Reel Cash is the Netflix-MoviePass Mashup That Flips the Script on Hollywood Economics

Business Wire 17-Jul-2018 10:10 AM

Reel Cash will bring much-needed disruption to the entertainment ecosystem starting with paying audiences for what they watch online

Eight technologists and 4 industry veterans with over 300 films between them have come together to solve some of the industry's toughest challenges with one technological innovation - an asset-based digital currency called Reel Cash. A video trailer at the company's website explains the service.

"Judge Leon's decision in favor of the ATT (NYSE: T) - Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) merger was due in large part to the valuable asset that streaming studios like Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) have and the Majors don't," said Reel Cash's co-founder Jeff Carr. "It's the same asset that Helios and Matheson Analytics MoviePass (NASDAQ:HMNY) believes will save their company - viewer data." Reel Cash's innovation will give the world's estimated 400 million streaming services (SVOD) subscribers a way to monetize their own anonymized viewer data for REEL tokens or hard currency; something that up till now they've been forced to give away for free to Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and every other SVOD service.

Rez Khan, Reel's lead developer, described how the program works. "We've built a virtual marketplace where subscribers of SVOD services can receive payment when their anonymized viewer metadata is aggregated and viewed by our data customers."

"We pay out 28% of what we collect from studios or other corporate clients to our subscribers. We retain 22% for overhead and put the remaining 50% into our film fund," explained Carr. That income stream between the world's content viewers and content creators will kick-start a series of innovations that could solve serious industry pain points according to entertainment attorney Bianca Goodloe, one of Reel Cash's founding partners. "The benefit for filmmakers financing their productions through Reel Cash, as a one-stop-shop," according to Goodloe who has been legal advisor to over 150 films, "is that they would avoid having to cannibalize individual distribution rights and territories of their productions through heavily discounted pre-sales, and thus avoiding costly multi-party financing fees and related transactional and legal costs, in order to finance their films. Moreover, by Reel Cash being the production's financier and distributor, the interests of the filmmaker, net profit participants and Reel Cash are aligned, in the best interest of the content."

Joel Lambert, another founder and the star of Discovery Channel's Manhunt said, "my friends in China and Eastern Europe really love this concept because of the almost insurmountable challenges they face in getting onboard productions in the West."

Other Reel Cash founders and advisors include prolific movie producer John Baldecchi, action designer and director Mike Smith, producer and technologist Alexander Ferguson, and J. Allen Dove, the CTO of SpotX.

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