KKRS was profiled in The Success Magazine as follows:
Streaming Film Site is Destined for Stardom
Daily Content: Web Exclusive
Published February 26, 2001
By Paul Gallagher
Ron Howard, Steven Spielberg, eat your hearts out.
While you and your partners were forced to yank the plug on your own dot-com dreams, things were popping nicely for Alex Kanakaris, chairman and CEO of Kanakaris Wireless. Not that he’s dancing on anyone’s graves, but it’s always nice to know when a guy’s right.
“Well, we’ve had a lot of skeptics along the way, and it’s sort of fun to knock down the naysayers,” says Kanakaris.
In fact, the 44-year-old admits that such fizzled media sites as pop.com and icebox.com only serve to prove that his site, CinemaPop.com, as well as other subsidiary sites from his publicly traded company (BB:KKRS), have found a better way to survive and thrive.
Since 1995, Kanakaris has been delivering digital entertainment in the form of movies (www.cinemapop.com) and books (www.wordpop.com) to hungry audiences worldwide. We’re talking about full-length features and complete books that can be downloaded or read online on a desktop PC or on a wireless-enabled device.
So, what does Kanakaris know that the big boys didn’t? In short, he says, quality.
(In fact, Kanakaris doesn’t often give short answers. Thoughts pour from him with the intensity of Dr. Pepper rushing out of a soda fountain.)
“There are three things that have to happen here,” he says quickly. “One is acquiring the content, of course. Then, there is encoding the content for the best quality. And the last is getting the content to wherever an Internet-enabled device is.” Upset one element in this delicate balance, says Kanakaris, and your product will suffer.
When the curtain first rose on Cinemapop.com, Kanakaris says he outsourced the encoding process of the films to major players in the industry. Eventually, though, he says he didn’t feel satisfied with the results of the image quality that he was delivering to viewers.
“So, we spent hundreds of thousands with some of the major players to improve what’s out there, and then we offered it as a service to others,” says Kanakaris. “Our company struggled to get the product right, and I think it’s resulted in a lot of nice things.”
Among the nice things that resulted for the Costa Mesa-based Kanakaris Wireless is CinemaWEAR, a proprietary encoding technique that delivers full-length movies wirelessly to Pocket PCs, through the Windows Media Player for Pocket PC.
Another nice thing is that Kanakaris has been able to build a substantial subscriber base for his service—for $4.95, subscribers can pick and choose from hundreds of feature films.
“We began the subscription service in late 2000,” he says. “I estimate that in the nearly three months since it started, we’ve attracted about 100,000 subscribers.”
While there are excellent choices for films in every genre—including “classic” grade B horror flicks—for both free and subscriber viewing, subscribers can take their pick of more notable fare, such as “To Kill A Mockingbird,” “Streamers,” and recent releases.
Kanakaris began his company simply enough: he had an idea that he could run an entertainment publication for the Los Angeles area that was both comprehensive and appealing.
“This was about 20 years ago,” he says. “It was called ‘L.A. Pop,’ and it covered entertainment.” He had trouble, though, maintaining quality with the publication in light of the competition, such as newspapers, which had more staff to dedicate to such a publication.
Then, he discovered the Internet.
“Five or six years ago, it became apparent that the Internet was a way, without a whole lot of money to provide a product that people could access throughout the world,” he says. So he began concentrating his energies on creating a movie and book site.
“Over a period of years, I had been telling people what I wanted to do,” he says. “Every place I went, I had a clear idea of what I was going to do, and what role others could do.” It all came together in CinemaPop.com and WordPop.com, despite the doubters he ran into. And Kanakaris says he’s got plenty of irons in the fire, not only for his wireless service, but also for print-on-demand capabilities from his WordPop.com service.
“Oh, everybody said you’re never going to be able to do it, nobody wants to watch movies on their computers, nobody will read books on a computer,” he says. Now, it looks like many doubt their own eyes. “We were at a convention recently, and we were showing streaming video from a wireless connection. People couldn’t believe what they were seeing.” |
