German video-on-demand (VOD) provider Pantaflix has introduced a Chinese version of its service as part of its global roll-out.
Mandarin is the sixth language being added following German, English, French, Turkish and Polish.
Pantaflix, initiated by German actor Matthias Schweighöfer in July 2016, is now available in the world’s most-used mother tongue, spoken by around one-fifth of the world’s population, namely 1.3 billion people. In addition to China with Hong-Kong and Macau, Chinese is the official language in Taiwan and Singapore and also spoken as a mother tongue in 19 other countries by parts of the population.
“Our mission is to turn a huge, but so far local film business into a global one. The access to new markets and further customers, of course, first of all works through the language,” Pantaflix CEO Dan Maag said in Berlin. “With the Chinese version launch of our service, we are opening up one of the most important growth markets. We will continue to concentrate all our efforts on significantly expanding our market share in the global VOD segment.”
In contrast to existing VOD portals that purchase their films from sales companies or distributors, Pantaflix wants to enable producers to directly target their audience through its platform – without intermediaries, thereby increasing revenues for content creators.
As licence vendors are circumvented who usually sell the rights on a territory-by-territory basis, viewers will be able to access the films worldwide without geo-blocking or other restrictions.
