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Homegrown start-up Kanopy offers free online movies for WA library users

Kim MacdonaldThe West Australian
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Olivia Humprhrey originally set up Kanopy in her garage in Perth.
Camera IconOlivia Humprhrey originally set up Kanopy in her garage in Perth.Picture: The West Australian

WA public library users will get free access to 30,000 films from today through on-demand streaming service Kanopy, a homegrown start-up that has gone global.

Perth woman Olivia Humphrey created the start-up at her Scarborough home nearly 10 years ago and now runs it from San Francisco with a staff of 80, reaching five million unique users a year.

Referring to itself as “the world’s finest cinema”, Kanopy streams mostly independent, foreign and arthouse films, from Oscar-nominated documentaries to obscure classics and instructional videos.

“People say if Netflix is junk food, Kanopy is food for the soul,” Ms Humphrey said during a visit to Perth at the weekend.

Until recently, Kanopy was available only through universities but WA is the first State to offer it to all public library members, though hundreds of individual libraries across Australia, the US and Canada have been doing so for months.

Ironically, it may be Kanopy’s digital content that helps to boost the profile of libraries around the world and help to keep books on the shelves.

“When they launched it at the New York Public Library they said they had never had so many new members sign up in such a short time,” Ms Humphrey said.

While she would not reveal how much the company was worth, Ms Humphrey said revenue had doubled in each of the past two years, and some independent filmmakers now earned more money from Kanopy than from competitor Amazon Prime.

Ms Humphrey started Kanopy in the front room of her Scarborough home in 2008, using her background in rights management for BBC and Village Roadshow to develop a platform for streaming movies to university students.

She said winning WA Innovator of the Year in 2012 gave her the confidence to remortgage her home and move to San Fran Cisco with her husband and then 10-month old baby to grow the business on a global scale.

“It is beyond my wildest dreams — never did I expect it to grow like this,” she said.

WA libraries will initially place a cap of four movies a month on Kanopy but this is expected to lift to 20.
https://thewest.com.au/business/startup/homegrown-start-up-kanopy-offers-free-online-movies-for-library-users-ng-b88741219z
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