Many video-on-demand offerings suffer from an overweight of more or less current Hollywood blockbusters. The newly launched portal alleskino.de focuses exclusively on well-known and unknown German films from 90 years of film history.
Just in time for the Berlinale, a community of film producers and media companies launched the film streaming portal, which pursues the ambitious goal of gradually offering access to all available German cinema films as part of the “Treasures of German Film” initiative. At present, the majority of films are only available in SD quality, with more films to follow later in HD resolution. The films are currently available in Flash format.
alleskino.de is initially browser-based; the films cannot yet be purchased as digital film files, but can only be borrowed for 48 hours. This is at least twice as long as with other portals that only offer the rental for 24 hours. With prices between 2.50 euros and 5 euros, the rental fee per film for the period is not quite cheap. It is to be expected that many customers will compare the prices very exactly with the DVD and Blu-ray purchase prices or with the rental fee in the local video store.
Subscription model also conceivable with larger film offering
The portal starts this year with 100 to 200 films, 500 to 600 films will be added each year. The initiators hope for public funding for the project and hope for private sponsors. By 2016, i.e. within three years, the project should be profitable. Later it will also be possible to download paid films. Should the film repertoire on the platform ever be so large that a subscription is worthwhile for the users, the operators want to think about a subscription model.
The presentation of the films on the portal already differs from competing portals, in which mostly prominent actors, directors and news from the private lives of the stars are the focus of the supporting programme. The German films are to be placed on alleskino.de in their film-historical context, and special topic sides are to emphasize the common features of the offered films.
With these themed pages, however, the portal is still at the very beginning. The Berlinale themed page on Berlin films, for example, mainly contains text modules that have been copied and pasted from Wikipedia without any reference to the source. The selection of films, however, is already impressive – in addition to classics of German film, the portal also features films that are rarely seen and are likely to be of interest to the classic Arthaus audience.
Support for further platforms is to follow
In their FAQ, the creators of the portal already provide information on the extent to which the service can also be used on smartphones, tablets and smart TVs: “In principle, it is also possible from the start of the platform to play the films on your Apple iPad or iPhone via the browser. Due to their usability with a touchpad, the browsers sometimes have some special features, so that navigation through the platform may be restricted. On Android mobile phones, alleskino is also available to a limited extent. This requires the installation of a Flash plugin, which is, however, no longer supported by Google. However, corresponding plugins are still available on the Internet.
The development of an app for SmartTVs of the most important manufacturers is planned for this year. But of course it is possible to connect your computer to a TV set via a cable and enjoy the purchased film on your TV set via the full screen function of our player”.
The location scout is intended to offer users the opportunity to enter film locations for specific films on a Google map. This takes place anonymously; the locations are then displayed for all users. alleskino.de must practice geoblocking for legal reasons: According to the portal, licenses for films are often granted by different rights holders in different countries. The creators want to make an effort to always be able to show the films worldwide, but sometimes this is not possible due to the complicated legal situation. As a rule, the films are available at least in Germany, Austria and German-speaking Switzerland.