Star Media: Coproduction as a main strategy and focus on its OTT LAVA

Riashyn, who was happy about the return of physical businesses, highlighted the participation of Star Media in a large number of meetings and deals that were launched during the market. 'We took advantage of the whole event: we attended the panels, the streamers keynotes, the trend conferences and we also attended the Canneseries, which was very interesting for Star Media', he stressed.

Among the novelties that the company has underway, Riashyn mentioned that they have 7 ongoing projects: The first, Royal Hat, a Russian / Israel co-production, which will be a historical series; he also mentioned the project The Silence, in co-production with the Croatian production company Drugi plan, distributed by Beta Film, and online in the Ukrainian streamig service  Oll.TV., and another one with a title TBA, that will be co-produced with Serbia & Russia, and will be about Yacht boat world & stories.

The executive highlighted that co-production is the first in his business strategy, he said: 'we tend to find more and more co-production projects before maybe we were trying to keep 100%of the rights of the creations, but now we are more looking for new partners. In Cannes, we also had talks with Pickel Film in Italy, also talked with Eccho Right, Beta Films, among others; Always looking for new models and new distributions ways'.

LAVA and its digital participation

'Thanks to global streamers now the market is open to for WW possible hit contents, even non-English spoken ones can find success', explained Riashyn, who also said that company strategy to release a series or film is made it first on her OTT and then on his YouTube channel, which capitalizes 30 million subscribers, 1 billion views per month and over 6000 hours of programs.

Its OTT LAVA platform was launched recently in Russian and is preparing to debut in the American market, and Latin America is its first focus. 

The service counted with label provider OTTera, who provide access to series and films dubbed and subtitled in up to eight languages, including English, Spanish, French and Portuguese. Also, Riashyn highlighted that the OTT will be integrated within smart TVs in various territories to confirm. 'LAVA will become the place where Star Media will launch the next first series Premiere', stated.

'We want now to extend worldwide as I know that there are 30 million Russians understood people audience to target WW with potentially 100 million - If you extend to their circles of influence(families, friends)', added the exec. The executive also mentioned that they are currently concentrating on dubbing and subtitling their content in many other languages, including Vietnamese and other market languages at APAC, as well as on the development of the "Content Scan" tool to help fight against piracy.