Éclair, Ymagis Group’s content services business unit, today announced a strategic alliance with the Art House Convergence, USA’s premier non-profit association in support of independent film exhibition and distribution. This new alliance was sealed during AHC’s 10th Anniversary Conference held just prior to the 2017 Sundance Film Festival.
As part of the alliance, Éclair’s CineConductor for digital cinema package management and delivery via broadband network becomes AHC’s preferred broadband digital cinema services provider in the US. Launched at the AHC’s 2015 event, CineConductor rapidly expanded to well over one hundred sites, many of which are ongoing AHC participants. Over half of the more than one hundred plus cinema venues and two thirds of the rights holders attending the 2017 AHC have already been CineConductor users. Cinema venues new to the service that attended both 2016 and 2017 AHC events are also entitled to receive additional benefits with CineConductor.
Terms of the partnership include Éclair’s ongoing financial support for the AHC’s Scholarship Fund, which subsidizes selected cinemas to enable them to attend the annual conference held in Midway, Utah the week leading up to the Sundance Film Festival. The Art House Convergence annual conference is presented in participation with the Sundance Institute Art House Project, a joint program in support of the indie film exhibition and distribution community.
“Our purpose, from the very beginning of the Art House Convergence, is to support community-based, mission-driven cinemas,” said Russ Collins, founder of Art House Convergence. “The process requires not only creative programming and marketing efforts but ongoing dialog between art house exhibitors and distributors, as well as re-visiting the business models we all work under. Sustainability and increased diversity, on the screen and in the audiences, are critical to our ongoing growth. When an effective new service, such as CineConductor, comes onto the market and is quickly adopted by our constituents, including my own Michigan Theater, in Ann Arbor, it is meaningful. With our new alliance Éclair’s has stepped up to support us, both via the Scholarship Program, and in cost effectively and conveniently sending DCPs to participating theaters.”
For Barry Rebo, managing director of Éclair USA said, “Ymagis Group’s founder and CEO Jean Mizrahi and I in fact launched our U.S.-based company back at the 2015 AHC conference. Since then we have been extremely pleased with the uptake of CineConductor by the specialty film community as practiced by the active AHC participants. It’s indeed an honor to be able to expand our support of their extremely worthwhile efforts via both our Scholarship Fund initiative as well as applying Éclair’s commercial resources in service to our mutual goals.”
In addition to the strategic alliance with the AHC, Éclair also announced a complimentary program with the Film Festival Alliance, which holds its own conference in association, and simultaneously, with the larger Art House Convergence gathering.
The Art House Convergence http://www.arthouseconvergence.org.
Éclair http://www.eclair.digital