Ukraine’s Star Media has signed a cooperation agreement with the US company OTTera to launch an OTT service named Lava this autumn.
Initially, it will host the company’s most popular content from its library, consisting of over 7,500 hours. Most will be available dubbed and subtitled in 6-8 languages, including English, Spanish, French and Portuguese. In the second stage, the company will offer cooperation to all its partners, whose content is already successfully aggregated in the company’s multi-channel network on YouTube and is protected from piracy by the ContentScan service, which works using artificial intelligence (AI).
Commenting on Lava, which will use a mixed funding model, Vlad Ryashin, president of Star Media Group, said: “By launching our own Lava online cinema, we are not going to compete with global platforms and local online cinemas that have been on the market for a long time. On the contrary, we plan to cooperate. In the near future, there will be projects created specifically for Lava, including those that we plan to do in co-production with other partners. By the way, Lava is one of the few words that has the same meaning in most languages”.
Stephen Hodge, chairman and co-CEO of OTTera, added: “Star Media is actively strengthening its presence in the international market by cooperating with many well-known foreign companies. We are happy to work with such an ambitious company. Together, we will work to draw attention to their multilingual content from new audiences around the world through a versatile and simple application available anywhere in the world. Given the success of our partners in paid channels, content promotion on YouTube and Amazon Prime Video, we are confident that Star Media will be able to become a powerful player in the OTT industry”.
Star Media is a producer, distributor and owner of serial and film content. The company’s activities are aimed at developing joint production with international partners and creating projects aimed at a wide audience. It successfully develops its own TV and Internet broadcasting, cooperates with leading TV channels and online cinemas. As the largest aggregator in the CIS, the company is widely represented on YouTube.
Meanwhile, OTTera provides a “white label” service. It operates more than 55 OTT services and 80 channels with an audience of over 100 million users worldwide.
