Blackpills has landed. Thursday, May 4, the streaming platform launched in 15 European countries, as well as the USA and Canada. What makes this streaming service different is that it specializes in short series designed for viewing on mobile devices.
For the last year, Deezer founder Daniel Marhely and Patrick Holzman, formerly of France's cable television Canal+ and cinema website Allocine, have been working on building Blackpills with the support of French entrepreneur Xavier Niel. This streaming platform, which specializes in content designed for watching on mobile devices, is billing itself as a whole new digital media studio, creating, producing and screening short-format series.
Blackpills' series have 10 to 15 episodes, which are a maximum 15 minutes in length. The aim is to respond to new mobile viewing habits, especially among users under the age of 30.
Blackpills is reaching out to under-30s by creating series about them and their lives. It is available free of charge -- since the service carries ads -- for the iOS and Android mobile operating systems. A premium version is expected to land in a few weeks. To appeal to the broadest range of users, series on the site will be filmed in English with dubbed versions available in four languages and subtitles in eight, including English, French, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, German and Arabic. Asian languages are expected to be added in 2018.
Luc Besson, Louis Leterrier and Zoe Cassavetes line up for the launch
Blackpills launches with nine series, some of which are entirely new and exclusive. To kick-start its offer, the platform has joined forces with some major names of the movie world. Luc Besson, for example, brings "Playground" to the platform, a show based on young assassins being trained in a specialist school.
The platform will have content spanning all genres, from comedies about thirtysomethings in the midst of an existential crisis ("Pillow Talk" and "All Wrong") to the secret life of a teenage badass ("Junior," directed by Zoe Cassavetes) or a police drama investigating an attack on a young girl in a coal mining town ("Pineapple"). Other series already available to watch include "Tycoon," a thriller directed by Louis Leterrier, and "You Got Trumped," a dark comedy satirizing what Donald Trump's first 100 days in the White House might be like.
