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After three years of providing online film viewing services for web property owners, digital film distribution startup YEKRA continues its swift evolution. Last week, the company announced several new developments, including the launch of YEKRA Theater, its first self-service, custom digital movie theater, as well as a partnership with the faith-based Dove Foundation.
These advancements follow a rich company genesis. YEKRA was conceived in 2011 as a service to give independent filmmakers autonomy over the distribution of their work. Prior to its inception, its founder and CEO, Lee Waterworth, was hired by independent filmmakers Foster Gamble and Kimberly Carter Gamble, who sought a distribution model for their film that would give them full control and independence from a studio.
“We brainstormed together and we came up with a concept that became the foundation of YEKRA,” said Waterworth. The commercial performance of the film, entitled Thrive, far exceeded expectations.
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“We thought: How do we take that success and start building a platform that would enable independent filmmakers, distributors, and studios and producers to basically sell content online, direct to consumer, in a way that suits them the best? That’s really the mission of the company.”
Shortly after, the startup gathered a collection of films and developed a system called AffiliateConnect, which would allow anyone with a website to publish a movie from YEKRA’s library by embedding the company’s video player within an article or blog entry. “Our focus became on the key issue, which is how do you go beyond that and how do you put content in front of people who really care about it? How do you make the discovery process easy?” said Waterworth.
The development of YEKRA Theater seemed a natural next step. The company’s newest feature provides publishers with both marketplace functionality and a player, allowing visitors to browse, buy, and watch within the same interface. It also comes complete with SVOD and AVOD capabilities (where brands own their own content rights), personalized branding to match a site's user interface, and loyalty or reward program integrations. After embedding the YEKRA Theater on their site, website owners can curate the content and titles they offer to more effectively reach their audience.
To meet the demands of its increasingly robust features, the company is expanding its content offerings. After securing a partnership with The Dove Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to increasing the film industry’s faith- and family-friendly fare, YEKRA launched the DOVE Theater, a collection of titles available for streaming and download with an accompanying in-theater store. “It’s about taking faith- and family-friendly titles...to as many places as possible online that look for that approval and making it very easy for them to watch and associate with a brand they know and trust,” Waterworth said.
Waterworth plans to maintain the momentum the recent product rollouts have generated. YEKRA has partnered with other brands on developing theater or channel functionality and continues to hone its eponymous Theater and introduce more content. Concurrently, the company is in the process of implementing its mobile strategy.
With each development, Waterworth feels YEKRA grows closer to revolutionizing the way films are made available to the public. “We’ve completely reversed the [conventional film distribution] model. Instead of pulling people to destinations, [we] go out and create as many new points of digital distribution as we can, as quickly as we can.”
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