Voddler Launches Subscription Service - Goes Halfway
Voddler, a company sometimes referred to as the Spotify of movies, is beginning to offer a subscription service for 7,9€ a month (or 79 SEK). The advantage for subscribers, or Voddler Plus members as the company refers to the plan, is that for a monthly fee they have part of the Voddler catalogue available to them at no extra cost. You read correctly - part of the catalogue. The downside is that you still will have to pay for some movies. For customers - this isn't as good a deal as it sounds.
Voddler Hits 1 Million Users
We have been keeping track on the progress of Voddler for a long time at Arctic Startup and perhaps the best possible mention came when we talked about the movie streaming service hitting past 300,000 user mark back in 2010. The service has now scaled to over I million users as 13 year old Phillip became its 1 millionth user. This is quite an achievement given that the movie streaming service had removed the need for invite based registrations and opened for all in 2010.
The Sampo 3D Animation Film Aims Big
The Finnish film industry is looking more and more lively nowadays. The international successes have not been that many in the past, compared to e.g. the Swedish movie industry focused on strong story telling, like the recent Stieg Larsson's Millennium Saga. However, in the past few years the Finnish industry has been showing signs of much increased international ambitions. One of the most widest distributed Finnish films ever has been the animation Niko & The Way to the Stars, published in 2008.
The next big take seems now to be The Sampo, a feature length 3D stereoscopic animation film based on the Kalevala mythology by Northern Digital Film Company NDFC Helsinki, founded in 2006.
Pushing The Frontiers Of 3D Movies - Stereoscape
The Nordic countries, and especially Finland, have been strong in graphical software development. This has partially been reflected in the relatively large and successful gaming industry. Another area where this expertise has now had positive network externalities is the animation and movie industry in the form of 3D. For those unfamiliar with 3D movies, Wikipedia defines the technology as the process of including the illusion of depth perception. There's an interesting Finnish player in this area that has attracted quite a bit of international interest in the recent months.
FilmGator - The Last.fm For Movies
I've been longing for a service like Last.fm, but for movies, for quite some time already. To my surprise, I had an e-mail waiting in my inbox last week regarding such a service. It's called Filmgator and it's still in beta, but the service works in the way you'd expect it to. FilmGator is a Finnish startup, based in Helsinki. The service aims to answer the question: "What are people watching?"
