Exeest, a new digital platform that connects buyers and sellers of premium film and television content, made its global launch today. The hub is currently available to content owners, rights holders, distributors and buyers across the world.
Co-founded by Matteo Petrelli and Shabbir Aqeel Danish, Exeest is based in New York, Los Angeles and Rome, Italy. Petrelli, a content creator and tech entrepreneur, serves as the platform’s CEO while Danish, a former Global IT CFO for NBCUniversal, is CFO of Exeest.
The new platform gives buyers including streaming services like Netflix and Amazon as well as television networks instant access to curated content. The intent of the platform is to serve as a sales tool and a way to streamline the acquisition process. Buyers can contact content distributors directly through the hub or via the agent repping the content. Unlike Vuulr -- an online content marketplace for film and TV rights that launched globally in 2020 -- Exeest does not force financial transactions through the platform.
The platform will launch with content catalogs ready to be bought or licensed from distributors including Caracol, Cinedigm, Complex Networks, Epic Pictures, Keshet, Propagate and Telemundo. According to Petrelli and Danish, the service hub is intended to create a frictionless sales process and will provide a full asset management tool for agents, distributors, rights holders and producers to manage their catalogues.
“Our platform can expand the reach of sales agents to content and territories previously too arduous to address,” Petrelli said.
Danish said Exeest is addressing the current market’s disintermediation of buyers and sellers, diversity of content being offered and a growing desire to make transactions happen at a faster pace.
The B2B hub resembles a modern streaming service interface and provides studio-level encryption security that ensures content is protected with watermarking, DRM, and two-factor authentication.
“Sellers can display their content on Exeest and they can upload their libraries,” Danish said. “They can send screeners directly to buyers and they can create screening rooms.”
Through the service content sellers will receive detailed screener analytics with buyer engagement including real-time notifications for page visits, content views and percentage of the content watched.
For content buyers Exeest comes equipped with an AI engine that learns buyers’ preferences to provide insights and title recommendations specific to their needs.
The Exeest platform is free to use for buyers. Sellers are charged a “nominal” fee to list their catalogues, which allows the company to earn revenue. Seller fees range depending on factors like amount of titles being uploaded.
Danish says that in addition to SVOD services, digital channels, broadcaster and cable companies will be among the buyers using Exeest.
The platform launches with thousands of titles for purchase.
Exeest’s Advisory Board includes Bob Sauerberg, former president and CEO, Condé Nast; Diane Tryneski, previously EVP/CTO, HBO; Alison Moore, CEO of Comic Relief and former NBCUniversal and HBO executive; Andrew Marcus, former president and COO, Critical Content; Karl Kilb, former general counsel, Bloomberg; Das Dasgupta, former chief data science officer at Viacom; Salil Mehta, former president, FoxNext Games, and GM, Digital Media for the Walt Disney Co.; Lauren Hurvitz, previously CCMO at Turner, Tom Cosgrove, former COO Discovery Channel; and James Turcotte, former CIO at NBCUniversal.
