BERLIN — Outside of some key markets, few may have heard of Viewster. But the Zurich- and Berlin-based VOD service has more than 20 million unique monthly users across four of its operating countries.
At this week’s Berlinale (Berlin Film Festival) and European Film Market, Viewster chief content officer Robert Franke appeared on on a panel and was searching for new content to add to the platform.
He tells Beet.TV the company wanted to avoid going up against big-spending Netflix, Vodafone and Vodafone for premium video rights, by targeting a niche of millennials with “geeky, nerdy content”.
That includes a healthy dose of Japanese anime animation. “We buy content from Japan and air it on our platform an hour after it has been aired in Japan,” Franke says.
“Everything which is not anime, we buy very selectively and say, ‘Is it something which would match with our target audience?’
“It has to be popular. We don’t take old, unpopular catalog content. We do very thorough content research. We have a system which puts all those KPIs in to perspective… then we know if content is something which works on our platform.
