Top programs and First Channel films, such as Paris Hilton's Searchlight, Night Watch, Day Watch, will be freely available on the
ivi.ru video site. Already signed a license agreement.
For the first time, the main TV channel of Russia legalized its programs on the Internet, Kommersant
writes . Previously, they were distributed only through torrents.
The unpopular ivi.ru site (it was launched just a
month ago ) now has every chance to compete with the leaders of the video content market in Runet, that is, projects like Smotri.com (29% of the market), Video@mail.ru (26%) , Rutube.ru (21%) and Yandex.Video (12%). These are statistics on the volume of video advertising, according to J`son & Partners Consulting.
A new project ivi.ru is planning to capture 20% of the video advertising market in RuNet in a year, which will increase from $ 5 million in 2009 to $ 9-10 million in 2010 and will grow by 40-50% per year for at least the next five years.
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The ivi.ru project is owned by Digital Access, which in 2009 was acquired by the foundation of Leonid Boguslavsky’s ru-Net Ltd. By the way, this fund also owns a large stake in Yandex and other well-known Internet projects.
Now Digital Access sells video ads on the Smotri.com, Video@mail.ru, Rutube.ru, and other portals. The catalog contains more than 9 thousand hours of content, the copyright holders of which are TNT, STS, MTV, MUZ-TV, and film company. Central Partnership, Amedia and others. Recently Digital Access launched its own video portal, ivi.ru, but its attendance is still not high: the average daily audience is about 70 thousand unique users, for the first month of its operation, the site was visited by 1.2 million people.