Benzinga | Oct 26, 2020 09:07AM EDT

Cinedigm Reports Its Portfolio Of Paid Subscription Streaming Services 142K+ Paid Subs, Up 45% During First Half Of FY20

Cinedigm (NASDAQ:CIDM) today announced its portfolio of paid subscription streaming services has grown to more than 142,000 paid subscribers, up 45% during the first half of the company's fiscal year that began on April 1st, 2020.

Cinedigm leverages its user base on free streaming services to grow its base of paid memberships. The company now reaches more than 15.2 million ad supported users per month, up 238% year over year, from 10 live streaming services. The company has 15 more ad-supported services signed to go live within the next twelve months.

"This rapid growth illustrates the success of our 'freemium' model," said Erick Opeka, President of Cinedigm Networks. "Users can discover and enjoy our free networks across hundreds of millions of devices, and with savvy marketing and advertising we convert the most passionate of those viewers into long-term paid subscribers who want commercial-free and exclusive content. Cinedigm is one of the few public streaming companies that generates users, subscribers, and revenues from all major streaming business models. At this level, we estimate a stream of over $4 million per year in high margin subscriber revenues in addition to our digital advertising and licensing revenues."

Leading the way in subscriber growth is Cinedigm's flagship network CONtv, up 78% in paid subscribers since April 1st. This growth was driven by a relaunch and expansion of the service on Vizio and Roku devices, the integration of more than 10,000 digital comics from last year's acquisition of ComicBlitz, a comics subscription service, and a successful subscriber bundling deal with e-book and audiobook subscription service Scribd.

Cinedigm's other premium services also saw significant subscriber growth since April 1st, with Viewster Anime, a Japanese Anime-focused service up 39%, Docurama, a premium documentary service up 24%, and The Dove Channel, a family movie service, up 21%.

"Our goal is to more than double our paying subscriber base to 290,000 subscribers over the intermediate term through expanded distribution, marketing and new content deals for high-quality programming," said Opeka, who added: "We also plan to continue to execute our accretive roll-up strategy of profitable streaming companies like our acquisitions of Viewster and Film Detective where we can leverage our extensive expertise, proprietary technology capabilities and distribution muscle to quickly increase monetization and viewership while cutting operating costs."

Cinedigm plans to further expand its bundle partnerships in the coming months and will also expand the successful strategy of launching its networks on cable, satellite and telco platforms. The company launched on Cox and Cox Contour on August 18th, joining Cinedigm's other scale platform deals including Comcast Xfinity, Dish Network / SlingTV, The Roku Channel, Amazon Channels and more.

The company also plans on international expansion of both free and paid services in the coming quarters, and will also explore the creation of new subscription streaming services from Cinedigm's library of tens of thousands of film and television titles.