Mola, the OTT multimedia company encompassing sports, music, and film content, announces its global launch. The platform puts the focus on interactivity and social engagement initiatives, including song requests at live concerts and questions during talks by top celebrities.
Bolstered by the upsurge of subscriptions and revenues during the pandemic, OTT content streaming services have long experimented with ways to make their offering more interactive. While some of such efforts, such as Bandersnatch, released on Netflix as part of the award-winning Black Mirror show, won praise from critics and audience, the default user experience in the industry is still fundamentally uninteractive.
Featuring premium series and movies by the world’s top filmmakers in its lineup, Mola places its bet on audience engagement and experience, making the OTT service more interactive for both users and their communities in a multitude of ways:
- Sports: Besides featuring a broad range of sports content, including NFL, NHL, EPL, Bundesliga, Primeira Liga, and WWE Raw and Smackdown events, Mola also actively invests in supporting aspiring athletes. The company produces an annual Dream Chasers documentary series, which follows 24 promising athletes from Indonesia, Africa, and Europe as they train for a career in professional football. In Indonesia, remarkably, the viewership at live streams of the Garuda Select matches exceeds that of the Premier League as the audience enthusiastically watches the team taking on the world’s top academies including the likes of Chelsea, Arsenal, Manchester City, Inter, and Juventus. As the show enters its fourth season, at least three Dream Chasers alumni have already signed up with professional European clubs. Mola also owns the Italian professional football club Como 1907, led by Chelsea football club legend, Dennis Wise, as its CEO.
- Music: Mola holds live events with top musicians, including Kehlani, Seal, and Charlie Puth, where viewers can interact with the performers and request songs. The company also has its own recording label, which signs up the top new talent taking part in Mola’s social media engagements. During its upcoming London Mola Chill Festival event on October 29, Indonesian winners of Instagram auditions will take the stage alongside American bands Weezer and Kings of Convenience.
- Celebrity talks: The Mola Living Live interactive talk show features top celebrities, including Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Douglas, Gary Vaynerchuck, Mike Tyson, Susan Sarandon, Sharon Stone, and John Travolta. At-home viewers are invited to ask their questions to the celebrity guests as they share their life experiences and lessons with the audience. Those set to join the future installments of the show include Alec Baldwin, slated to take part in the live event on November 2, as well as Jude Law and Sylvester Stallone in the coming months.
- Social engagement: Besides engaging the viewers on stream, Mola also works to support communities in its countries of operation. In Italy, Mola will open an education fund which will provide Italian families with extra support for educational supplies and tuition fees; the proceeds from a series of NFT sales will be allocated to the fund. The company also runs a community journalism program, reviewing Instagram applications from content creators looking to report on its platform, and has already selected a number of candidates to work out of its London office.
“Wherever we go, we want to become a part of the community, which is why we are so focused on creating programs and activities that do more than just entertain our viewers,” says Mirwan Suwarso, Official Representative of Mola. “We also try to celebrate local heroes and celebrities. In Italy, we celebrate our arrival with the release of our film ‘Quagliarella—The Untold Truth,’ a documentary on the career of Italian soccer star Fabio Quagliarella, who spent many tumultuous years facing threats from an anonymous stalker. In the UK, we are partnering with Oxford United Football Club and, soon, a number of other clubs to create community engagement programs that will be tied to our new football-themed shows. Unlike most platforms, Mola isn’t just a streaming service, we approach and serve our customers through a number of services including live events, activities, and social media engagements that are meant to leave a positive impact.”
About Mola
Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Jakarta, Mola is an Indonesian subscription video on-demand and over-the-top (OTT) streaming service. Mola holds live and on-demand broadcasting rights in Southeast Asia for multiple sports competitions, including the NFL, NHL, WWE Raw and Smackdown events, English Premier League, and Bundesliga, among several others. In addition to offering a wide range multimedia content for its users, the company engages with local communities to empower content creators and aspiring athletes.