One year old US online film site Jaman is coming to the UK after successful start up in the US and building a site for India. The company is one of the few online film operations which has, for the most part, licensed films on a global basis.
The new Jaman strategy outside the US is to add those films it has international licenses for, to local UK content from film companies such the British Film Institute, Path’ Films, ContentFilms and Axiom. It plans to repeat this concept across Europe while simultaneously continuing to develop a free to air, advertising based operation, showing international films plus local Bollywood films in India. It has also tapped veteran David Fischer, from MySpace and Fox Interactive Media to run the UK.
We have come across Jaman only a few times, in deals announced with DiVX and TiVo platforms, both for distribution of films online, but from what we can make out the company has its own in-house developed DRM, which runs on a PC, and its own P2P delivery system. From here it streams films to other devices, one of which is the recently launched second version of Apple TV.
The founder and CEO Gaurav Dhillon has put $10 million of his own money into the venture, which now employs 30 or so staff.
The strategy it has adopted is one we have talked to people about in the past ‘ to take independent and foreign films which did not get big cinema audiences in the first place, and sign them up for online VoD, in order to build up momentum. Once it has momentum, it represents a revenue opportunity to larger film distributors ‘ eventually the big US studios.
Already Jaman has content from one of the US majors in Viacom’s Paramount Pictures as well as Lionsgate, Eros International, Magnolia, First Look, Arts Alliance America and BBC Worldwide.
Arts Alliance is an aggregator which is doing much the same in that it signs up content for other online film operations.
Already Jaman claims that some 70% of its existing users are not from the US anyway, but they only have access to the films it has for global distribution. In total, Jaman has rights to 4,500 films, but not all of these are global. For instance the new UK site will only have 1,000 films and that includes both locally produced and globally signed content.
This week Jaman also announced new titles in its global collection, from Cinelan, Reality Entertainment and Mondo Mini. These will join existing cinema titles, comedies, documentaries and shorts, Japanese anime and Bollywood hits.
Jaman already claims to be one of the largest and fastest growing film websites in India. In a quote on content site Contentinople last year Dhillon said licensing cinema films ‘was like selling malaria, two years ago,’ until he started traveling the film festival circuit and stumbled across the independent strategy.