Latest update April 1st, 2015 6:34 PM
China’s iQiyi Joins Venice Film Festival for Online Screening
BEIJING, August 21 - China’s leading video website iQiyi will screen some of the 71st Venice Film Festival’s films online.
It is the first time of Venice Film Festival to cooperate with a Chinese video website, while its partner, iQiyi, has worked with Hong Kong International Film Festival and Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF) for online screening before.
Each June, moviegoers and film critics sometimes got be very depressed when SIFF was short of tickets. iQiyi’s online screening gives them access to the missed films.
This could be a win-win business. Several films got lots of viewers on iQiyi and brought some revenue for the company. Next year, SIFF is going to have a longer list of films for online screening.
The cooperation between iQiyi and international film festivals will bring more benefits to the film industry than the book revenue alone. Before this project, reporters of video websites just reported film festivals, but now the emerging project helps them overcome the time and space limitation of traditional film festivals and spread excellent overseas films which are not available in the Chinese cinemas.
iQiyi needs to buy film copyrights before screening the films online, which may pose a challenge. Taking SIFF as an example, it did not disclose the line-up until just a few days before its opening, so iQiyi had to choose which films to buy in a very short time.
This time, iQiyi will attend several events of Venice Film Festival including its opening party, film forums, market gatherings and selective film screening.
iQiyi might expand its cooperation with other important film festivals like the Cannes Film Festival if it wants to contentiously develop this model of online screening. It can be predicted that the film festivals and video websites launch closer cooperation in the near future.
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