Whoah, it's awesome to see this posted here in my native habitat! I've spent the last 8 years of my life building MUBI as Co-Founder and CTO (even longer than I've been on HN!). Please AMA.
Only discovered MUBI today via HN. Looks great! There is one annoyance (which I also have with Netflix): I live in Denmark, but I am not fluent in Danish. Not all your movies have English subtitles though, so how can I watch anything else except the three languages I master (English, French and Dutch)? Are licensing issues preventing you from offering English subtitles on all your movies as a default?
In short, yes. Language/subtitle licensing is a mine field. Often times the small local distributors we deal with don't acquire anything but the local language rights, so it becomes almost impossible to go upstream and get the remaining rights even though we may well have the assets for use in other countries.
We are doing what we can to move the ball forward on this issue industry-wide, but historical rights arrangements are working against us here.
This is also our major issue with MUBI. We love the film selection, but we live in Germany. When we want to watch a French film, its overdubbed in German.
Netflix is also odd about this but usually we can get German subtitles for any film and choose the audio with original language. Ideally we should be able to select any language that there are available subtitles for. Why restrict it by region ?
The producers likely have distribution agreements on a by-country basis. So, for example WB cannot distribute <movie> in Germany because GEMA has the rights. But GEMA didn't buy the rights for the English subtitles. I imagine technically WB could then sell subtitles rights for <movie> in Germany but it would be a pain because maybe those subtitles were done by <subcompany> for licence in America and Oceania... etc.
Me too! But my problem is slightly different. I'm learning Spanish and would like to watch Spanish movies with Spanish subtitles to improve my understanding.
In Kodi player, I can connect to subtitles sites and have it automatically downloaded. Why don't you do allow it? I know that it is a muddy copyright terrain, but would be a Good Thing for more advanced users.
I live in Germany, but I don't speak German. Well, not enough to watch films or feel comfortable browsing the site. Took me a while to find the browse films link as a result.
I was wondering about changing the interface language, and more importantly, whether the film selection will be heavily skewed towards German films (and perhaps without subtitles??).
...I guess I could use a proxy to access it from the UK, but it feels like I'd be trying to trick the system.
First time I hear about MUBI and I'm in film and tv business. I've heard about Fandor. I have a question - what do you see your (MUBI) future like? Still independent or as an integrated 'thing' in netflix, IPTVs (as a channel), etc..?
This is a great question and one that probably merits a long-form discussion.
One thing I'm certain of is that aggregation of content directly in a way as to provide the holy grail of streaming everything is simply never going to happen because rightsholders are unwilling to cede control of distribution to a powerful entity like Netflix or iTunes (hence Netflix's pivot to focus on production and exclusives so they can control their own destiny).
But it's also clearly not viable for the majority of rightsholders to do their own distribution, at least not yet. As much as streaming technology is commoditizing and device manufacturers outside of Apple/Android are converging on web-based platforms, it's still a massive effort to build a good UX and make it available everywhere that counts. There is clearly huge opportunity for platform makers like Apple to capture value by enabling distribution like they did with the iTunes Store and App Store. There is also opportunity for new middleman strategies like white-label apps, or transparent aggregation that would be something akin to channels-within-an-app type of setup
At the moment there's so much churn happening and so many different strategies that it's very hard to predict what the landscape will look like in 5-10 years. The only constant is that cable companies are being rapidly disintermediated, because they were overly reliant on their monopoly status, and have no talent in either production or UX design so I don't see much chance for them to survive.
If I had to sum my thoughts up it is that the apps of today are replacing the channels of yesterday. The most successful channels are themselves becoming apps (eg. HBO). In the past channels were distributed either as broadcast or as cable, but there is not such a clear distribution pattern for apps. Already apps are available on numerous devices, all with their own idiosyncrasies, sometimes overlapping with other platforms and sometimes not. Platforms that were relevant just a few years ago (Boxee) are completely gone, and new platforms are launching every day. I agree wholeheartedly with Tim Cook's assertion that the future of TV is apps, but I don't have a clue what the platforms will look like in a few years. MUBI will continue to be one of those apps, mostly independent (although we rely on platforms so there's always a degree of cooperation involved), certainly not integrated exclusively into a larger offering ala Netflix or IPTV.
Hi. I just now learned about MUBI, through this HN post. First and foremost, it looks great, and I will almost definitely be signing up tonight when I get home.
Here's my gripe ... am I doing something wrong, or do I have to create an account just to find out the subscription prices? If it's not just my user-stupidity, don't make me register just to see the prices.
I don't have a question, but I'd like to thank you. I've been a MUBI subscriber for a month or two now and love it. You've a subscriber for life here.
My best experience was when I fired up my MUBI app in my holiday home (different country in Europe) expecting nothing (like with Netflix and Amazon film), only to find another excellent selection of films.
Discovering that rather than punish me for trying to use MUBI in two countries, you actually gave me twice as much content, was a beautiful surprise to say the least. Thank you.
We've put a hold on new platform development for most of this year in order to move towards a standardized API and tighten up our QA process, so no plans for this year. I can share that the top two platforms which we are seeing interest in are Roku and the new Apple TV.
Also does "Android" support include direct (not tab-cast) chromecast support, or is that another thing entirely? (I'm not home now so I haven't tried this myself.)
Never heard of MUBI before this post. Browsing some lists, it makes a ton of sense. I'd probably sign up right now if it were available on AppleTV.
I don't really want to add another device to my entertainment center and not interested in watching anywhere but the TV (except on the iPad when traveling). We've got AppleTVs and a PS4. Tossed the Rokus.
Not expecting you guys are hurting all that bad for my $40. But figured another vote/story couldn't hurt.
We have a PS4 app, it's just not launched in the US yet due to the administrative and policy distance between SCEE and SCEA. It will be coming soon, but in the meantime, if you can get yourself a UK or EU-based PSN account, you can download the app through that and it will work fine anywhere in the world (provided you purchase a subscription through the web, the PSN store integration is a bit flaky and I don't want to promise that would work from US shores).
It seems that the major focus of MUBI is rapid and ongoing curation. Do you guys have a defined process for how you do this so that you achieve a desired distribution of films or is it more down the the individual curators?
One other thing I wonder about curation of media in general is whether you think your customer base is willing to try new things because they trust you rather than simply trying to find something that is known to be similar to what they liked in the past? Do you think trust based recommendation system overcome the bubble effect that similarity based systems fall in to?
This isn't my department, so I can't comment on the details of processes, but there are teams working on content acquisitions, and there are individual curators, and there is also an algorithm for non-curated countries. We definitely look at the data for analytics on the past programmings to understand what worked or didn't, but it's more as a guideline for the curators who have significant latitude to program things in a culturally relevant or timely fashion (eg. programming The Iron Lady the day after Margaret Thatcher died).
As I mentioned in another thread, we did try the data-driven recommendation engine approach and did not achieve great results. We definitely believe that the human element of our editorial voice leads to a greater level of trust with our subscribers, and enables us to introduce hidden gems and lesser-known films to a wider audience.
Neat site. I might consider signing up for it as I'm rather sick of Netflix and don't use it much anymore. Having a short list would certainly help the endless flicking through crap on Netflix. OTOH, it's still competing with every other film out there, as they're one click away off a Torrent site.
One complaint on the homepage that'd usually have me close right away, if this wasn't on HN:
Why do you ignore the user's language presence and send them a language based on a guess from their IP? My OS is English, my browser is in English and only ends en-US and en in the Accept-Language field. Yet because I'm traveling in Central America, I get content in a language I'm not keen on. With no obvious way to change back to the correct language.
Changing back to my US IP, it still continues to show stuff in Spanish. I've gotta clear history for it to reset.
This is a really annoying thing to do. Did this actually test well? That is, do users often send the wrong Accept-Language header and appreciate the site second guessing them? And those users, do they not like having a quick option to change the language back to the one they requested?
Why exactly a 30 day rotation schedule? To me it puts a lot of pressure on the subscriber to view a particular movie within that timeframe. Sometimes you're too busy or on vacation and you don't have enough time to view all the movies you're interested in. How about a hybrid model that combines the 30 day streaming service with a 3 month VOD service? Or a plus version of the regular subscription that offers a 90 day window for a slightly higher monthly fee?
On Android you can download a movie and view it offline for 7 days. What are the obstacles to offer something similar on other platforms?
30 films fits nicely on one large screen or scrollable list. It's also worked out quite nicely for licensing as it allows us to squeeze stuff in to short licensing windows, and just generally softens the negotiations a bit.
We definitely have a million other ideas about how to expand this model in many different directions, but I won't comment on any of those yet as its all speculative at this point. For now we are trying to get people familiar with the model and improve the design because it is a bit unintuitive at first.
As far as downloads, we only offer them on Android and iOS for the time being because those are the two platforms that it was feasible to implement easily. We are always looking at the possibility of bringing it to other devices and even the web, but so far it's too much effort for our small engineering team.
Our ability to reach our audience is strong, just not in the US because we don't do marketing here yet. If you are in the UK there is a much greater chance you've heard of us. This is commensurate with the quality of our library in the UK where we've signed much more significant content deals. In the US our library is not where we want it to be yet, so it's a slow burn while we improve the core product and get the deals in place. One mistake we didn't do that you often see with video/music startups was to raise $10M and blow it on content licensing before we had the audience. We're ratcheting up step by step, and we're lining things up for a bigger US presence very soon.
Thank you for the explanation, and distinction regarding your approach. The release of the Paul Thomas Anderson film (and getting publicity) definitely tracks with what you state herein. My hunch is your strategy really did avoid "putting the cart before the horse" by way of prioritizing. I sincerely wish you well in pursuit of audience and content licensing in the most effective ways possible.
Why do you no longer parter with Criterion/Janus? Was it just more profitable for them to move to Hulu? I signed for The Auteurs a few years back but didn't follow through with t.
Essentially that's correct. We partnered with them early before we had a user base, and they were just trying to dip their feet into streaming. From our end we were not able to provide the audience to monetize their films, and from their end the economics of streaming were a completely different world from what they do with DVD, even for a company with the content and reputation of Criterion. We are still close with them, and hopefully we can do something again in the future.
UK is our biggest territory and best film selection, however we do stream globally, so if you subscribe you can take MUBI with you wherever you go, albeit with a different selection in each country.
Plex is currently not on our roadmap (though I do run a plex server at home).
MUBI's curatorial approach stands in sharp contrast to major streaming services
like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, which have amassed large libraries and deliver
personalized recommendations based on algorithms. MUBI's human-curated selection
takes a lot of that choice away, and Cakarel thinks viewers are better off
for it.
"Think about your own Netflix experience and how frustrating it is — how
long it takes you to find a film that you want to watch," says Cakarel.
"It doesn't work. It categorically doesn't work."
While I get what they're saying, I still wonder if it wouldn't be interesting to try out some personal recommendation algorithms/systems on their user ratings dataset. (After reviewing their T&C, I've actually crawled through their data (more like, their backend exposes neat API endpoints that are not part of any formal API (officially they don't have one)..) some time ago, and am still curious to just try out some stuff from scikit-learn.
Maybe someone has thought/done the same? When contacted, the MUBI team (IIRC) basically said they're not interested in that as of now.
Little known fact, but we did start out with the goal of amassing a large library, and we even put significant effort with some former Netflix-prize winners in building a recommendation engine.
The first big problem, which you see on Netflix as well, is that a recommendation engine really falls off in efficiency when your selection is thin, and the original dream of streaming every film is never going to happen because of a price squeeze from the content side (hence Netflix moving into production and focusing on exclusive content).
The second, perhaps bigger problem (particularly for our audience) is that there is only so much metadata that you can pump into a film database that will tell you categorically if someone wants to watch it. People like to be delighted by discovering a new film, not because it is somehow akin to 20 other films they liked, but because of where they are in their life now, and the contemporary meaning of that film. I know curation has become possibly the most annoying buzzword in SV circles lately, but it has been our approach since 2007, real actual curation by human beings—not algorithms that purport to be "curatorial" on a pitch deck.
Regarding your second point, I really understand this position - fair enough (re. zeitgeist and personal point in life of someone looking for films and rating films, etc.) I just wonder if it wouldn't be interesting to spend some time looking at recommendation systems which are not just simply about intersecting users' votes and presenting something "just what you've recently liked." But this would be more of a playful experimentation which is more hobbyist in nature, for sure.
What, so like, "as an early thirty-something who just found out you're about to become a father, you may enjoy films X, Y, Z"? To really get people's life chapters and such you'd have to have massive metadata about them beyond the scope of a video service. Google/FB could do it, though.
It was more a comment about how considerations such as this make collaborative recommendation systems precisely less useful. Regarding rec.systems that move beyond naive rating/like intersections between users (such as e.g. Jaccard similarity index), I think there could be interesting algorithms developed that make use of assigned/curated item tags together with collaborative filtering/recommendations (e.g. something that last.fm has considered (or has been considering) - there's an entire field of research for just music recommendation systems.)
I would pay $10 a month for a recommendation engine only. I'm able to find the actual video files easily enough. (And I often do so, even with Netflix has it, as Netflix's player sucks, quality is iffy, subtitles are spotty, etc.)
> "Think about your own Netflix experience and how frustrating it is — how long it takes you to find a film that you want to watch," says Cakarel. "It doesn't work. It categorically doesn't work."
I don't really think this describes my Netflix experience well enough to be "categorically" true.
Netflix recommendations work really well for some people, not so much for others.
Even after using it for a few months, I found the success rate not much better than just trawling through imdb new releases lists. Yet a lot of my friends say they the recommendations are pretty spot-on and usually something they enjoy.
Netflix recommendations have essentially never worked for me. It occasionally identifies a category I might be interested in, but essentially drops the ball on actual content. I think the best film I've seen recommended in a genre was Charlie Victor Romeo.
There are still some excellent movies (Primer, Metropolis, Ronin, Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn't There, etc...), particularly classics. And the documentaries are probably under appreciated (Genius on Hold, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, both Cosmos, etc...). So, someone is probably paying attention. I have to randomly search for specific things from time to time though. Sometimes sites like https://reddit.com/r/bestofnetflix help.
One of the bigger problems I've noticed is that some movies tend to be cut short though. It's almost never a director's cut.
In reply to throwaway7767, who I can't seem to reply to directly, I think recommendations depend how thorough people are about using unique accounts for each user in the house.
I ended up just creating an Everyone profile after being asked once too often why Netflix wasn't keeping track of where people had got to in a series, and the recommendations now are utter garbage, as you'd expect when looking for the intersection of Breaking Bad, Period Dramas, and Fireman Sam. I have a feeling they'd be much better if each person's tastes were segregated.
The www.netflixprize.com data from 2009 is quantitative evidence about whether the recommender works (it is much better than random). I'm open to the idea that a curated collection might delight more people, but in my experience and based on this data, I can't agree that Netflix's algorithm is useless. Personally I find it's the unavailability of streaming content that makes Netflix frustrating.
* index every piece of data properly, for easy reference to (a) films, (b) user ratings (per user per film) and (c) users (seeing the latter as simply sets of ratings on films)
* then run a few collaborative recommendation algorithms on the indexed dataset - basically taking things from the scikit-learn python package and running them
* then see (naively and heuristically) whether any recommendations for myself and for a friend who's interested in this make sense
* then do a more proper machine learning dataset split into "teaching dataset" vs. "testing dataset", to see if any of those algos can predict what films a particular user would be interested in watching and how much they'd like them
* and then to move onto something which may (I think) provide insights for this particular dataset, such as e.g. attempting to classify users into clusters, to see if there are any more homogeneous clusters of users, with some users acting as connecting "bridges" between clusters; I'd start with the kNN algorithm here, for example
* it would also be interesting to attempt to classify films as well, and see whether some curious non-intuitive/non-stereotypical clusters emerge (something beyond well-known genre categories, etc.) I'm not sure what I'd be looking at in particular, but basically this assumes that we really do trust the collective ratings of users. The latter may be very problematic - for starters, I'm quite sure it'd be difficult to attempt to "normalize" the different ways users vote (4/5 rating is one thing for one person and another for a different person - of course collective averages may help here, and that's one of the things with this MUBI community in particular that drew my initial attention: overall (subjectively and with bias) it seems that the overall community rates films quite responsibly and with a degree of (let's say) signal.)
* visualize classified clusters, include sliders which alter parameters for classification (including kNN's simple "n", but beyond that, too), etc.
What is that line in the Pink Floyd song? "I got thirteen channels of shit on the tv to choose from..".
Netflix is beginning to resemble that. I mean I love Netflix but its becoming a little hit-or-miss. The alternatives (proprietary content from HBO Now) are becoming more alluring.
Anyway I just signed up a year's subscription with MUBI. I haven't had a chance to see "Junun" yet, but I just recently watched "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" by Mira Nair. I was blown away by the quality of the Music/Soundtrack in that.
I don't know the precise style of music in the movie (Qawwali/Hindustani???) but I have never heard anything so amazing.
I used to use mubi back in the Auteurs days but it was frustrating that the selection was so much smaller in the UK than the US (I recall it being around 10% of the films; anything that had had a mainstream cinema release was missing). They still seem to have that restriction, but they've taken the 'show me what's available in my area' filter away.
I can understand why they'd do that, but it feels a bit off being asked to sign up for a service where the films advertised on the front page aren't available.
"This film is not currently playing on MUBI but 30 other great films are. See what's NOW SHOWING"
Why? That was for a movie that I could pay to watch but they don't let me watch it. I wonder how they could be in business. Still they are so it's probably a sensible choice that I fail to understand.
We recognize the confusion this causes in the UI, but indeed there is a valid reason for it. Since the beginning we have streamed globally, but a different selection in each country. Since we have editorial and social features on the site as well, we can't just have pages appear and disappear from the site like Netflix does. All these pages exist as connective tissue between users in different countries (which becomes even more important with links shared on social networks). Even if social features and film discussions don't interest you, clicking Add to Watchlist tells us you want to watch that and helps in our acquisitions and programming process.
So the movie I wanted to see is currently available in another country or has been available in mine but not now. The UI could be tweaked to explain that and not (negatively) surprise customers but it seems that you already know that. Probably you have plans to improve it.
Your approach is similar to TV, a list of programs to choose from but not the full catalog. Given these terms I'm not sure I'll ever be a customer but this business model seems to be serving you well so I can hardly criticize it.
The niche is something like: A quickly browsed list that includes no teevee series, no films called Foo 2, nothing offensively bad, but some good films, some classics, some that are just easy on the eyes. It'll never be mainstream, but it's great for middlebrow teevee haters like myself.
I've been really impressed with Netflix's automatic suggestion algorithm. It frequently guesses my rating correctly and shows me movies that I do actually find interesting.
I have had a completely different experience. I like well-made movies, and am less picky about genre. It seems like if I rate a movie well, they suggest a poor movie of the same basic formula.
Wow. They routinely recommend bad for me. I even tried going along with a lot of their suggestions. Spent a day trying that out. It sucked. Now they show up in my "Continue Watching" list which requires going into preferences to remove.
Now, Netflix doesn't even pretend to recommend good stuff. The "Recommended For You" sort gives me items that Netflix itself suggests I will rate 1-star. I must sort by rating to see the better stuff. And even then, most of the top items I've already seen. I cancelled.
I used to pay Netflix (before streaming) while not receiving any DVDs. The recommendations were good enough for me to decide what to download. Not so much now.
Greenlight has widely been seen as a failure in the gaming community though. Steam users have been sold on hype and greenlit games only to get unfinished buggy messes all too often.
I used Mubi a long time a go, but somehow forgot about them - probably due to their limited selection in Germany. The service itself always impressed me though - a service obviously run by true enthusiasts and aficionados.
Until quite recently there was a forum and such things, which you could use for free. Ninetysome per cent of the users never paid anything, and surprisingly many didn't know that Mubi offered any paid service.
But yes, nowadays I think it would make more sense to make the price tag for the paid service more visible.
Yes, giving the website a quick glance now it looks like a web shop/streaming portal: products and user reviews and I wouldn't even have expected you could create free account, much less it to be useful.
I subscribed to MUBI for a while, and just never watched the films that were available. Some are quite risque for a dad with two pre-teens at home. But overall, I just don't watch movies at home. There's always something else to do. I hope they stay in business long enough for me to get to the point that I have time to participate.
> "We didn't even know [he was a member] because he was using an email that was not descriptive, and he was not using his real name," Cakarel says.
This implies that the company looks through their subscriber rolls for famous film-industry personalities, which is an unusual thing to glibly admit to.
Let me add to that. Starting from my own profile page at mubi, it took three clicks and a bit of scrolling to get to https://mubi.com/users/59108 — people know each other.
> MUBI has spent years cultivating that audience with a selection of artsy, obscure films that don't usually appear on Netflix or Hulu. (It originally launched under the name "The Auteurs," before rebranding in 2010 as MUBI — a play on accented pronunciations of "movie," and after a city in Nigeria.) On Monday, the titles available on the company's US site included Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970 classic The Conformist, and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, by Chan-wook Park. Occasionally, it features more mainstream movies like Sin City, currently available on the French site, though the majority are far more obscure. A new title is added every day as another drops out, meaning that only 30 films are available for streaming at any given time.
In defense of Netflix (not that the "Goliath" in this comparison needs defenders)...but "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance" has been available on streaming Netflix for, as far as I remember, the time that I've been a customer, which was basically when streaming started. "Mr. Vengeance" is the first in "The Vengeance Trilogy" that includes the more well-known "Oldboy" [1] and "Sympathy for Lady Vengeance"...I think the entire trilogy has been on Netflix for years (including the regrettable American remake of Oldboy, but can't fault Netflix for having it...)
Even as Netflix's blockbuster selection has faded (with the ending of the Starz deal, and in comparison to HBONow)...I've never had a complaint about their selection of the most well-known and recent foreign indies. "Let the Right One In", "The Hunt", "Force Majeure", The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy...though sure, they could always have more (and obviously, I don't know enough of the foreign scene to know all of the gems that they don't have).
But I imagine the problem for Netflix isn't that they do a shitty job of curation...but that the deals end up not being financially valuable to them, as it was in the Starz case. Ang Lee's movies ("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "Lust, Caution") were long-time selections, but I've just noticed they are no longer available for streaming.
edit: if you liked Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is definitely worth checking out. But whereas Oldboy was entertaining on top of being emotionally extreme...I'd argue "Mr. Vengeance" is much more of an artistic achievement, but at the cost of being "entertaining". In fact, I get a little ill at the thought of re-watching it, even though I own it on DVD.
[1] http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/oldboy-2005 -- Ebert's review here is so glowing that not only did it get me to seek out Oldboy, but it changed the way I think of foreign movies in comparison to Hollywood.
Have they added the Korean language version of (the original) Oldboy to Netflix or is it still just the dubbed version? I got tired of checking. Funny was just thinking about this last night when their recommendation engine threw Drunken Master II at me and the only option was English dub.
