Voddler VoD raises another $3.5m
February 9, 2010
Swedish film streaming site Voddler, still in beta, has won another $3.5 million in funding from Eqvitec Partners and brings the total amount invested to million $20.2 million.
To coincide with the announcement, Voddler is also extending its beta programme to Norway. Voddler already has 420,000 users in Sweden, and the plan is to extend that to other countries in Europe by the end of this summer.
Voddler says it has more than 30 patents covering its delivery technology, which is built on a P2P distribution system to speed up delivery. “But it's very safe for the movie companies,” says the spokesperson. “We can take back the segments of content stored with our users at any time.”
Voddler currently distributes films from 15 studios, including Disney, Paramount, Miramax, Columbia, Dreamworks, Touchstone, MGM and Sony.
Lots of initial interest for the service from both users and the industry, then, but still the main challenge for Voddler will be monetising its content. The company says it is mulling over a subscription model, but is still “uncertain” how that will work, or when it would get put in place.
Currently 95 per cent of the content is free to view, with those films running with two to four minutes of pre-roll ads. The other movies are offered on a per-day rental model costing between SEK19 and SEK37 to rent. Most of the content is in English with a choice of languages for subtitles.
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