Hello Jean-David, what does Molotov offer to its users?
“Molotov is the leading French service for the distribution of Internet television channels (OTT). Launched in 2016, Molotov has more than 7.5 million users. We offer a modern TV access experience, allowing you to view it in all its forms with a single modern interface.
Molotov gives access to free and paid channels, live, replay, vod, and offers a whole range of services (backtracking, recordings in the “cloud”, access from the foreign). This is in some way the Spotify of television.”
Where did you get the idea to create Molotov? How was the project born?
“I was at the origin of AlloCiné, who already in his time had given himself the mission to discover movies and movie theaters. Molotov, it’s a bit the same idea: discover the TV channels and their programs, and give access in the coolest possible way (mean cool: modern, passionate, inovante, simple, enthusiastic).”
Molotov is hosted since its first day at Iguana Solutions, what were you originally expecting from your host?
“I already knew Stéphane Cohen (the founder of Iguana) and spoke to him, especially because Iguana hosted (and still hosts) Deezer and other services that require high performance and robustness. At the time of the genesis of the project, Iguana provided us with the infrastructure and service of his team to create a POC (Proof of Concept), a pilot in a way. This allowed us to present the concept to our partners, TV channels, investors, future employees, …. When we created the company and started the project for good, it is natural that we continued to work with Iguana.
The know-how of Iguana Solutions allowed us to be relevant in our technical choices from the beginning of the project, while implementing exceptional economic efficiency.
Iguana Solutions’ participation has gone well beyond that of a simple hosting provider. Iguana accompanied us throughout the project, always present when we solicit them, always ready to help us to estimate the infrastructure costs in our business plan, to optimize our purchases, and to find solutions to the problems that we have submitted.”
What kinds of services do you currently use at Iguana Solutions?
“Molotov is an audiovisual content broadcasting service but also manages many types of access and huge user databases. We use Iguana Solutions’ infrastructure to host our large volumes of data, and for part of the broadcast. We also solicit them to provide us with service around our infrastructures and hardware purchases.
Our service requires our partners to be very responsive to deliver additional resources to ensure the impact of Molotov’s strong growth. Iguana has always been able to find solutions, and respond without delay when we asked them for new resources to increase the size of our infrastructures.”
What do you think of the quality of Iguana Solutions services? Did they meet your expectations?
“From the beginning, and it’s been several years now (Molotov really began in 2014 and the service opened to the public in mid-2016), we are very satisfied with the quality of the infrastructures and the reactivity of the Iguane teams, when they have to intervene or when we solicit them.
Iguana Solutions always has solutions, while offering very competitive rates. They have perfectly met our expectations. We are very happy to work together.”
What are the next challenges for Molotov?
“Growth in terms of use, in terms of number of users, in terms of functionalities, devices.”