New French ‘independent creator’ SVOD offering launches

SOFA-VoD, a new French subscription video-on-demand service featuring user-generated content, short films and series created by independents who have difficulty securing distribution via traditional players, has launched.

The streaming service, which provides SVOD from €5.99 a month, offers a mix of professional, semi-professional and amateur content spanning genres including documentaries, fiction, animation and more, mostly short-form, from creators that find it difficult to distribute on other sites such as YouTube where discovery is challenging and where finance is hard to source.

The service’s backers say it offers a search functionality designed to help creators to localise their content and to promote local productions as well as to address a public in their own geographical vicinity.

The platform claims to be based on a ‘virtuous and rational’ economic model for independent filmmakers, with 50% of revenues going directly to rightsholders, calculated based on the amount of time users spend with their content.

SOFA-VoD was created by Saint-Étienne-based content creators and brothers Maxime and Alexis Bonzi and two other associates, Guillaume Pissot and Kévin Graillot, with support from Saint-Étienne ‘creative incubator’ Le Mixeur.