Cinemoz unveils plans for Arabic video viewing on Facebook

Lebanese tech startup Cinemoz announced Thursday several landmark partnerships, as well as a sharing agreement with Facebook.“We built a groundbreaking, patent-pending, social feature customized for Arabic and global users to make video viewing completely interactive,” 27-year-old entrepreneur Karim Safieddine, the man who launched Cinemoz last year, said during the Arabnet summit in Beirut. “This was achieved through close collaboration with Facebook and their Open Graph feature,” he said. A strategic content partnership with ART Networks (Arab Radio and TV Networks), the region’s largest video library, will give Cinemoz privileged access to 10,000 titles, with over 1,000 to be released by the end of this year. In addition, its new “Remoz Control,” will allow users to share snapshots and video scenes straight from the movies they’re watching in collaboration with Facebook. “This means it is no longer a small startup,” says Samer Karam, founder of Seeqence, the startup accelerator that hosts Cinemoz. “It has gone from seed funding to early stages [of a self-sustaining company].” The website, http://www.cinemoz.com, offers a diverse collection of over 250 Arabic language pieces, including TV series, full-length feature films and documentaries as well as short films. With their high populations and Internet penetrations, the main targets of the business are Egypt and the Gulf Cooperation Council countries. As a new startup, Cinemoz was able to secure a $200,000 loan from Kafalat, a Lebanese financial company that assists small and medium enterprises to access commercial bank funding based on their proposed business plans. They expect to be self-sustaining by 2014. The online Arabic entertainment provider, which started with 100 views per day, is now seeing 1,000 hits per day and says it is expecting 10,000 by August and a million by 2016. The company is one of two Lebanese tech startups presenting at this year’s Arabnet conference. The conference hosts a series of lectures and workshops featuring IT experts and entrepreneurs. Other Cinemoz announcements included its selection by leading video delivery network Brightcove as the network’s case study for the Arab world after close development between the two companies. The startup also announced the beginning of a campaign in which users and fans can pledge donations to the company to help fund its growth. This funds raised will finance the production of a documentary on the Cinemoz team over a six month period, to be called “Almoz Famous.”