L. A.-based Cinelytic wants to help Hollywood studios use AI to improve their decision-making and forecasting as they launch their streaming services.
While Hollywood giants have plunged into the streaming wars with massive vaults of content, they still face a yawning consumer data deficit as they try to catch up to industry leader Netflix. Cinelytic wants to help them level the playing field.
The L. A.-based startup has compiled a broad array of data to fuel its platform that helps studios understand in real time how choices ranging from scripts to actors could impact a project’s risk profile and revenue potential. While Hollywood studios have been making bets based on box office data and audience surveys for decades, they still have nowhere near the audience insight that Netflix has at its fingertips.
With subscription-based streaming set to become the primary way consumers discover and experience Hollywood’s content, traditional film and TV producers will eventually be awash in new forms of behavioral data. Studios are starting to turn to AI to help manage and analyze the data in a way that can actually drive more effective and profitable decisions.
“We launched over four years ago with the aim to bring best practices from different industries like finance and tech to build what we call a film business intelligence platform,” Tobias Queisser, CEO and cofounder of Cinelytic, said. “I went into the film industry for two years and I thought there was lack of data and insight to improve how value was assessed.”
Of course, the creative side of filmmaking has been transformed by the technology and graphics behind special effects and the use of drones for filming. But Queisser said he found that the business side remained stuck in the past. He had previously worked in finance, a world governed by real-time data analytics, before trying his hand at films, where he found himself looking at basic Excel spreadsheets and attending meetings over several weeks to make decisions.
Frustrated by the antiquated methods, he teamed up with cofounder Dev Sen, who had worked at NASA for 15 years building risk assessment models. They eventually brought in Christian Monti, a former studio executive at Paramount and Warner Brothers, to be COO.
Together, they built a platform that offers a handful of different features connected to different parts of the filmmaking process, from greenlighting a project to distribution and marketing.
