At the recently concluded MIPCOM, reps for KinoPoisk, Russia’s largest streaming platform, a division of IT giant Yandex, announced the production of two original TV series: Aeterna, a fantasy program based on the bestselling book series The Sparks of Aeterna by Vera Kamsha, and CyberSlav, written by Dmitry Yakovenko, showrunner for the children’s series Kikoriki. Both series are slated to release in the fourth quarter of 2022. Aeterna is among one of the largest fantasy productions in Russia
Prior to MIPCOM, KinoPoisk representatives announced the acquisition of the global film and TV adaptation rights to Israeli author Mike Omer’s best-selling Zoe Bentley trio of English-language crime novels, which KinoPoisk aims to adapt with an international partner.
KinoPoisk is owned by the country’s biggest search engine and technology company, Yandex, which, since 1997, has built intelligent products and services powered by machine learning. Additionally, Yandex has developed on-demand transportation services, navigation products, and other mobile applications for millions of consumers across the globe. Yandex, which has more than 30 offices worldwide, has been listed on the NASDAQ (New York) since 2011 and on the MOEX (Moscow) since 2014.
KinoPoisk was launched as an IMDB-style database of information about film and TV but, since 2018, has also run an SVoD service that reaches close to 10 million households. Recent titles to stream exclusively on the platform include Zack Snyder’s Justice League and Russian crime thriller Silver Spoon. Both went straight to VoD in Russia.
The whole operation is run from Moscow by Olga Filipuk (pictured above), CEO of Yandex Studios and Chief Content Officer of KinoPoisk. She has also served as a producer for Russian TV series including Topi, ANNDroid, Kitchenblock, Unprincipled, and The Last Minister. She is responsible for video and music licensing, as well as content production. She is also in charge of animation and sports content project development on Yandex media services.
From 2014 till 2016 she worked for Russian streaming service company ivi.ru, where she first held the position of Purchasing director. She later became the vice president of Content Policy there.
Prior to her stint at ivi.ru she worked for seven years as the Content Purchasing director for Russia’s Carmen Film company. She started her career at the Tokyo-based DLE Inc., which she joined after graduating from the University of Tokyo. Throughout her career, she has taken part in the creation of joint animated series with such companies as Hasbro, Cartoon Network, and Upper Deck Entertainment.
[…] The rapid growth of video streaming has transformed the domestic media industry in just two years, triggering a rapid increase in demand for new film series while the number of writers, directors, actors, and technicians has remained the same. This has helped double the rates of their pay, according to Olga Filipuk (right) who runs KinoPoisk (“Film Search”) for Yandex. “The online platforms have changed the TV series production market,” she says. “Three or four years ago, the series were ordered only by the big TV channels, and the producers depended on the moods or tastes of their managers.” “If you had a historical series,” adds Sergei Kornykhin, an independent Moscow film producer, “you could take it to Channel One or VGTRK. A comedy series, if it’s complicated, that was TNT. If it was family oriented, that’s CTC. You were given a price, and you worked within that.” US media industry publications didn’t begin to notice the transformation of the Russian media industry until mid-2021, two years after the revolution had begun in Moscow. For example, between June and September of last year Yandex launched this PR campaign for its video-on-demand (VOD) streaming platform unit KinoPoisk: https://variety.com/ and https://www.screendaily.com/ and click. […]