The Head of Sales & Distribution at the independent distributor spoke to ttvnews at LA Screenings about their vast catalog of content, from classic productions to new premieres for the international market.
*By Luis Cabrera and Fernando Moreno, from Los Angeles
Owners of a vast library of content, spanning classic titles and newer premieres, independent TV and film distributor Multicom Entertainment Group made its way to LA Screenings to find new partners for its varied collection.
“We own several libraries, so we own a lot of content, over 1000 titles”, said Niloo Badie, Head of Sales & Distribution, Multicom Entertainment Group. ”This includes catalog content, classic TV, made for TV movies, old theatrical movies, horror films… so that consists of the majority of our content”.
One of Multicom’s main assets is taking these classic productions and bringing them back to life. “We function as archivists”, she explained. “So when we buy content we look for the best elements we can find. Sometimes there are film elements but at the time only an SD version was made, so we have a whole setup where we do full restorations and bring a movie, that maybe was a cult favorite, to the market where it has never been seen before”.
“An example of that is one of the earliest movies that Reese Witherspoon made called Freeway. We have this beautiful 4K restoration of that film now. Another is The Lost World, a classic TV series that we’ve been able to restore just now thanks to AI technology”.
“But we also have new titles that we bring on”, she continued, highlighting productions such as Tokyo Giant, an amazing baseball story, Sk8Face, a skateboarding documentary; and a drama called Shelter in Solitude.
In terms of partners for this vast catalog, the executive explained the group is “flexible”, searching for alliances with multiple types of platforms and territories. “We are very flexible because we own our content. We own the rights worldwide. Because some of the content has been distributed in Latin America in the past, we own a lot of Spanish-dubbed content. And as a company we’ve always been very digital-first. So we embraced the digital evolution in the US and we are doing a similar thing internationally, being on board with ad-supported buyers well in advance of other companies. We were one of the first to partner with Pluto or Amazon Prime. We have relationships with all of them and we seek these types of relationships internationally”.
