Connections

Combining the best practices of finance, science and tech, and the entertainment sectors, Los Angeles-based Cinelytic has a bold goal: help entertainment industry professionals maximize content success, using machine learning- and AI-driven tools to provide insights throughout a film’s value chain.

Founded in 2015, Cinelytic’s online suite of platform services runs the gamut when evaluating filmed content, offering clients project management, talent and film analytics, predictive forecasting, and financial modelling, in real time. Its co-founders, bringing deep backgrounds in rocket science, high finance and film production, founded the company after seeing a lack of data insights in the filmed entertainment industry, along with few of the business tools that were available in other industries.

“Cinelytic is the only platform that is a ‘one-stop shop’ combining industry-leading data and proprietary analytics at the user’s fingertips via an easy to use, cloud-based project management system,” said Tobias Queisser, co-founder and CEO of the company. “Cinelytic reduces executive’s time spent on low-value, repetitive tasks and instead focuses on generating actionable insights for packaging, green-lighting, marketing and distribution decisions in real time. Tasks that often took days are now executable in 30 minutes.”

Cinelytic helps both major studios and independents make faster, smarter decisions, by providing data and analytics in an integrated project management system, with talent analytics that pull in data-driven insights within minutes; film analytics that can run multiple film comp scenarios (with per-territory and per-distributor analysis); real-time predictive forecasting that covers both the box office and post-theatrical distribution models; and integrated financial modeling, enabling users to understand the ROI potential of any project.

The goal: improve how business is done, not change it outright, Queisser said. “The entertainment business is a creative endeavor: it is often creative instinct coupled with experience and relationships that bring projects to life,” he said.

The platform makes the most of the capabilities of machine learning and AI, to help compliment how the industry makes decisions. That technology allows Cinelytic’s platform to recognize patterns early in the process and provide quick, efficient and methodical guidance at any stage.

Basically, Queisser added, it amounts to rocket science technology being made available for entertainment, to improve staff productivity, and by using real data to provide probabilistic scenarios to forecast and build budget, marketing and sales estimates.

Part of what makes Cinelytic tick is its partnerships, with the likes of Gracenote’s StudioSystem, TMDb and Variety Insight.

Those partnerships power the data behind the company’s system, eliminating the need for a user or analyst to spend any time determining the viability and credibility of that data.

“Ultimately, our aim is to make our clients more successful,” Queisser said. “For example, Cinelytic can support independent companies during the film financing phase with deeper insights to facilitate a better dialogue with investors. For studios, it’s more about making actionable insights readily available on demand to improve workflow speed and decision making. Whether independent company or studio, every user case may be different in its application.”

Next, Cinelytic will look to add new verticals to its product line, and is actively pursuing opportunities in TV and video games, to establish itself as the global leader of decision support in the entertainment industries.

“The platform and its technology adds fundamental business analysis to the equation and is most powerful when combined with strong creative instincts and experience,” Queisser said. “Cinelytic facilitates the decision-making process all the while bringing more transparency into the conversation.”