and rapidly expanding, primarily driven by digital, social, streaming, and technological advancements.
The global movies and entertainment market size was worth around USD 94.451 Billion in 2022 and is predicted to grow to around USD 169.62 Billion by 2030 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of roughly 7.21% between 2023 and 2030.
Streaming platforms have accelerated content consumption, leading to a significant rise in streaming budgets and demand for new and engaging content. While platforms like Community.com, Superphone, Upstream, Beams, and Wisdo focus on fan engagement, KINO stands out with its exclusive rights to behind-the-scenes content, offering actionable insights into the entertainment industry.
KINO is reaching over 1,000,000 film fans each month, and an early release of the KINO app is now available for download in the App Store.
The Team Behind Kino
The team has highly relevant expertise and a robust network within the OTT space, with experience in related startups, giving them an in-depth understanding of the industry’s intricacies.
He served in the army for almost nine years before getting a degree in screenwriting and selling a show to Netflix that he created with Matt Damon and Peter Berg, where he was an executive producer for the show. He has also worked on writing pilots for a show with Jimmy Kimmel. He is responsible for leading the partnerships, considering his vast experience working with producers, screenplay writers, and writers and successfully selling shows to OTT platforms like Netflix and Disney.
Co-Founder and COO Austin Worrell
He attended the London School of Economics for his master’s degree and then USC for law school. Along the way, he also built three startups. The first one was sold, and the second was a blockchain project called Elongate that Daril was part of, which reached 500k consumers and 500Mn market cap. This is when he saw the power of blockchain and, fascinated by it, decided to build something in the entertainment industry.
While in university, she was the CEO of Casting Central, Canada’s casting facility with multiple offices across Canada, responsible for shoots in Toronto, many of which included the big American projects that come to Toronto. And then, after ten years of doing that, she moved to LA and built up the production division for Lenovo, De’Longhi, LA Fitness, and Bosch.
Engineer, tech leader and LEAN advocate with 15+ years of experience. After completing his degree in Computer Science with a minor in Math, David went on to work for numerous government agencies such as the DHS and TSA. David was responsible for building cutting-edge technology, such as the biometric enrollment software “TSA Pre-Check.”
Concluding Thoughts
The team’s deep expertise and strong networks in the OTT industry set them up for ongoing growth and strategic partnerships. What’s more, their unity as a team is evident and enhances their overall effectiveness which has led to great backers including Slow Ventures and Sequoia.
And it’s no surprise, looking at the platform’s successes — like hitting 1 million monthly engagements and building a strong social media presence in just two months — it’s clear they’ve got significant potential and are striking a chord in the market. These achievements are especially impressive for a company at the pre-seed stage, underlining their deep understanding of their audience and what they want. Considering these early results, KINO might just be the “money shot” Hollywood needs.
