Austin Worrell - Hollywood Disrupted: How KINO Is Shaking Up The Film Industry

Full transcript: Austin Worrell on London Real

2:45 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Austin Morell, the lawyer, entrepreneur, and tech innovator. You are the co-founder and COO of Kino, a multi-platform interactive social cinema streaming app that is revolutionizing the film industry and how we consume content. Keynote combines the power of social media and content streaming in one place, providing film and TV creators of all genres the tools to engage and monetize their organic fan base.

3:14 You built this because you believe Hollywood is broken and that the filmmakers and fans are the ones suffering. Your mission is to reinvent entertainment by breaking down barriers between fans and creators to make movies interactive. Your goal is to make the industry more equitable, efficient, and engaging, allowing filmmakers to control their own destiny by empowering the next generation of stories to be told. Austin, welcome to London Real. Thank you.

3:44 I could not have asked for a better introduction. That was incredible. It’s great having you. I want to start by saying that Kino is one of our portfolio companies here at London Real Ventures, the world’s first media-powered investment firm, where our mission is to transform the world by investing in cutting-edge web 3 and AI companies while giving our partners marketing exposure across the London Real Media platforms and academies. We heighten awareness, create customers, and build communities by leveraging our global audience and extensive network.

4:10 Austin, I am more than excited to be a part of this incredible journey with you and I’m going to be a huge consumer of your product as well. So let’s jump in. What is Keynote? We said a lot of words before, but let’s break that down. I mean, so when Darryl, my co-founder, and I first founded, we met in a little coffee shop in Hollywood.

4:32 He had sent me a sketchy LinkedIn message because folks in Hollywood are terrible at LinkedIn. Unlike tech, we have pristine LinkedIn’s. His said something about working on Netflix and Disney and Matt Damon and Jimmy Kimmel, and I thought, what the heck? We sat down, we started chatting, and I was studying entertainment law and startup law at USC. He had reached out because I had founded a cryptocurrency previously and he was part of that community.

4:55 He said, hey, man, I’ve just been really thinking about Hollywood and how the system is broken and how we could build a platform to fix it. And so we started on day one with this mission of equitability that is only possible through technological efficiency that’s only really founded upon better engagement with fans. So if we sort of trace back to what you chatted about before, we are an interactive digital cinema and a social streaming platform. Today, when you go to www.kino.studio, what you see on mobile, on your smart TVs, and on your web browsers is an interactive digital cinema.

5:28 And that’s the first stop. The next stop is achieving a true Netflix meets TikTok experience. And we can kind of dig into each of those right now, but right now, if you go to Kino.studio, just a couple weeks ago, we did two digital premieres where the cast and crew got on, premiered their film for the first time, and it was like getting a Sundance or a TIFF or a CAN or you name a film festival experience in your home or the big Hollywood premiere on Hollywood Boulevard at the Dolby Theater.

5:54 Imagine that, but in your home now. And what’s really cool is for the filmmaker, they can reach millions of fans online. And also for the fan, you get that more authentic engagement with the story and the storyteller, which is what we think is most important because that expands the medium and allows them to break the noise. The internet’s a really crowded place today. And so you need good technology, but it can’t just be, let me throw AI at that, or let me throw blockchain at that, or let me throw just a better tech stack at that.

6:17 You also need to reverse engineer the fan experience by understanding who they are and how they absorb media. And I’m happy to dive into all of those. Yeah, look, this is a powerful idea. And when you first came on our call and kind of pitched our group about what you were doing, I think I had the realization in real time that, wait a second, when I go to Netflix and watch something, I can’t even post a link on my social media. And it’s like, and when I go to my social media, getting over to watch a film somewhere is near impossible.

6:47 And they’re like these totally walled gardens in 2024, like what the hell is going on? And when I watch something that I love, that I really get into, and I wanna go deeper, man. I wanna hear about the actors, I wanna hear about the writers, I wanna see the outtakes. I can’t, I can’t get more. And so I’m just kind of left hanging and then I float to the next piece of content, which I don’t even know where I find it anymore.

7:12 I really struggle. I was telling you outside, I literally asked my barber what to watch next. And I gotta wait every two weeks because he’s the only guy that seems to know what’s up. And I’m someone who talks to some of the coolest people in the world. I’m on all the social networks, but I still can’t find a way to find great content.

7:32 Isn’t it crazy? Well, if you think about the economic impact of that, if discoverability, and that is the key frustration of fans worldwide, including myself, and in a bit I can share the story of sort of how we came to this realization. It was me sitting on my couch, but I’ll save that for a second. If you think about that economic impact, if discoverability is the hardest part of the industry, not can we make a good film, not can we get the film out there to the world because we have video technology, not can we market the film because we have marketing technology, but how do you discover it?

8:02 Well, that’s all that really matters, right? At the end of the day, if it’s not discoverable because there’s so much content now on the internet, and I can’t do that efficiently, that means that you have an industry where only a certain films every year can break through. We’re seeing this this year. There are a couple films that have broke records. Inside out to over a billion dollars.

8:21 It is now the highest grossing film. I think of all time. It’s at least Disney’s highest grossing film of all time. However, the box office generally is down this year. And folks in industry are starting to seriously question, is the movie theater by itself the only place where we can monetize a film?

8:36 And the obvious answer is no because culture has shifted, and then we can get into a second how the system was already built into a broken model because of innovative shifts that have gone on. And so what we like to say at Kino is that it’s essentially a broken house built on shifting sands. And combined, that is just an impending collapse. So instead, we need to rebuild the house better and put it on a solid foundation. We believe that foundation is filmmakers first and fans first.

9:00 Okay. Where do we start? Do we start with this big assertion that Hollywood’s broken? I think so. Also, you live in Hollywood and you understand it better than most of us.

9:09 I think a lot of us, we kind of consume what they throw at us. And we don’t know what we’re getting or why we’re getting it. We don’t know why we’re sometimes not satisfied. We don’t know why we haven’t watched something good in three months or six months. So maybe you can tell me because you grew up in that world.

9:24 For sure. Yeah. I mean, so a little bit of the backstory on me is my big dream as a kid was to be a movie star. Grew up in the middle of Ohio, Cincinnati, which by the way, they make a lot more movies there than you anticipate. But that was my dream.

9:38 I trained to be an actor. I was lucky. I got to be on big screen in a couple of cool movies. No big parts or anything like that. But I at least got a taste of it.

9:47 I think I was three or five when I first got started. Yeah, I was in a couple of commercials to start and then started acting. And any film that would come to town, I would just, you know, submit a self-date, my head shots, my bio, all of that. And I got lucky being a couple of cool movies. And I got to just see the magic.

10:05 I mean, if you’ve ever been on set, there’s such a magic. All these creatives in one space telling a story. And the story is not just the actor and it’s not just the director. There are folks that are putting together the wardrobe, the costumes. Actually, I think some of the coolest people on set are the folks that are building the actual sets and scouting locations and the DPs, directors of photography, figuring out how every shot or some of the guys that are working on lighting.

10:30 I mean, the amount of people it takes to create a film is such a beautiful endeavor. And so that was sort of my first love was film and TV. A week before college, I got a call from my dad. He said, hey, kid, you’re on your own. Figure it out.

10:42 My parents found a company. It got shut down by a lot of regulations. And so in that moment, I thought probably not the right time to pursue acting as a career because I felt this fire of I want to fight against what felt like an injustice. And so I thought I’m going to go be a lawyer because if I’m a lawyer, I have the superpower where I can always fight against the bad guys if you will. I can sort of rail against injustice through a career.

11:04 I’ve got the skills and the training. And so fast forward, I sort of pursued that path and moved out here to London to attend London School of Economics, went back to LA to study law. And now I find myself a kino sort of at a blend of all three. I get to work with my first love, which is film and TV. I get to practice law in that this is a very legally complex industry.

11:26 And finally, I get to look at the economics of film and TV. And so if we look deep into those economics, we see that at the end of the day, it is the filmmaker who is struggling because the current systems that are in place just no longer are built for the audiences that exist today. And so if we look at places like the theater, what do we say when we think about maybe a date night, Netflix and chill, right? Like that’s a common phrase. It’s no longer let me go to the movie theater to take my date after a nice dinner, right?

11:56 And I’m not here to say that’s right or wrong. I personally love going to the movie theater and I wish more people would go. But to think that that is the most viable economic pathway to monetize your film is difficult. And so when we think about that discoverability issue, it’s really key to build a platform that users can first discover film and TV. But then also we backtrack and we think, okay, we have the studio system, we have independent producers, we have actors and directors.

12:20 It’s this love of film that transcends all but then it’s a labor of love between so many different parties with sometimes aligned interests, sometimes disparate interests. And so that can create this really complex machine that previously the sort of central source was the studio. But then the studios recently have really got into this grind of what I call short-termism, which is for better or for worse, as a publicly traded company, you have to report to the street, you have to report your earnings, you have to report subscriber numbers.

12:49 And so it was really this advent of streaming that brought about this extreme short-termism and thinking about the art form and saying, well, if we can create five more Marvel movies, we’re going to be able to report certain earnings because we can predict that we’re going to have fans come in the door like they have for the previous four. And what we’re all realizing is that we are quite diverse in our appetite for content these days. And that could be anything from a cat video on TikTok to a $100 million action movie on Netflix.

13:17 And the reality is that both are competing for the exact same attention of every single human on the earth and it’s called the attention economy. So when we really sort of backtrack and we think we no longer live in a world where the only way to entertain myself is to go to the theater and watch the $100 million movie and I’m going to pay for that, I’m now deciding whether I want to sit on my couch in my pajamas and watch cat videos all day on TikTok. For me, it’s more like really weird geeky movies or not movies, clips about how like bridges were built.

13:41 I don’t know why the algorithm pushes that to me, but they do instead of watching the movie, right? And then if you can’t discover the film but your TikTok algorithm is pushing cat videos to you all day, well, then that’s really bad for the filmmaker. Yeah. Or you might listen to a podcast which is like two dudes somewhere in a studio with maybe some sure microphones that’ll produce a two-hour piece of content that like you said will have your attention the same as the Marvel movie.

14:05 Yeah. Which is wild. One cost hundreds of millions and one cost hundreds of dollars. Yeah. Yeah.

14:10 And yet it’s still the same attention, isn’t it? It’s the exact same attention economy. And so really at the end of the day, you have to then backtrack and reverse engineer the economics behind each piece of content. And it’s kind of eye-opening when you think about it in that way. You start looking and you think, okay, I’m deciding to spend my hour watching this video on whatever platform and now I’m not allocating that time, that energy, those resources to watching the $100 million Marvel movie.

14:35 And then that has trickle effects and then if they’re advertising dollars going behind that, right? Now the advertisers aren’t playing their ads. So now the film is not being supported or I’m not subscribing to every single streaming service anymore because I just can’t find anything I want to watch. All of that reduces the amount of revenue going into the Hollywood space. And so what we have to do is we have to address that and realize that that is where we are at.

14:56 And that streaming was a part of the solution but also a part of the problem in the way that they built that model out because it was sort of, you know, $15 a month you can get unlimited content. Ultimately that math doesn’t add up. We joke and we sometimes call that boy math which sometimes we as boys can be, you know, not always the greatest at. We’ve got a great idea. We put it together.

15:15 But that’s the joke that we sometimes say which is that at the end of the day it’s a great idea that you can get unlimited content for $15 a month. But the reality is that if every movie costs $100 million, it doesn’t work. And so really we have to backtrack and think how do we deliver a premium experience for fans that they’re willing to spend on it or how do we create a no cost way to reach the fans and again we have solutions to both which is cool. Okay. Is Netflix unsustainable though?

15:39 Is that what you’re saying? No, it’s just not. I’m not saying that Netflix is sustainable and I think we could sort of phrase it like this. Let’s play in a virtual town, right? A virtual town has multiple places.

15:49 We’ve got the public square, right? We’ve got the movie theater, right? We’ve got the library. We’ve probably got Blockbuster in there. Let’s go back in time a little bit.

15:56 You know, and then we got the house. Those are key areas for any virtual space, real space for humans. That’s kind of where we operate. The public square might be Twitter or X. It might be Instagram.

16:08 It might be Facebook for you. That’s where you virtually hop into community and you bump around with other people and you talk about stuff and that’s where you discover a lot, right? The movie theater is probably where you go to discover the coolest new movies, right? And unfortunately today that isn’t actually Netflix necessarily and I’ll get into sort of why that is. You might go to the library to get a book or let’s keep on with filming TV.

16:31 You might go run a DVD or something like that, right? You know, or you might go to a friend’s house to watch a movie and in those different key areas, there are different touch points for how a film might come to life. So the example you gave earlier, how you talked to your barber. Well, that’s, you know, that’s sort of in the public square or, you know, the barbershop. Maybe I should add that to the list.

16:48 You know, the barbershop, that’s where you discovered it and then you want to watch that movie. You didn’t discover it at the theater. You didn’t discover the library. You didn’t discover the friend’s house, right? You discovered it through a public forum, which was the barbershop.

16:59 And so there are key importances to each of those public places. And for us, we have built a digital movie theater because while a film or show is new and hot, you can deliver greater revenue out of it because we’re all excited to see it and we want to go spend a greater amount on it, which helps the filmmaker, right? Because at the end of the day, they’re building a product that they need to monetize. When a film is much older and you’re going back to, there’s less economic demand for it and so the price has to go down.

17:27 And so in that regard then, those are two key important aspects of any film’s life. If we backtrack and then put the entertainment lawyer hat on, we call these windows. Watch windows. This is the way the industry has always operated. Now we just have more windows than ever because there are more platforms than ever.

17:42 But traditionally, we would put it in the theater to start. That’s always where you start. The movie’s hot. I can get people to go to the theater and watch it because they’re excited and they want to watch it with friends or take a date or go with their family, whatever. That used to be the core reason and way for a film to launch.

17:58 And then once that was done, then it would go out on DVDs and you rented a blockbuster or let’s go five years ago. It would go to Netflix or Amazon and one of the streaming services. And typically, it would either get bought up and it would just live there forever in a library and that was the modern blockbuster and that’s where you could go and see it if you want but you wouldn’t own it and you wouldn’t keep it. You just watch it for a limited time. And then often what would happen either would live on there forever or it would then trickle down to the smaller platforms like a 2B or a Pluto where it’s free.

18:26 So, now I don’t even have to pay a subscription for it. So, as you can tell, it starts at the I’m paying $20 for a ticket. I then pay $15 a month on Netflix. I now watch it for free and I have to watch some ads. But the film is still monetizing.

18:37 It’s the highest level at the theater, the second highest level at subscriptions and then the lowest level on these ad-supported platforms or back in the day we would put it on cable, right? And then ads would run. So, they’re different formats for each. The reality is that first one, gone. Unless you’re Barbie or you’re Oppenheimer because it’s very expensive and lengthy process to market to get people to get out of their chair and go to the theater.

18:59 I live right next to a movie theater and I love film and TV and I don’t go that often. I’m ashamed to admit it. I should go more. I don’t like the theater anymore. It’s just, you know, I don’t even enjoy it.

19:08 It’s like if I got to go to the bathroom, I got to get up and I miss half the day. Is that such an old man’s thing to say? I know. I think I’m just getting old already and I’m only 28. He’s sitting in the front but it’s still, I’d rather sit in front of my high back and I can pause it.

19:19 Exactly. Such a grandpa thing to say but I don’t see the upside now. So then we go, well, how do we still capture that first window? That’s what we built and Kino actually is German for movie theater. So to my German viewers, you would have known that already.

19:31 It also means movie theater, cinema and quite a few other languages. We did that on purpose. We are not building a replacement for Netflix. Netflix replaced Blockbuster, right? And they do an incredible job at that.

19:42 If you want a reliable library of content and you like the kind of content you have, subscribing to them, being a member of their platform makes a lot of sense. And yes, they’re going to have new releases and they’re going to have a library of older content. And you know that if Netflix is your place to go or Paramount Plus or Disney Plus or you name any streaming platform, that is my library to go, right? That is my library. And like we said, in that sort of public square of places to go, that’s your library.

20:09 And that’s where you can go to find a reliable source of content. But for the new stuff that you’re like, actually, I’m willing to fork out $10, $20 to see something that’s cool and new. That’s what we’ve built Kino for. But the reality is, we can’t just have folks show up because there is so much content and the internet, we need to deliver a greater value. And so understanding that value proposition, particularly for Gen Z, I’m sort of a zillennial.

20:34 I claim that I’m Gen Z, but a lot of my team also says I’m a millennial. I’m 28, so I’m right on the border in 96. So it’s a hot debate. I’ll be curious to see what the London Real audience thinks defines a Gen Z individual. Maybe that’ll actually finally define who I am.

20:48 But Gen Z in particular, right, is an audience that craves more authentic engagement online. We call it parasocial relationships. There was a great article in Variety actually a couple weeks ago talking about how social video is the preeminent viewing and entertainment experience for Gen Z and Gen Alpha particularly. And a lot of their parasocial relationships are digital in that they find community and others online. And again, I’m not saying that this is a good or bad thing for humanity.

21:15 We can debate that and I can talk about how I think more kids should get outside and play and play sort of tag and all of that. But the reality is digital is where a lot of our community happens. That sort of public square I was talking about. And so if we realize that then we go, well, how do we recreate a movie theater online? Well, you deliver a really incredible viewing experience, which takes some cues from social media.

21:36 Live streams are some of the coolest events on the internet. I think we’re currently on right now, aren’t we? And so the cool thing is that at the end of the day, if you add in a live element, where you’re like, wow, my favorite actor’s right there talking about his film. I’m going to see it for the first time digitally with him. And then add in a dual screen experience where you could ask a question on your phone.

21:54 And then they say, we’re about to give away the hat that I wore in the critical scene where I killed a bad guy. And if you click that button now, you could win it, right? Or you can record a video of yourself asking a question. It’s going to be on the big screen next to my favorite actor. That creates that digital parasocial relationship that not only then justifies a premium experience.

22:14 And I go, I’m going to go watch it on Keynote now instead of waiting a couple of years for it to drop on the library platform. It creates that sense of, yeah, I want to go see it now. I want to support that filmmaker. I’m going to get value and get an experience I won’t get anywhere else. That’s what’s really critical.

22:28 And then that actually helps to support the further windows because once it’s launched on us, we give the data analytics for our filmmakers. They can take that data and they can say, hey, Netflix, hey, Disney, this is why you should purchase my film and it should live on your library. And it’s great for the filmmaker because they can actually show the value out of the data. But it’s also great for Netflix and Disney because they can buy the films that they know are going to perform well on their apps.

22:51 So the way we see it is that we are actually a helper to both sides in that there is this critical loss of the first window which was the theater. And so how do we fill that void? We can’t pretend like it doesn’t exist because if everything’s going to drop on libraries, how do I build out an economic model as a streaming platform to know what works and what doesn’t? We actually have that now. Okay, now we saw Netflix tipping their toes and Joe Rogan did a live show on Netflix last weekend.

23:17 I think the time zone was off here so I didn’t watch it live. I watched it the next day. And it was really exciting because it was even exciting for Joe because if you’re a comedian, I think you typically will do a few nights and take the best. But that’s a lot of pressure which makes it more exciting. He did some crowd work at one point because someone was shouting and I was like, damn, this is live.

23:36 So it takes someone as gangster as Joe to be able to even go there. And it was exciting. Obviously, the Jake Paul Mike Tyson fight was scheduled for this summer to be live. And I think it’s still going to happen. Yeah, that’s Netflix dipping their toe into live.

23:49 But it still is missing this social engagement or parasocial engagement you’re talking about. And they’ll probably never get there. And all these library platforms look the same as and they look like they’re these separate online libraries that don’t have anything to do with the way I engage socially or don’t have any engagement really. So when you saw that live thing, is that a good thing to see? Does that compete with you?

24:14 Yeah, great question. I mean, I’ll also make note this is something that it’s kind of like seeing the FedEx arrow and the FedEx logo. And if you have no idea what I’m talking about to the audience, take a look at it. There’s a little arrow. You’ll never unsee it ever again.

24:29 This happens when you look at streaming platforms. You do notice that most of them look very similar. What are they? They are rows of posters. Now, go back 10, 15 years ago, I was really kind of too young to remember, but I’m gonna pretend like I was, I can’t remember.

24:43 I can remember a little bit of going with my parents. That’s the same as a blockbuster shelf. Yeah. Right? That’s all they are.

24:48 They’re blockbuster shelves in digital format. We’ve gone well beyond it. Now, that still has a place and a role in society and that this is the library of content. However, you can’t pretend like that shelf is the exact same thing as a theater. They’re two separate things.

25:05 And so realizing that then allows for us to build an incredible platform that says, hey, to the user, we’re gonna deliver a theatrical experience but in a digital format. And so then you ask, okay, live. Actually, that’s a great thing because the reality is that the more that we have live events online, the more that we’re drawing community, the more it becomes a standard way for us to build those parasocial relationships and we start to embrace them. But I also recognize that at the same time, these are library platforms.

25:33 That’s who they’re built to be. Right? They can partner with platforms like mine. But at the end of the day, it takes a lot of effort to reinvent yourself as a company and just on a core economic basis these platforms are built to be libraries. That is how their economics, that is how their model is built.

25:49 That is what they’re reporting to the street every quarter. And so knowing that then allows for us to focus on our lane, which is that first window and being the best platform for filmmakers to launch their film and or for fans to discover those films. And in focusing on those lanes, we then realize that we’re actually a partner to industry. That in many ways, yes, we’re disrupting but we’re disrupting in a way that this actually goes hand in hand with the current outlets that are out there because if we go back 20 years, Blockbuster and AMC have some areas where you could argue they compete.

26:22 They’re still competing for the attention of the user but also they’re completely separate businesses. One’s a theater and one’s a library renter, right? So in that way, when you start to see that, you realize the internet’s a big place and we actually need both. Right, okay. So I like the fact that you’re not competing with them and they are library networks and they’re always going to be that because a lot of them are associated with studios.

26:40 Yeah. So what do they have? They have a whole catalog of movies and Netflix has now become one of those. They didn’t start that way but now they have effectively because they bought all this content or licensed all the content. So I would think they behave very similar to Disney or Hulu or whatever these streaming things are.

26:55 They do, yeah. Long come you. Now, you rolling up 28 years old saying I’m going to disrupt the Hollywood film industry. I mean, oh my gosh, that must go over, you know, not so well, I would think in LA or tell me does it. Yeah.

27:09 I was told in tech one times that a product has to be 10 times better in order to be adopted as a disrupter. Yeah. Is that true? And what is the reaction? Even if you tell people we’re here to compliment you.

27:22 Yeah. I actually believe you. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I love that question.

27:25 Isn’t it? This is a huge industry and a bunch of old school Hollywood guys. I can see their look and their place in the Malibu and their old school producers are thinking you’re not going to mess with my business model. It’s the innovator’s dilemma all over again. Yeah.

27:39 Well, first, incredible book, innovator’s dilemma. And also if we dig into that, we recognize that it is the startup that has the advantage when there is a true problem at the core, right? And we can look to, I think that one of the examples that they give in the book. Not just the advantage, but the ultimate winner is the startup, right? Because they can’t change even as much as they want to because they’re tied into those revenues.

28:02 You know, exactly. And the old school model, even if they want to change, they can’t. Yeah. I mean, also why incumbents fail. Another, you know, great, great read on sort of the current problem.

28:11 And so if we actually think from that lens, then we recognize that there is a lot of power in being solely focused. We say obsessed. That’s the word we use. Aquino being obsessed with the problem for the filmmaker and for the fan. Not obsessed with how do we persist a business model that’s existed for the past decade or decades or century.

28:29 If you’re one of these true legacy companies, right? And they keep buying each other up. They keep merging, unmerging. My favorite recently is, and I love, Warner Brothers, they’ve made incredible classic films. I’ve gone to the lot many times.

28:43 Incredible company. Warner Brothers Discovery, top analyst on the street a couple weeks ago said, I think we should split out the streaming business. They just merged. Was it even two years ago? And now top analysts on the street are saying, maybe we should go back, right?

28:56 And there’s a great article. I think it was in Hollywood Reporter that talked about how mergers and acquisitions are not going to save this town. Two companies that are struggling to disrupt, to innovate, to shift with the shifting sands and rebuild the house that was originally broken. Two of them merging together doesn’t fix the shifting sands or the broken pieces in the house, right? What they need to do is take a deeper critical lens at who they are, how they’re delivering media to their core fan bases.

29:22 And they will figure that out in time. They have brilliant individuals. But the reality is for someone like us, who’s uniquely focused on the problem, we’re small, we’re nimble. It means that we can also take a really cool approach. And I think what’s great about my team is, you have me, I’m trained as an entertainment lawyer.

29:37 And so I deeply understand the complexities of this industry in a way that it’s pretty rare actually. You’ll meet a lot of producers and a lot of executives who might be so narrowly focused on one aspect of the industry that they actually don’t have a sort of macro overview on the complexities of windowing and the legal rights that go behind each one and sort of how fans actually can actually absorb your content and the sort of legal complexities with that. And so when we take that approach and then combine that with my co-founder Darryl who’s an executive producer and has been a writer and created shows with some really cool individuals that top platforms and has that experience, we sort of, we’re just a fan of this company on both sides of the aisle me saying, hey, I’ve been trained as an institution man.

30:17 I know how the system works. I know where the brokenness is in the house. You as the creative as somebody who’s reached the heights of success in the industry know the shifting sands because as a creative you know your fan bases. You know storytelling. You know how to tap into it.

30:32 And so when you combine us together we can take a really radical approach which is that at the end of the day the industry doesn’t just have to just go away in the way that like Uber replaced taxis. It’s that there’s actually a place for studios and there’s a place for libraries and there’s a place for movie theaters and there’s a place for fan engagement. And all those are critical and if we all put the pieces in order we can then actually build out a really successful plan for every film that launches in the market and in that way every filmmaker can maximize their revenues across the board.

31:03 They can create scalable models. They can have successful careers. We can see employment numbers rise in the industry and by the way that goes down to the catering services and folks that you would never even think about in LA that are relying on this industry to keep going. And so if we don’t figure out a way to maximize revenues per film you’re going to see a lot of people that have to leave town and leave the industry. And so the question is sort of yeah how do I come in and say hey we’ve got some great ideas for how to fix this.

31:27 It really is listening to the problem understanding it. There’s a great book The Startup J Curve and they talk about how some companies found because they just had this crazy cool idea for something and everybody goes yeah let’s hop on board. Right I think TikTok is a good example of that. TikTok wasn’t founded because we said there’s a problem we need to watch people dancing in sweatpants. That’s what we really need.

31:47 No it was like this is a cool we’re gonna you know we’re gonna sort of lip sync to music videos. People are gonna dance and it grew into something crazy and it grew into something massive. Right that’s one area. Then you have other startups that go I actually critically understand a problem and I’m gonna build tech around that and in that way it’s gonna be disruptive but not in a way that bumps elbows and shoulders and said hey I’m here to shut everybody else down and we just want to be the one and only.

32:11 It actually says hey I have a critical approach I understand the economics I understand the parasocial relationships I understand the key players and if we reverse engineer to build a platform with better technology that can serve and create solutions to the problem in that way you can then win significant market share without having to sort of decimate all of your competitors. Right I’m not saying that this is business the other day right we’re gonna have we’re gonna have friendly competition we’re gonna have hard competition it’s been a battle to get to where we are today but what I think I’m really proud of my team for doing the best is we understand the problem like nobody else does. I’ve gone to so many film festivals over the past two years and listened to individual filmmakers producers, distributors studio executives folks from the top to the bottom and I’ve understood what their current problem is and a lot of it centers around the same thing.

33:00 One discoverability is the core problem for fans and so if they can’t find my film I have to spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to market to them and I can’t do that with every single film I’ve got. I don’t have that big of a balance sheet I don’t have that big of a budget. So at the end of the day that’s not sustainable. Two the model currently is no longer working I used to have a great formula put it in theaters sell it to a streamer put it in theaters sell it to a streamer put it on Tubi put it in theaters do DVDs put it on cable right like all these models and now I’m realizing that that just no longer suffices or go to a film festival it’s the coolest thing it can and the big streamer comes and buys it.

33:40 They’re not doing that anymore so what do I do now? Let me say well that’s where tech comes into play and we’re actually here to fix your problems and we want you to go get that big Netflix deal. We want you to put it on Tubi in the future but start with us launch be successful build your fan base go sell your film and rinse and repeat and you’re going to now have a solid process where we now take that first vertical we give you the data analytics we give you the tools to most efficiently tap into fan community you’re going to have a successful launch and then you can still go on and be a Netflix film or be a Tubi film whatever else you want to do because we recognize that that’s how the industry works is we have multiple stops on the train path for every film and when you think from that approach it then becomes this really cool beautiful concept technologically which is that at the end of the day our job is to crush our lane if we crush our lane then we actually are very successful and we help the rest of the industry become more successful.

34:31 Okay but it’s primarily for independent filmmakers and getting their films out there as opposed to helping the big studios or helping anything else. So yeah this is always a fun question because what the heck is an independent filmmaker? You know it’s such an interesting question so if we really go back into history and I’m a big history geek my master’s is in history and economics and so it’s sort of just where my brain always lives. Let’s go back to the 20s I live in Culver City in LA which is where the first studio was built it was the MGM lot there’s this beautiful colonnade that’s still there today it’s the new Sony lot or it is the Sony lot now.

35:08 Back when sort of Hollywood was first founded right we had these major studios and then you would have some smaller companies or individuals create films and there’s this concept of like the big five and then there’s the independents who were not your MGMs or your Warner Brothers and somehow that term stuck and we have your major studios we have your mini majors which is a weird term in the in-between and then we have your independents but if I said to you was Civil War by A24 an independent movie what’s your answer? It was one of the bigger movies of the year but the reality is technically yes it’s independent because A24 is an independent film studio or what about Long Legs right now with Nicolas Cage? Neon that’s an independent film but it’s one of the biggest films at the box office right now so it’s a tough question to ask because the reality is that the independent moniker can mean a lot of different things it could just mean it wasn’t created by Warner Brothers or Paramount and the legacy companies it could mean yeah it was created by a little dude that had an idea in his basement he got five dudes together and they created a film and it was truly indie or at the end of the day it could just mean that it was totally funded and financed and created outside of the system with no internal capital so there’s a couple different ways we can look at that but I think this is a more important stat what would you guess is the percentage of the industry

36:27 That is independent? Well based on the definition you just gave me like not part of a major studio percentage of total gross or number of movies or what? So let’s do total number of productions per year total number of productions which is correlated to gross is it? Yeah oh gosh I totally don’t know but I would say the studios make I just really don’t know I know they make the big blockbuster movies they do but so in quantity maybe it wouldn’t be that big compared to everything else but I would assume that they take most of the revenue I would guess that they take 30% of the revenue but I don’t know Yeah so it’s about 70 to 75% is independent which that’s where we do have some years where if we actually just look at gross revenues that number because that’s why I say it’s correlated not directly linked because there’s obviously some years where the box office really takes up but lately we actually see that 75% is holding up a major portion of the industry and that’s anywhere from 127 to 154 billion dollars is the independent market and now that number also isn’t counting all of the really small independent films that we really that’s what we often think about when we say the word indie and that’s your buddy who just got a little camera has got an idea for a movie and you pull together a crew and you just film in your backwoods in Ohio and that’s indie filmmaking and there’s a lot of that that’s not even quantifiable because it’s not reported

37:50 And we don’t know about it and it never hits the screen and so actually I think that number is quite a bit larger it’s hard to also quantify the value of those films because the budget doesn’t actually equal value anyway I won’t geek out too much about that but the point is if we actually died into the market that is film and television and we know that about 75% is independent then pair that statistic with this statistic which is 65 to 72% of Gen Z reports wanting to become a creator now creator is a big term and the creator economy is also kind of a misnomer the creator economy the way I look at it as a Gen Z millennial individual is that at the end of the day creator can be anything from me creating cat videos on the internet I actually don’t like cats very much I don’t know why I bring that up so much I love dogs I’m going to say dog videos from now on but dog videos on the internet or I’m creating a hundred million dollar blockbuster with Disney that is a creator right and it could be my craft is script writing my craft is you know director of photography or it could be I’m an influencer and I like creating educational videos about blockchain and AI or other cool things right it’s a wide swath but if we know that now the top reported desire and demand for Gen Z and Gen Alpha is not to go be a lawyer or an astronaut or a doctor they want to go become creators of some sort they want to be creative they want to create content online and you’re seeing

39:09 So many more people do this right I might be creating a sort of you know a med tech company but I’m documenting the whole thing as an influencer right like there’s this crossover because we live in this parasocial reality of the digital community and so knowing those two stats 75% of the industry is independent 72% of Gen Z reports want to become a creator that’s high it’s extremely high that feels high let’s even call it half that okay 35 and 35 okay that’s a ton of content that’s not to drop on the world right and then pair that with the concept of artificial intelligence driving down the cost of production even if we don’t factor in Gen AI we just factor in the ways in which we go about setting up shots the ways in which that we’re able to utilize cameras and sort of categorize our different you know pieces of footage AI can drive down the cost or the way that we do VFX all that really post-production is where that comes into play we can go create really cool movies for much less right knowing those sort of three things that means there’s a large amount of content that is coming into the world that is independent that didn’t originate from the studios and I think that’s a really cool thing because if we go back in time we’re all sitting around cavemen and women in caves drawing on the walls telling stories that was the original storytelling medium it was you know vocal it was shared it was drawn you know and then of course over time we have music

40:25 And we have painting and we have books and then finally we get to a point where we have moving pictures which is the newest form of storytelling we think about it which is also something cool to think about is film and TV is a young industry it’s only about 100 years old we’re still figuring ourselves out so a lot of these are growing pains also accelerated by the fact that we now have crazy technology like AI so not only are we sort of like on our teen awkward growth stage as an industry we’re doing that with some of the craziest innovations of technology that have ever occurred so that’s a really interesting phenomenon that occurs but if we think about the fact that we have already a large independent industry because so many more individuals today can go produce a film compared to the 20s when you needed to have a ton of money to even make a film because cameras weren’t cheap right we no longer live in that air so you have that then you have a generation that’s upcoming that says hey I’d love to get into the creation of media whether that’s alternative content YouTube channels podcast or that’s a whole film or show right all of that is storytelling to some degree most of it arguably some of it’s not but there’s a lot of it that is and then we pair that with the fact that the cost of production the ability to produce is going down drastically that then means that the independent market is not getting smaller the independent market is getting bigger

41:37 So what do those folks need? At the end of the day being the platform that can empower them to deliver the stories to the audiences that they actually are looking to hit because at the end of the day I can go make a $2 million movie and you know I don’t have a hundred million dollars to go market to the world and put it in theaters and have billboards on you know Hollywood Boulevard and you know across London and you know all that like at the end of the day you need a platform that allows for you to find your audience that’s what’s really important So what makes you think you can do that? Yeah Where do you get the audacity?

42:06 Yeah That you can actually find my audience for my movie because that’s not easy Couple different things I think one if you think about the innovators dilemma some of it comes with the unique understanding that when exemplified is sort of on a team level when sort of you know put into strategy when built out in technological form is just able to tackle a problem so much faster and better I think that’s where it first comes from is my team understands the problem from both the fan side and the filmmaker side better than I would say anybody else in this entire industry I’m not saying that there aren’t folks out there who know it super well but they don’t spend every day obsessed with this problem like we do That’s a good start and so that’s a great start I know my team is obsessing over this every single day and that started with just me and Daryl and that has become this team of now we’re 25 team and we just have an awesome team that we’re all obsessed with that problem which is either how do we empower the filmmaker or how do we create fan experiences they never had before with this digital theater whether that’s it was so easy to discover that movie and I had a pleasure watching that cool Michael Douglas movie called The Game Last Night because I just scroll to find it or wow I got to sit there and watch Tom Holland premiere his new film on Kino and I asked him a question and I’m never ever going to forget that moment in my life and I’m also going to tell my friends

43:25 To go watch that movie yeah right both of those are important so I think one it starts with that it’s a team that’s obsessed with a problem and understands it better than everybody else I think it’s two we have the advantage of being able to build our technology from the ground up in a more efficient manner we don’t have decades of legacy that we have to deal with we don’t have you know levels of bureaucracy that we have to deal with even though we can go hey we know the problem so now let’s build the solution for it and let’s build the solution in the best way possible because that’s our job to do that and then I think finally at the end of the day we can be nimble and quick because we are a startup and we can also work and partner with some of the coolest folks in industry and we already are the final bit and this one is unique and not philosophical those are sort of just core to any startup really the startups that win are the ones that tackle those first three the final one is timing which any good VC would look at and know that that is sort of a critical piece then not every startup can get right there’s a lot of great startups that had the first three and it just wasn’t their time and for us I have never seen really in the past month or two months I have never seen greater feeling of product market fit than I have now because the core thesis that Daryl and I had at the beginning which is that we saw this onslaught coming we knew that the filmmaking

44:37 Industry sort of those who are actually doing the work had a lot of frustration and that they were sort of there’s this pent up just feelings and energy we saw a double strike happen and then a lot of folks said oh back to business as usual we all struck everything’s great now and we said no I promise you guys it’s not back to business as usual and now in the past couple months we were working with some of the biggest names in the industry because they are saying you guys were spot on you saw this coming that the sands are shifting the house was broken at the end of the day we need new solutions to get to where we are going and so when you have that fourth piece which is the timing is now that’s a really cool recipe for success and at the end of the day too I know that this is what my team it’s our life’s work it’s what we are impassioned to do we love film and TV we love storytelling and so for us it’s not about let’s go build a taxi app and just relentlessly compete to the end of the day because we just want to have the coolest taxi app we want to have the coolest app in film and TV but also I get to talk to filmmakers and see how just excited and happy they are to premiere their film on my app and reach their target audience and that’s what really drives us because we know that we are fixing that problem.

45:48 Okay have you been successful so far would you say I know that the strike through a monkey wrench in your plans maybe last year then in retrospect maybe it was good to wait have you been successful? That’s a great question my answer is always going to be no my mom always called me her little overachiever growing up which definitely it was probably a good and a bad thing there’s that line from the movie Trading Places where the two older brothers one of them says mother always used to call you greedy he said she meant it as a compliment I love that line she meant it as a compliment it can’t relate but yeah she called me a little overachiever growing up and so whenever I hear somebody say have you been successful the answer is always not yeah we’ve got so much bigger and better to do but the reality is yes we have been you’ve made some inroads in the last 12 months we have and you know it was really tough to found the company at the beginning you know Daryl and I were chatting last night about how as a startup founder even if you read every startup book under the sun which I’m a big reader so I have you can’t be impressed upon how difficult it is to found a new venture and how you literally will never be able to predict every problem you think I know it’s going to be hard to get people to believe in our idea and adopt the product and become partners but we’ll figure it out then there are the problems that pop up that you go I never in a million years

47:14 Could have predicted or then you get to a point of growth where everything is going really well and that’s part of the problem my team’s not big enough we can’t you know we can’t build fast enough or now I don’t have enough time because X wants to do this and Y wants to do that and that’s actually a great problem to have but it’s still another problem and so really at the end of the day what I sort of think of when I think of success is are we achieving product market fit in this stage as a company? Not all are we a billion dollar company today yet that’s where we’re headed but are we achieving product market fit because that is our job to do today and we have because now we are having folks biggest names in the industry agencies production companies distributors etc reaching out to us and saying hey guys we think what you’re doing is really cool we think that the time is now our clients our partners our films our filmmakers they need what you’re building and we want to be a part of this way because we feel like the product you’re offering is a great thing to add to our strategy not replace the entire thing not throw it out the window but you’ve created a product that we need now and then on the opposite fans going wait so I can sit on my couch and pull the Kino app and just scroll and click a button and watch it on my TV like I do on TikTok oh my gosh sign me up today or I’m going to be able to share with my best friend a playlist of like

48:28 His top action movies just like I do on Spotify oh my gosh that’s so cool or wait a minute my favorite director is going to go live on Kino and I get to ask him a question about how he picked the shot in the final scene holy cow that’s awesome I want that and so what we hear from fans is we can’t wait for you to build on every feature and again that comes back to I wish I had you know 20 times the amount of team because we can’t build fast enough which is a good problem to have and then on the other side it’s we know that we are hitting the nail on the head for the problem point and that’s really beautiful because that means we’re doing our jobs right and we’re not just building tech that looks cool and feels cool but nobody really wants to use and we’re building tech that actually is meaningfully helping filmmakers storytellers get their films out to the world and that sounds really beautiful it also sounds really cliche actually what it’s doing is keeping people employed and creating sustainable economies within film and TV because we are a data first platform and so when filmmakers actually have data and data analytics they can understand their audiences they know more efficient pathways we have AI assisted tools to get them to their target audiences they now know they have a platform that can achieve success for them which means they can keep paying their teams they can go produce the next movie they can keep getting investment dollars

49:39 Into their next film they can grow their company their company can maintain growth whatever that is they now feel free to do the part that they actually signed up for which is the creation of film and TV and I think that’s really exciting Let’s talk about maybe a case study because you have God bless Bitcoin the movie coming out I think premiering your platform or there’s a behind the scenes Q&A where I think Kathy Wood of ARK Invest is also an investor I want to ask you about that Robert Kiyosaki who has become a good friend of mine over the last five years is going to be I think on the panel as well Is this a good case study to talk about? Is there something that you do? Because I noticed it was happening and I was like oh this is interesting because this is different for sure you can get out there what are you doing?

50:23 And how does that different than anybody else does? So and this one’s a great case study because it’s a documentary and a lot of folks will understand readily that a documentary is not something I’m just itching to go to the movie theater for Right That’s you or most people? Most people that I know they go you know a documentary school but I kind of like putting it on on my TV and I’m making dinner and I’m hanging out with my friends or the kids or whatever right and it’s I’m learning or if you’re like me you’re sitting down you’re going oh my gosh that’s how the world works but really I think it’s great because it’s documentary they often don’t get the sort of fanfare and the spotlight that a lot of feature films do they don’t get your Deadpool big premiere right but they’re actually I think oftentimes the more impactful of filmmaking because they really cut to the heart of a problem to the heart of a story to the heart of whatever it is and they can give you some really cool insights that are sort of bite size and understandable and you can move forward and it starts conversation and it starts change and innovation whatever It can also be one of the most creative art Yeah Which is a counterintuitive because it seems oh it’s based on fact Yeah It’s restrictive but actually can be one of the most creative for sure art forms out there because you’re making active choices every time you go to that individual human who’s telling their bit of the story

51:35 That makes up the larger story and you actually don’t have full control there so something really cool about that but this was a great case study in that you know a financial documentary in particular is not something that would typically get a really cool premiere where you’re pulling out the red carpet and all the stops right so when we sat down and the team came to us and said hey you know we really like what you guys are building we’d like to do a digital premiere of our film God bless Bitcoin on your app what would that look like and so with every one of our new digital peers that comes out our team puts together a custom creative strategy and so whether that’s a horror movie that just premiered our app a couple weeks ago and we had a whole unique pre-show and post-show or if that’s God bless Bitcoin we say okay well it’s not the same kind of audience and so at the end of the day we’re not going to create the exact same kind of experience we want to create the keynote experience for each film that’s unique to that film and unique to that audience what does that look like here well the film is full of really cool thought leaders Cathie Wood who I do think is one of the most prominent investors on Wall Street in the world I think she’s incredible and we are very fortunate to be back by Cathie and her team at Arc Mark Cuban an incredible voice in the space in technology and in culture generally Robert Kiyosaki who is just so well known

52:53 For his tangible advice around finance and business and I know so many of my friends of Jen Alpha all the way up to sort of you know whatever age group that know who he is you have Mark Usko who is just an incredible investor as well you have Tom Lee and the list goes on of individuals who are in the film and also have said hey yeah we want to go live to continue the conversation and interact with the community around it I think that’s what’s really cool is that you can watch the documentary and absorb it get a lot of information and that’s going to make impact but now let’s really create a conversation around the content itself around the story which in this case is Bitcoin digital assets what does blockchain look like for the future of humanity which is a really intriguing conversation regardless of what your views are on it because Bitcoin exists Bitcoin has a solid community there are solid community folks who disagree with digital assets and blockchain there’s all sorts of legal issues there’s financial issues there’s technological issues and having that discussion around it is critical and then adding in an interactive piece where I as a fan can go hey I’d love to ask Cathy why she took such a solid stance in going and creating the Bitcoin ETF to create investor accessibility in this asset class that lets me frank can be a little hard to understand if you’re not super well versed in finance or might seem a little inaccessible

54:13 Because what is the blockchain and what’s a wallet and how so let me ask Cathy of all the things you could have invested in why did you decide that Bitcoin was the thing or let me go and ask Mark you know how does this fit into your general business sort of philosophy you know you’re one who’s known for Shark Tank and backing big founders this doesn’t seem like something that sort of you might be involved in or any of the other folks that I mentioned who are thought leaders and unique in their own vertical now you get to be a part of the conversation with them and also we could do this in a little theater in Hollywood or a big theater in Hollywood and then we get a couple thousand people or a couple hundred people in a room but now let’s multiply that by millions and get millions of people worldwide engage in the conversation now we can’t do millions of questions right but we can still entertain folks as part of the conversation who not only are interacting directly with the cool thought leaders that are part of this but also with one another and community and then that compounds the impact of the story and so that’s a really good case study because all those elements I just said well unique to god bless Bitcoin in that we’re having Kathy and Mark and other cool individuals show up and they’re talking about sort of the elements and complexities of Bitcoin and blockchain that also is exactly the case in you know an upcoming burn documentary

55:26 That we have in September that has Taylor Swift and Oprah and other cool individuals involved and they’re talking about the impacts of burn survivors and how we need more resources and how their families are impacted that’s really beautiful we also have a really cool horror movie that’s coming up with a really young new cast who are incredible by the way and they’re going to get on and talk about the complexities behind filming this horror movie the locations how they chose their roles the costumes that are at play all of that and then we have some really cool films that have won awards at the top film festivals that have some of the biggest names who are on red carpets right now that you know about that I definitely can’t talk about yet or my team will slap me but we have some really cool folks they’d be like I’d be dying to ask them how did you prep for that role or the director behind that how did you make those choices like I said earlier and so the cool thing is this model is applicable regardless of what the ultimate film or show is because it is an interactive way to engage with that ultimate story and so for us God bless Bitcoin is a really cool and coming up we have a really incredible group of individuals that’s coming together for this and you as a fan can directly interact and then if you love that Kino experience you can keep coming back for more because I’m sure that you probably have a favorite type of film a favorite type of story

56:42 A favorite type of show I’m sure you probably have a favorite actor make me not a favorite somebody you might just be like hey I’d love to ask you know for me it’d be Michael Douglas I’d love to ask Michael Douglas how do you do it every time how do you get into character you know how do you make that story come to life and so that’s the experience that we’re doing for the God bless Bitcoin thing will they all be in a theater or will they all just be remote? Yeah how does that work? Great question so it depends on each film and so sometimes we go live from studio we get everybody together sometimes particularly this one these are very high profile individuals that are all across the world so the majority of them I think are probably going to be remote from their home studios but we’ll have some folks coming live from the studio as well we do both and that’s what’s really cool about this kind of a product is we build it too is as a young startup we could have said we have to get everybody flown into LA to our studio to film to go live that’s it that’s the rule but then we wouldn’t be able to work with all these cool individuals that have crazy schedules and so because we’re building the product from the bottom up we said hey let’s build a flexible product and we know that we can facilitate an incredible beautiful interactive experience that at the end of the day if Mark or Kathy is zooming in live from you know New York or you’re calling in from Austin

57:54 Or they come to the theater or sorry the studio live in LA either way we can facilitate that magical experience digitally through your smart TV and your mobile device and either way we are still facilitating the actual mission which is to create that interactive engagement. Yeah okay very cool economics yeah now a lot of people go to these film festivals and I’m guessing if you bump into the Netflix guy you sit next to him he’s thinking about buying that movie you’re about to watch you I guess don’t buy movies you don’t have that capital base so how do the economics work because you have to attract these people at the end of the day to use your platform yeah great question so this also goes into the different ways in which economic models are built in Hollywood so let’s go back to that windowing thing I talked about before a movie theater you’re never going to see somebody I don’t want to say never because you can see all sorts of things in Hollywood AMC doesn’t go to can or Sundance and go buy films that’s not their model right they are what we call an exhibitor their model is we built a cool theater with nice seats and maybe some drinks and some popcorn that’s way too expensive and you’re going to come and you’re going to sit here because I’ve got the big screen and that is the premium experience I thought this really cool ad from the 60s that actually said don’t watch it at home watch it here at I think it was AMC watch it here at the theater

59:14 Because this movie was made for the big screen now take that concept and apply it to Kino don’t just go watch it on Netflix don’t just go watch it on another platform watch it first on Kino because this movie was made to be interactive this movie was made to be enjoyed this movie was made to tap into you and your community that’s the equivalent that we’re seeing today back in the day it was this is black and white and my tiny little tube box and the better experience is the theater so I’m willing to spend $10 to go to the theater to watch that thing today the most premium experience is no longer the theater right the most premium experience is this interactive engaging experience that we’ve built and so we are also an exhibitor in that we take a portion of ticket sales and we take membership fees to join the platform and so either you can join as a Kino Plus member it’s a little bit like Audible where you get a ticket every month to watch a cool digital premiere or you can upgrade your membership to get multiple tickets a month and then we have an old library of films that we’re building out this is a new product line we can talk about in a bit that you’ll get access to unlimited content there on that but for us it’s very similar to Audible where you subscribe every month and for that you’re going to get a discount on those tickets or if you want you can just come buy a ticket normally like you would at the theater watch the film on Kino and come back again

1:00:29 For another one in the future so that’s how we’re a little bit different is that we actually have both a membership model and a ticket model but the way that we interact economically with the film itself is we’re an exhibitor so we don’t go and allocate billions of dollars off our balance sheet to go buy up a bunch of content making the bet that that is then going to drive subscribers that’s how the library platforms like Netflix, Disney, Hulu, etc that’s how they work we also don’t run a ton of ads for free content or subscribers who are watching ads and that’s how we combine those revenues and that’s how we work that’s the two B’s and Pluto’s and Hulu’s of the world right? We act as an exhibitor which is a movie theater and that’s how we built the company to be and there are as I said before there are lanes for each of these economic models and each of these economic models can also pay at a certain rate to the ultimate filmmaker which is based off of just the sort of usability and the revenues and the premium nature of the different experiences that go so for us it is the movie theater model applied digitally and applied on scale.

1:01:30 Okay so potentially the guy sitting next to you at Cannes this year for Netflix who bought it if he’s educated in the future he might premiere it on your platform absolutely right okay so the same person that buying it uses your platform for that initial interactive I’m going to get the data or whatever exactly maybe but if you bought it for Netflix already bought it maybe not but maybe somebody else would for sure I mean I can see both scenarios working probably what I think is more likely scenario is that the film does a lot of film festival the filmmakers go hey we want to premiere this on Keynote because we’re going to gather some really great data to say hey this went viral on Keynote we had a million fans watch this and then if I go over to that same guy at Netflix at a price I can get a better price for it instead of sitting there and they’re going well I know the judges liked it but hey who knows that the fans will and at the end of the day for that Netflix executive it’s a better way to price out and then it’s a better way to gain the economic advantage you want as a streamer which is we have the best content for our member base so like I said before we think of this as our job is actually to the industry and that we are helping solve that critical fundamental question which is is this commercially viable?

1:02:45 Okay Can it find its target audience? And actually we take a different approach than does this film have to hit every audience we actually think that every film has an audience there are 4.35 billion users on the internet that’s a lot of people and so instead if we don’t think about does every film apply on mass scale to every one which some films do like a Barbie or Oppenheimer it can hit you know 50-75% of the market instead you’re going to have those we call those temples but you’re going to have some films that actually do really well with smaller audience you got a hundred thousand people to spend ten dollars that’s a million dollars you don’t need to have a hundred million people go watch your film everybody would love that but not every film is going to breach that success so instead how do we get every audience to then see the film as they should Okay back to Kathy Wood yeah she is considered one of the preeminent technology investors she was super early on Bitcoin she’s predicted Bitcoin as high as 3.8 million in the future she’s invested heavily in Tesla in the past and a lot of other companies Coinbase etc what is she doing messing with a disruptor Hollywood technology play you know I didn’t know she was an investor in this type of a business why?

1:03:57 Yeah technically you’d have to ask her that for the real answer but I have some theories based off our conversations I also have to make a quick plug and say that Kathy is also a USC Trojan so fight on to any Trojans we do that thing it gets annoying you can talk to my team you know it was actually interesting when the art team first approached us I had no idea that they invested this early in companies I really didn’t I was like I know you guys for ETFs I’ve been an investor for your ETFs I know who you are I see you on Bloomberg every single day I love watching Kathy I love seeing the way she thinks about the market I love that she makes a lot of really big bold choices and I agree fundamentally with a lot of the choices that she’s made and I think that she also gets a lot of heat from the street because she makes really bold choices Yeah but when we started chatting I thought way too early you do realize that we’re a pre-seed to seed company that we aren’t ready to go IPO right now they said no this is our venture fund which is one of the funds under the ARC portfolio and we invest in early stage startups and our thesis in philosophy is that certain pieces of technology whether that’s blockchain or artificial intelligence or robotics that these pieces of technology are going to disrupt that we are in a unique period of time where we are going to be disrupting legacy industries in a way that we’ve never seen before and our whole thesis our whole philosophy as a fund

1:05:33 Is to back disruptors that is who we are and that transcends from their public funds they back disruptors to their venture fund which is in the early private markets and so in sort of going through that due diligence process that is what they dug into so we asked sort of why did they make it but I can’t tell at the end of the day exactly why they did it you can go read on their website ARC Ventures they have a whole write-up about Kino but really what I think it is is that they saw Darryl and I as two individuals that are gritty and resilient like none other that this is our life’s work this is what we’re passionate about and we understand the problem uniquely like nobody else in the business does especially paired together and building a team out that does that and that you know what’s interesting is that one of one of the guys on the ARC team um brilliant he was saying that a couple years ago he predicted this would happen he said he predicted the blend of social and streaming particularly when TikTok first got its ban and then they played some corporate magic and created a couple companies and then all of a sudden it was fine and he said I think that you know TikTok and Netflix shouldn’t merge and when he tweeted that a couple years ago everybody was like why are you talking about man this doesn’t make any sense it’s social media it’s streaming doesn’t make sense and so when him and I really got into it he’s saying you know I predicted this would happen

1:06:56 I saw this coming and you guys are now building exactly what I built a court thesis around years ago and we want to make a big bet in this space because we think that this is an area that not many people are looking to and also that content is actually digital gold in that if you think about it what drives anyone to do anything on the internet these days the video really I mean that’s it I mean you know that more than anybody at the end of the day it is not just pretty pictures it’s not just text we went from a very read write era of the original internet where it was very much text based and you would see little lines of text and that would get you to communicate with others or buy a product and that’s where we started and then we got to a visual medium where we had pictures that drove us to do these then those pictures became slightly animated and then we got to the video and now the video is transcending beyond just a static video that lives you know asynchronously to live streams to AR VR to metaverses and beyond and so going hey we get that you guys know the problem better than anyone we see the headlines we know that Hollywood is about to face a reckoning which it is literally right now and we think that you guys in the tech that you’re building are the ones to meet the problem head on and to truly be a disruptor in this space because of your unique sort of positioning as a founding team and it just fit into their core philosophy

1:08:22 And you know Trojan bias aside when we finally got through and we got the call that they were going to invest I couldn’t have been more proud because what we’re doing is not easy not that building any tech startup is easy but you could build a piece of software that fixes a problem that anybody can plug into their website to make it run faster or some sort of chat GPT to help you find the nearest bicycle shop and you can have a very valid business that’s more simple in nature the economics are simplified the market is simplified there aren’t all these legal complexities there aren’t all these different actors we chose a really big problem and it’s the problem that we love and we’re obsessed with and because of that we needed a really big and important backer in our corner and so finally you know sort of getting to know the ARC team it just made perfect sense and I’m really excited to continue this journey with them because the way they think is the way that we think too which is that technology is built to empower technology isn’t just made to make our lives easier more fun more exciting drive revenues at the end of the day technology is built to empower and it does all those things too but when technology is fixing key and critical problems that’s where the real success for an investor comes from and that’s where the real success for a startup comes from Now Kathy obviously has a background in blockchain and web3 and funny enough you do as well

1:09:51 I do and so what is the future of Kino when it comes to blockchain and web3? Great question So my previous startup was a charity cryptocurrency and I got deep into the web3 communities and that’s actually how Darryl and I met as I kind of mentioned earlier a bit and what we both tapped into was not just that blockchain is a really cool technology let’s remove the whole concept of coins and tokens and even crypto let’s just go back to the basics blockchain which by the way has been around for a long time been around since the 80s it was just an alternative way to build out encryption software to build out sort of your database architecture right blockchain is just a ledger system and I won’t get too deep into it but blockchain has been around for a long time it’s not like somebody just came up with it now the use cases new ones are popping up every single day some of them are incredible solve real problems some of them fun some of them ridiculous and that’s the same with any piece of technology AI is going from the ridiculous to the holy cow that’s amazing I can’t wait to use it every piece of technology goes through this cycle and so with my last startup charity cryptocurrency the point that Darryl and I took away when we met was that digital community is really powerful we reached over half a billion total trading volume and reached over half a million total investors in this little meme coin called Elongate and we were able to donate

1:11:13 Millions of dollars to charity and spin up a team of 50 full-time staff and 200 volunteers worldwide and it was one of the most impactful experiences of my life because our whole mission from day one was to create this viral cryptocurrency that the fees would then go directly to charity so imagine if you just reinvented the US dollar and every time those taxes went you knew exactly where it was going and it was actually solving world hunger and disease and building wells and fixing homes and all that what a concept what a concept knowing where our taxes went yeah yeah what a great concept yeah that’s a future product to be built tax software that actually lets you know but it was a really beautiful community that we built and we had hundreds of thousands of people on telegram and reddit and discord and twitter and instagram and you name it and it was so cool to see how invested how impassioned they were around this cryptocurrency because it was all about doing good in the world and we had a lot of fun and we were posting memes and all that and so when Daryl and I sat down and we thought about Hollywood we said hey we met through this digital community around this cryptocurrency and when we think about Hollywood who has some of the best communities in the world filmmakers artists have millions of fans worldwide theoretically they have all that social capital to then be empowered to deliver their film to mass audiences and target you know individuals

1:12:31 To come and watch their movie theoretically they have the pieces of the pie to then go out to market in a way that’s way more efficient than running hundreds of million dollars billboard ads but then when we sort of dove deeper we don’t think they don’t have the tools there isn’t a platform built for that kind of a model the platform is built for this old model which is go create in a very gate kept there are literally gates at studios spend a lot of money producing spend a lot of money marketing keep the fan at an extreme arms length that’s why we call them stars because they’re distant the Hollywood Hills are distant keep them really far apart and in that way that allure is going to drive people to spend the premium that’s not the case anymore my little sister who’s much more Gen Z than me we were having a chat when we first found the company and she said you know what I like influencers more than movie stars they seem like real people they eat their cereal on live streams in front of me I like them they seem real movie stars ah I don’t really care about them anymore and that was kind of a light bulb moment for me and I thought I don’t think she’s entirely right I know some influencers who are very inauthentic that’s just humanity generally but it is that Hollywood’s lagging in that authenticity game in that engagement game and that’s why the engagement was the final E of sort of what we were tapping into and so for us looking at blockchain

1:13:47 As a piece of usable technology has been a really interesting journey and so we actually then thought about how can we facilitate best in class technology that continues to drive our core mission of equitability through efficiency and engagement it’s that last E there’s a missing piece to our puzzle and so this has been pretty under wraps, stealth mode, whatever you want to call it we’re about to release a reward system to the app so most people have credit cards and with your credit cards you earn points American Express for example I can earn 100 000 points and theoretically spend those at Delta for a cool flight or maybe redeem them at Nike for 10% off or just use those for some cash back whatever that is that’s been around for a long, long time that’s never truly on scale been applied to any streaming platform that the more I watch, the more I earn and so we had this idea of when we create stickiness that’s the tech term for just keeping people coming back to your app really being a cool app and having people go I just want to use you in my daily life what would be a really cool way to incentivize people to keep coming back to Kino?

1:14:53 Well, what if we were awarded them for starting their film and TV journey with us that I’d go to Kino to Discover because they’ve got this infinite scroll that feels like TikTok and their For You page what we call Discover allows me to then discover a really cool new film or old film I click watch now and I pull it up on my TV Kino on my TV, Kino on my phone it’s interactive and now it’s not just the easiest place but I’m seeing all these cool points start to rack up on my account because I’ve just been watching movies on Kino and I went to the premiere and I asked a question and I signed up for the giveaway and I shared it with my friends and I tried this new thing called a movie playlist and the list goes on well that’s cool for us as an app because that allows for us to then have a consistent user base but it is giving to that user base and saying we’re going to reward you for being a consistent user on our platform and for inviting your friends and for showing up for our filmmakers and for supporting our films that are on the app we’re going to reward you for that and that’s going to allow for us to have exponential growth as a company because we are giving you those rewards in a way that none of the major players do and so then we thought okay how do we build best in class technology?

1:16:00 And we sit down with our CTO he’s the guy that built TSA PreCheck by the way so talk about somebody who knows how to build really deeply complex infrastructure and architecture and if we think about that we could just build that on a database in a very traditional web2 way or we could go back to sort of the roots that Darryl and I came from which is this discovery of digital community and how blockchain facilitated so much of that and we could say could we apply that to that user experience? And the question we always ask is does that improve or does that reduce the UX? With everything blockchain or if it’s just a widget or a button doesn’t matter API you name it will that improve or reduce?

1:16:36 And we dug deep and we thought this actually is going to improve the user experience and the question always is why? Why will it? Because what blockchain does is actually allows for interoperability which is really cool that’s just a fancy word for I can take it from here to here I earned the points on the Kino app and I was able to go spend them at the Nike app right that’s a great use case I watched a really cool movie on Kino I watched five really cool movies on Kino I was able to earn a thousand Kino points and then I was able to take them over at Nike and I got 10% off these cool limited edition shoes that only I could get because they were sort of related to a film premiere on Kino whatever you name it that’s just a quick example interoperability is the future of the internet and that’s not me saying that we have some extremely cool partners some of the biggest corporations in the world that have been working on this for a long time and so I started to see signals from the venture sort of world from the big corporate world that a lot of people were actually in private building out blockchain systems for different user experiences one of the most sort of exciting ones was loyalty was how do we continue to facilitate incredible fan user loyalty through blockchain and there’s a lot of really great use cases for that across different verticals of retail to telecom to film and TV to you name it there’s all sorts of ways

1:17:54 That it can be interoperable and I can redeem my points in another system and it’s able to carry that value there’s also really cool ways that you can earn points up to a certain level and then unlock status in the app and now I’m a VIP Kino Plus member and I can actually attend one physical premiere in LA at the actual event and meet my favorite celebrity because I’ve earned enough points I’m you know gotten up to that status there’s also transparency that is embedded within blockchain so AMX points it all comes down to the terms and conditions and if you’re like me and I am a lawyer you don’t read the terms and conditions very often and so you really don’t know at any given time what the value of those points are blockchain allows for you to always know at any given time what the value of those points are because it is a transparent system it’s also very secure so those points built on chain cannot go away just because we as Kinos say well they’re gone now no actually they exist in a way that you custody them and you hold them and you have digital tangible custody of in a way that’s not just a piece of paper living on the internet that says you’ve earned a thousand AMX points so therefore you own a thousand AMX points AMX could theoretically tomorrow just say yep we’ve gotten rid of it and you should have read that in section 25 right that’s just the way the internet works by the way that you’re always signing and agreeing to all sorts of terms

1:19:11 And conditions as you scroll through and click agree because that’s just the way the internet’s been built now so blockchain fixes a lot of those different issues it elevates that user experience and in that way we said yeah let’s build in this web 3 format but to my mom when she’s using the app she’s just going to go oh honey I’ve got a thousand more Kino points and I was able to go redeem it for a really cool purse at White House Black Market I think is one of her favorite stories I should know that better but in the future the Kino point is going to turn into the Kino token correct and it’s going to be a crypto asset that I can trade on the exchange so that is true and that’s what if you are super deep into sort of the web 3 world and I think web 3 is such a misnomer too you know web 3 is yes the next iteration of the internet and really a lot of what we’re doing building from an empower first mindset I think is truly web 3 I think that there’s a whole generation of founders now that are going hey problem, solution here’s the person that I’m built to empower right I think that’s more or less what web 3 is but if we just take the financial sort of approach to it yes it is something that you could stake that you could trade and that allows for it to have its own economies of scale in and of itself beyond just the Kino ecosystem that for a majority of my users I anticipate they’re probably going to be more retail and consumer

1:20:27 And they’re going to just spend it at cool brands redeem it elevate up to certain perks whatever that is and for others there are really cool use cases for trading for staking for earning that go beyond just a simple point system like Amex has and a lot of the language that you use around on the app is going to be very web 2.5 if you will so using the word points over tokens even though we both know that this is something that is built on a blockchain that is tradable across different platforms but to the primary user of Kino I’m here to watch film and TV I’m here to support filmmakers I’m not here to go read 10 pages of a white paper and watch 3 hours of a YouTube video to figure out how do I do this whole thing I want to make it easy and enjoyable Do we know what blockchain it might be on in the future?

1:21:14 I can announce that we do and I can say the only thing it’s a fast one the only thing that I could it is very fast it’s very efficient the only thing that I can tease out is it may or not be related to another primary portfolio company of the Ark ecosystem Got it, good choice Very nice and in the future potentially as a filmmaker I could maybe get paid in Kino points So yeah there’s an element beyond just loyalty that we can get to which is there is a whole complex world of contracts that drive the economics behind any film behind any show and so if I have 2% of the back end another word for royalties of any film I should get paid out of 2% all the revenues going forward but right now there’s actually this very complex structure wherein I have to go through multiple middlemen whether that’s my agent or my manager or my lawyer those are the most obvious but then there’s these folks called distributors and sales agents there’s accountants there’s auditors there’s financial services firms though I could keep going there are a lot of middlemen so you never get your money I mean yes that’s the note under the note as we say in filming TV but I’m a blockchain you can get your money You can and so there’s actually going to Ed Solomon’s Twitter and you’re going to see he’s the guy that was one of the creators of Men in Black successful franchise right he is notorious for tweeting about how he has basically never gotten paid even though Men in Black

1:22:45 Goes to report all these incredible box office earnings but through what we call Hollywood accounting you go and you get this thing it says a billionaire and then it goes Minus, Minus, Minus, Minus, Minus and oh I got 10 cents You owe them money at the end Wow Well so that’s the next story is I won’t say who it is but it’s the creator of a major comedy show on one of the major channels on cable this was 10 years ago he’s a good friend of the team and he told us a story about how it was one of the most successful shows on this channel and the first time he got an envelope he went oh I’m getting envelope money which is kind of a phrase in the industry where if you’re getting envelopes from the from the network you’re getting paid he got it he’s opens it the first page oh this thing made so much money it’s just taken off the next page Minus, Minus, Minus, Minus, Minus and it was we owe you nothing the next time that must be a mistake something’s off the next one came the exact same thing owe you nothing finally he went to his legal team and he said hey guys can you just reach out and see what’s going on I mean I’m the creator I own a significant portion of the show it’s doing really well I can see it and the next one he got it said that he owed I think it was six or seven figures to them he went I created the show what do you mean I owe you now and so yes to your point we know friends in the industry who have been told that they actually owe money even though

1:24:19 The reported numbers are significant you can look at I highly recommend the audience Google Hollywood Accounting there’s a great Wikipedia article it’s a good place to start and you’re going to see examples of how I think it was the Last Jedi the Star Wars franchise was made for 32 or 35 million dollars I believe it grossed 936 close to a billion million so close to a billion worldwide and it reported significant losses the Lord of the Rings trilogy was made for somewhere in the ballpark of 300 million and I think did anywhere from 2.5 to 6 billion I’m forgetting which the exact number is they reported two different ones I believe either way massive loss right now if we get into that we’re not naive in reporting these stats and saying that there isn’t significant cost because like I said before too get out’s a good example made for 4.3 it did I believe 130 million at the box office guess how much they spent in marketing 75 million so it’s not just a matter of well they made it for 30 and they made a billion and then they just kept it all it’s more complex than that however there are all these clever accounting games that are played where entity A under major studio X is going to loan the 10 million dollars to entity B and in that agreement and the debt agreement it’s a 40% interest rate that’s accelerated and so now that 10 million turned into 20 million and so now all of a sudden even though it’s all under the same company we can deduct from your pay

1:25:43 Because we actually owed debt and there’s some really clever systems in place that by the way some of those brilliant lawyers some of the brilliant executives have created not because they’re evil people necessarily there are terrible people in Hollywood as there are in the industry but also there’s some really smart people that go my job is to ensure that our balance sheet that our earnings calls that what we’re reporting is profitability and we work in a tough business which is we create movies and not every movie is going to make money and for better or for worse we can never get to a point where we can with 100% certainty predictive of film is going to be a success because it’s a subjective art form and so ultimately it is up to the human viewer however we are getting to a point today where if you build the right system for example a digital movie theater where you can test and see how did the film perform to us if a film does really well we take our cut of the ticket sales if it doesn’t perform well we take a smaller cut of the ticket sales either way we still operate as a platform because we didn’t just go spend a billion dollars to acquire it Netflix can make better decisions so they lose less money on their subscription basis if you build a better system then you apply AI technology and data analytics and everything else you can actually fix a lot of these antiquated systems because they didn’t have that capacity previously before that

1:26:56 They had to create clever accounting and legal structures to ensure that the studio could keep making and unfortunately the folks who got hurt the most were the little guys who don’t have the large legal departments and accounting teams and all of that and that ultimately usually is the artist who goes you know on this one I guess I’m just this one’s going to be an L even though it was a massive success I’m not seeing it I don’t exactly know why I want to get to a point where that’s just we don’t have to create clever systems we don’t need clever lawyering or clever accounting because the internet’s a big place with a lot of people who really want to support filmmakers and storytellers and want to watch really cool art and if they can find it the economic sustainability can be baked in Okay couple last things AR VR is that really going to be part of the future of the film consumption experience we’ve obviously seen the Apple Vision Pro I saw the demo of it I could see how the movies all over your living room and it looks really cool I had an Oculus a few years ago everybody here bought one and we all used them like crazy for three weeks and then we all stop using them and I was sitting down with some VR guy recently and he’s like yeah it’s just the technology hasn’t got to where you make the choice of sticking it on your head when you go home and I found myself watching YouTube instead and I was like what am I doing?

1:28:14 But I just wasn’t diving into that so I’m not convinced people want to watch films in that way but maybe I’m wrong so what do you see? So I think you’re spot on in terms of where we’re at right now first of all what is it 35.99 for a Vision Pro maybe it went down a little bit I mean it’s not it’s that’s not an approachable price it’s an iMac on your head so that’s what it looks like to me which is cool but that’s what it looks like to me yeah I mean it’s also a little clunky people have headaches so that’s one thing is one can we facilitate mass consumer adoption at this price point? There’s an argument to me that you do have to start at premium that if you think about it the Lisa the original Max they’ll start at a premium price point and then mass consumer adoption took some time but Apple always creates a premium product and then if you look at you know sort of the meta headsets they’re a much more approachable price point they’re in the hundreds of dollars we can compare I think they’re apples to oranges I think they’re different types of hardware they do different things the graphics the you know just the basic you know computer components are different the compute power behind each of those whatever however we have to think about more the social side and the content I think is actually more interesting you could have the most incredible accessible the price point is perfect the hardware is perfect it fits on my head I can barely tell it’s there

1:29:31 I paid two dollars for it it’s the fastest thing ever great if there’s nothing to do on it it doesn’t matter very much it can have the coolest TV in the world but if there’s nothing to watch I’m not watching it right and so part of the problem is that there’s this chicken and the egg scenario in this portion of the industry where we go well the thing’s too expensive and not enough people are buying it so I’m not going to go make content for it because why would I do that if I went and made an AR VR movie and two people saw it I mean I can’t keep doing that forever but then the folks who are making the hardware also are really no hurry to facilitate all of the incredible experiences within the operating systems of these headsets because there’s not a ton of content then applying the pressure to it and that will resolve itself it’s called a cold start problem that’s within any different area of technological innovation but we do have some plans in the future and I will only tease out a little bit as these are definitely being big towards stealth mode but imagine this you are sitting on your couch it’s Friday night maybe you’re with a couple friends you’ve all got a Mediquest or an Oculus or a Vision Pro that you bought for 500 dollars or whatever that price is going to be like your Mac and you all sit down or maybe you’re in your own houses and you’re not together either way you put the headset on and you’re all really excited

1:30:45 To watch The Game 2 with Michael Douglas and it’s a digital premiere on Kino so you pull up the Kino app on your headset There’s Sean Penn in it as well and Sean Penn’s in it as well of course and guess who you’re sitting in between? The two dudes Michael’s on your left and Sean’s on your right and you get to look over and you get to say hey Michael how’d you make that choice? You threw that phone on the floor and it smacked was that in the script? Did you make that up?

1:31:10 And Sean Penn says shut up Quiet watching the movie or you’re sitting next to you know Steven Soderbergh and he’s getting commentary on the entire film I mean what we’re doing with our digital premieres and sort of breaking that forth while I’m bringing the fan audience in is really applicable to AR-VR and we’re not building that yet today into the app and so when you download Kino you can download it on your mobile device and on your smart TVs and of course you can access it via the web on any browser. However, I’m really excited as a final or as a future not a final a future milestone of ours is to get to that point and we are working on some beta versions with some really cool producers to come out in the next 12 months say 12 to 24 to go start testing that the only thing holding us back is back to that original problem where I go I don’t have an urgent need to go to market with it right now because there’s not enough adoption on the hardware side but also as a company we want to step really boldly forward where folks have stepped back and right now there’s a lot of really cool stuff being created in artificial intelligence and that’s all the hype and that’s all the buzz and if I hop into any call with the venture capitalists I know that that’s going to be one of their first questions is how are utilizing AI we are but what I get really excited by is that is one area of innovation what’s really quiet right now are different areas like blockchain

1:32:36 Like AR-VR those were some of the hottest things in the industry of technology a couple years ago that’s what everybody was talking about all of a sudden that’s gotten pretty quiet a lot of founders and investors have gone to this area I love that because that allows for us to play in an open space being the experts in the team that is obsessed like nobody else and to go hey we’re going to boldly step into these two critical areas and build out some technology and when everybody else looks over they’re going to go holy cow they’re so far ahead we can’t catch up and that’s going to allow for us to facilitate the most incredible fan experience because we do have a little more time to do the R&D to really get to that point so when I think about both our rewards system and our future use cases of expanding beyond mobile and smart TV and actually going to headset we’ve got the time to build the best in class product to work with our partners to understand the critical problem points to not just throw together some AR-VR premiere in an app but actually understand hey producer what’s this going to look like on set how do you bake this into your process so that way you can offer a really cool film like you used to do with blu-ray you know you had to sort of create file formats that could be utilized for that well this is the new version of that and it’s 10 times more complex so how do we bake that into your process that’s the way that we think about

1:33:50 The future of the company going forward but today our goals our KPIs are clear we are focused on user adoption of our mobile plus TV dual screen experience you might come in for a digital premiere because your favorite actor is going live on Keynote to show it and you’re probably going to stick around because it feels a little bit like TikTok and you’re scrolling and you’re sitting there and you found a movie to watch and you went you know what that’s the coolest new way to discover film and TV that’s on Keynote do I put it on my smart TV and I watch the movie and then I also play with the app yeah I’m watching the movie I love it that’s a good question well so let me first tell the story that I teased out before how did we come up with this so and it was actually funny because multiple multiple members of my team my co-founders we had this experience David our CTO Darrell my co-founder and CEO Brad our CMO we each sort of had this same experience and I brought it up on one of our one of our founder calls and I say hey guys I’m gonna tell you a story this is real it was happening to me I was last night I was on my couch I’m sitting right here here I need a prop for this because this is you know Hollywood of course right okay I’m sitting on my couch I’m right here I was on my phone I put it down I go you know what I’m going to watch something on Netflix tonight I pull up Netflix one of my apps Netflix has great shows you can argue that

1:35:06 They used to have better shows and whatever we can always have that argument with any streamer at the end of the day they are the leader in streaming in the library platforms they’re the leader so I was like I’m sure I can find something to watch on Netflix they’ve got some of the most content they had the biggest user base clearly so I pull it up on my TV on my smart TV I go to the homepage they have the recommended list none of it was anything I really wanted to watch the posters didn’t stand out I mean I scroll down I’m like action movies no I love historical dramas no I’m clicking through finally I was like oh that poster looks cool it looks like some sort of cool World War II film I love historical dramas maybe I’ll learn something clicked on it watch the trailer I’m like no scroll down comedy clicked it watch the trailer no I look down it’s an hour later so what do I do?

1:35:54 Well I pull up my phone and I go to Instagram or I go to TikTok and I start scrolling and guess what pops up in my feed? A scene from Good Will Hunting which I’m embarrassed to say I had never seen before and it was the bar scene and I was like this is so cool look at Matt Damon the lines they’re so it’s so witty the scene is incredible I had no idea I’ve been know this movie of course I want to watch it now and I thought what if I had a button that was right here as I’m hooked I’m in I’m sold and you didn’t have to tell me an ad didn’t tell me a billboard didn’t tell me the film spoke to me of itself because an algorithm pushed it towards me because I knew that I probably would like it what if I had a button that I could click that said watch now and I could pull up my TV and then I was like why don’t we just build that so I went back to the team I started CTO and he said yeah man I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately and I’ve been thinking about how is it that people discover anything today and it really is you talking to your barber it’s somebody else or it’s I saw a scene on social media or the final and most rare is I saw a billboard or I heard a radio ad but that sort of died so it’s really either I saw it on social or I heard it from a friend but if I do one of those paths and I see it on I’ve still never seen Goodwill Hunting because I thought I don’t know how to get from TikTok to wherever it is because you got to Google it and then you Google it

1:37:20 And you find it and it’s like either rentable for a million dollars or it’s on some platform that I’ve ever heard of that I don’t have or it’s on a platform I’ve heard of but I don’t have it and I don’t want to pay for it or I just don’t have it downloaded there’s so much friction there and so we said what if we created a frictionless discovery experience and that’s where that sort of TikTok meets Netflix blend comes that’s currently under development if you go to the Kino app on any mobile device you’re going to see that we have that infinite scroll we’re currently building out that watch now button that takes you either to the movie directly hosted on Kino or it’ll take you to the movie on another platform but that’s really that hub of discovery so in that way in the future you’re either coming because we have the coolest new film and it’s an interactive premiere and in that way I’m helping the filmmaker break the noise of the internet and the noise of my own app because on scale there will be hundreds of thousands of films in the Kino ecosystem so how do I even break that noise even though that’s a smaller ecosystem than the general internet well this live from here and getting the cast and having a community first approach works and then second how do I ensure that folks can keep discovering my film because it’s 20 years later and unless somebody brings it up in conversation there’s a chance it will never be remembered well that’s what an algorithm

1:38:32 Is really good at understanding your preferences and delivering recommendations that it’s not going to get right 100% of the time but there’s a high chance that in that moment you’re likely to go yeah I want to watch it and you click watch now and you pull it up on your smart TV directly from your Kino app and there you are watching and then the interactivity is always being built into the app so for a live premiere you can interact on your phone you can pull up a running commentary you can pull up cool ways to win props from set we have the ability to build out a merch store so if you want to buy limited edition merch around a film all of that for the live premiere and then for any of the legacy films that are in the library there are all sorts of interactive features that we’re thinking through building out but those are to come I think there’s probably enough of all that’s cooking over at Kino here today yeah I love it can’t wait till that gets live and I love all these ideas and I can’t believe no one’s building it yeah and I’m so glad you guys are thank you how do I download the app as a consumer and then also how as a filmmaker can I do business with you so that’s a bit of a complicated question in that we are on multiple platforms right so if you’re on a mobile you can go to iOS the app store to go to go download if you have a smart TV if you have an Apple TV go to the Apple TV app store if you have a Fire TV go to the Amazon app store

1:39:49 If you have a Roku TV go to the Roku app store if you’re on another device that is Android operating system for TVs we support that there’s very few that we don’t support right now in terms of smart TV so when in doubt probably you’re going to be on one of your smart TVs just type in Kino K-I-N-O K-I-N-O type in Kino and you’re going to find the app right there on your smart TV or go to www.kino.studio and you’ll see how to watch you can click that and it’ll walk you through how to get the mobile device and how to get the smart TV device okay and I can watch I can interact on my browser through that website as well yeah you can also if you just want to pull up your Mac and go to www.kino.studio.com you can do that as well although the best experience is definitely mobile and TV okay nice and if I’m a filmmaker do I go to the website?

1:40:34 You do not partnerships at Kino.studio you can reach out to that team and the partnerships team can get in touch and we’d love to review any film that you have or if you are a filmmaker who already has a distributor or a sales agent you can have them reach out to us get in contact and set up a conversation with the partnerships team are you limited to have you’re limited to certain amount of projects you can really look at a quarter or a month that is a great question the answer is yes there’s only something that we can actually launch on the app and that’s always going to be the case you know the digital premiere is the flagship product and that is the top of the app itself we will be building out a self-service aspect where you could host your own digital premiere that’s not directly hosted by the Kino team that’s in progress right now we’re building out a whole dashboard for filmmakers so that you can just do it on your own in the future Amazon has something like that yeah they have a self-service and so we’re building out our self-service as well but right now we are hands-on with every single digital premiere because we’re learning directly from our filmmakers every time which is like needs five projects a month yeah yeah so I would say that we try to do one or two a week that feels like the amount for our team right now that is most sort of effective and efficient as the team scales that number will increase but we always say reach out to us

1:41:54 Because we’d love to review your project we’d love to dive into your film or show and see if it’s a fit either for digital premiere which actually is a new legal watch window we worked with our outside council who’s one of the best in the business and created it’s called LVOD and there’s some content somewhere in the internet where I explain what that is and I can explain another time but that’s a whole new legal way to exercise your rights to your film and drive revenue or this new frictionless discover feed is TVOD so most people understand what that means if you’re a filmmaker both are ways to drive revenue to your film and our team is great at sort of figuring out how we can fit within your flow so if your dream is I want to make a big splash at the physical theater I want to make a great deal at Netflix and I want to go be on Tubi someday and that’s the plan that you have Kino can still fit within that in fact we’re going to augment and amplify your success through all of those different windows I love it Yeah I’m sold Austin I’m all in Sold again Yeah I’m sold again exactly This is super exciting and it really you can tell that you guys have a serious passion for this and ultimately that’s what really matters you guys really care and think probably daily hourly about the problem and only that problem you’re not thinking about your quarterlies or your streaming or your next blockbuster movie or the lot in Culver City you’re really focused

1:43:13 On this problem and if you do that I’d like to think the innovator will win and you’ve got great backing huge it’s a huge vote of confidence from Cathie Wood and you guys are making things happen and again God bless Bitcoin is a great project but also you’re doing horror films and all these other things so it’s exciting to see this and I want to use it as well so I guess you’re scratching your own itch which is a great way to create technology and it’s fantastic so yeah I like to say I inadvertently created my dream job is you’re right at a law school I was fortunate to get offers from some really cool firms one of which is our outside council on the technology side and they’re an incredible group but when Daryl approached me I was just like man this is exciting and I don’t know I don’t know if I can say no to hopping on this train and him and I working together and figuring out the problem and it got to a point where we got one of our first investors in the door who by the way sold his company to Apple for Vision Pro so he’s on the Vision Pro team so that might mean a couple things here and there but I won’t say anything else and I went this thing this is happening isn’t it so I called up the firm and I said am I crazy should I go found this and I said no man go do it you can always be a lawyer traditionally you can’t always find sort of what’s that niche that you can just exercise your full weight of passion and your full weight of expertise

1:44:37 And your lived experience in one way and really just give it your all and so my first love was film and TV my second love was sort of that economics and finance well when I got my masters and my final love is law I really am a geek at the end of the day I mean I love hitting the gym I love playing sports but I also love working out my brain and so for me the combination of all three and understanding that they’re actually very intrinsically combined when you watch a big movie you watch Oppenheimer you’re not thinking about how every single frame has been reviewed by a legal team how there are complex economics how there are tons of contracts that there is a whole creative life form that can’t happen without both the law and the economics and so understanding that has allowed for us to tap into that problem source and creatively think of solutions that to your point if you’re just focused on your quarterly earnings call or your one feature to build out for the company it’s hard to be able to elevate and so I feel very fortunate and blessed to be in this position that every day I get to wake up and I’m living my dream which is I am working at film and TV I get to exercise my cool economic side of my brain and my legal side of the brain and actually go I know that this is tangibly solving a problem for hundreds of thousands if not millions of individuals out there in the world whose livelihood depends upon this industry continuing and I think should

1:45:55 Because storytelling is important for humanity I do think that is an essential function of who we are yeah very very very important yeah super excited to be on this journey with you can’t wait to see where it goes next and we’re here we’re all in men so here to support you along the way really enjoyed this conversation I think a lot of people will as well and can’t wait to jump on the app and start using it amazing thank you Brian all right my pleasure thank you man