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October 25, 2006
Glowria Executes On VOD In Europe
French startup Glow Entertainment, the company behind the Glowria brand, has quietly been establishing a foothold in the European video-on-demand market. On the back of early deals in its home market, it is now crossing borders.
Glowria Easy On The Eyes And Easy On Users
Back in early 2005, we met Mihai Crasneau, founder and CEO of Glowria via our trusted industry insider Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz who was helping to raise capital for Glowria at the time. The two talked at length about Glowria's plans to deliver VOD in Europe.
It was a bit surprising to us at the time, considering the firm was established as a DVD rental play and VOD had fallen way, way out of favour. But we listened and filed it in our aging but reliable grey-matter-database.
MIhai Crasneau ModestlyBudding European VOD Business
That file was flagged "executing" the other day as we learned (via vpod.tv's coverage of the ETRE conference last week), that sure enough Glowria's CEO was doing what he said he would. We like to see execution, so here's a summary of what Crasneau has achieved.
- The online DVD rental business is still Glowria's core business, but it also has completed several acquisitions of smaller players in Germany and France
- It claims to be the Number 1 DVD rental provider in France and Number 2 in Germany.
- It's reaching breakeven in its home market (according to Crasneau).
- Acquired distribution deals with major Hollywood and 100 local content firms for several Euro markets. Users can buy or rent full length movies.
- Offers video on demand services as a white label service to Neuf-Cegetel's broadband customers and FNAC, the large retail chain and ecommerce vendor in France.
-Glowria has 80 employees and has done it all with a mere €12.5M in venture capital from French VCs.
The founder said he leveraged the DVD relationships with studios to create the VOD service. The next step is
Germany. Crasneau expects by 2008 to generate more than 70 percent of revenue from VOD.
VOD is one of those highly anticipated markets that has been "emerging" for more than ten years. So it feels kind of strange to actually see it happening and in such a low-key way. We first wrote about VOD in the mid-nineties, a time when players needed to buy bedroom-sized video servers, expensively acquire the content, get it into the right format for storage and delivery, develop software to manage the whole thing, and even if they had the cash and resources for all that, they faced the dilemna of the missing broadband pipes to deliver the hard-won digitized streams.
We asked a couple of our trusted VC experts about the "space", as they call it. From Paris to Munich, the sentiment is bullish and they all have different opinions on where the real money will be made. So with all that in mind, we'll be keeping our baby blues peeled for more signs of life in the VOD market in Europe.
Link- Mihai Etre Video
Posted on October 25, 2006 07:58 AM | Posted to Broadband Services | Permalink
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