About CINE.AR

CINE.AR

CINE.AR is the Argentine public television channel and streaming brand dedicated to Argentine cinema. It began as INCAA TV, the channel of the National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts, launching on 28 December 2010, and it was rebranded as CINE.AR in March 2017, when its sister streaming service Odeón was relaunched as CINE.AR Play and the channel was relaunched in high definition as Cine.ar TV. The service is operated by INCAA together with the Argentine public content system, and it broadcasts national films, shorts and documentaries, giving the country's cinema a permanent free window on television and online.

The logic of the channel is cultural policy. INCAA, created on 14 May 1968 by Law No. 17.741 and based at Lima 319 in Buenos Aires, exists to promote the Argentine film industry by funding qualified production companies and supporting new filmmakers, and it also organises the Mar del Plata International Film Festival and the Ventana Sur film market and runs the ENERC film school. A film institute that finances production needs exhibition outlets for what it finances; CINE.AR is that outlet, on television through the channel and on demand through CINE.AR Play at play.cine.ar.

Overview

CINE.AR operates in two connected forms. The television channel, listed in Argentine digital terrestrial guides at channel 22.4 in Buenos Aires, broadcasts Argentine films, short films and documentaries around the clock. The streaming platform, CINE.AR Play, is an Argentine video service offering access to films, television series, documentaries and short films made in Argentina, most of the content made with the support of INCAA, which owns both the platform and its sister channel. Together they form the public distribution arm of Argentine cinema.

The service sits within the family of Argentine state channels: television listings group CINE.AR with Encuentro, Pakapaka, DeporTV and TEC in the public multiplex, and reference sources describe the channel as operated by INCAA and Contenidos Públicos, the state public content company. Its audience is anyone interested in Argentine film, from casual viewers encountering a national classic on television to filmmakers, students and researchers using the platform as a catalogue of national production.

INCAA TV: the first years

The channel launched as INCAA TV in 2010, with 28 December 2010 recorded as its start date in Argentine television listings. It was a novel venture for a film institute: a broadcast channel devoted to the national film heritage and to new Argentine production. Trade reports from its early period describe the technical infrastructure built to support it, including a content management system installed to automate and streamline the ingest, description and archiving of some 5,000 hours of Argentine films, integrated with the channel's editing systems and a playout server that took movies and other content to air. That figure indicates the scale of the archive the channel was created to exploit: thousands of hours of Argentine cinema that had previously been difficult or impossible for the public to see.

INCAA TV's role was therefore archival as well as promotional. Argentine cinema has a long history, from the golden age of the 1930s and 1940s through the New Argentine Cinema of the 1990s and 2000s, but much of it circulated poorly after theatrical release. A dedicated channel could keep that heritage in continuous public view, and could give new INCAA-supported films a guaranteed television window after their festival and cinema runs.

The streaming service: from Odeón to CINE.AR Play

The on-demand arm began under the name Odeón. Its design involved the state telecommunications company ARSAT, which managed the technological aspects of the project, including content storage and transmission. The platform was also conceived as a new source of royalty income for Argentina's copyright collectives: DAC for film directors, SAGAI for actors and performers, SADAIC for musicians and Argentores for screenwriters, linking the public streaming of films to payments to the people who made them.

In March 2017, under a new government, the service was relaunched as CINE.AR Play alongside the rebrand of INCAA TV as Cine.ar TV in high definition. The initially planned subscription service, which had failed, was replaced by a pay-per-view feature called Estrenos, Premieres, in which movies could premiere simultaneously with their theatrical release. It was also announced that the platform would have native clients on several smart television platforms and a native iOS application, moving the service from a website toward the connected television environment in which on-demand viewing increasingly happens.

International expansion

In May 2017 CINE.AR Play was launched internationally, with limited programming at the initial stage, taking Argentine cinema to the diaspora and to foreign audiences interested in the country's film culture. By September 2019 the international service had reached 200,000 users, according to figures reported at the time. Integration with the video-on-demand services of Latin American television providers was also under negotiation, reflecting an ambition to embed the catalogue inside the platforms regional audiences already used.

For Argentine cinema, whose theatrical distribution abroad is limited and irregular, a state-backed streaming window with an international reach is a significant cultural instrument. It gives films a continuing life after festivals, and gives film schools, cultural centres and ordinary viewers abroad legal access to a national catalogue that the commercial market does not supply.

Programming

The channel's programming is built from national films, short films and documentaries, as its founding descriptions state. That includes features from the INCAA-supported production of recent decades, classic Argentine cinema from the archive, documentary work and short films that rarely receive any other form of public exhibition. The streaming platform organises a similar catalogue for on-demand viewing, adding television series to the films, documentaries and shorts.

The Estrenos feature added a further dimension: simultaneous premieres, in which a new film could be rented on the platform at the same time as its cinema release. That model, unusual when introduced in 2017, anticipated the day-and-date release strategies that became common across the film industry in the following years, and for smaller Argentine films it offered a way to reach audiences in provinces and towns with few or no cinemas.

The INCAA context

CINE.AR cannot be understood apart from its parent institute. INCAA, the National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts, was established on 14 May 1968, and promotes the film industry by funding production and supporting new filmmakers. Through its Advisory Commission it also issues film ratings for exhibition in Argentina. The institute organises the Mar del Plata International Film Festival, the only competitive film festival in Latin America accredited in the top category by FIAPF, and Ventana Sur, the region's major film market, and it runs the national film school, ENERC.

Within that structure, CINE.AR is the exhibition and public-access branch: the festival shows films for a week, the market sells them, the school trains their makers, the fund finances them, and the channel and platform show them to the Argentine public indefinitely. The coherence of that chain is the strongest argument for the service's existence, and it explains why the brand is organised around access to a national catalogue rather than around original channel programming of other kinds.

Distribution and access

The television channel is distributed on Argentina's digital terrestrial platform and through pay television systems, listed at channel 22.4 among the public signals in Buenos Aires, and the platform is available through its website, mobile applications and smart television clients. Most of CINE.AR Play's catalogue has historically been available free of charge within Argentina after registration, with the Estrenos premieres as the paid exception, a model that treats the catalogue as a public cultural collection rather than a commercial subscription product.

Free access is the point of the service. Argentine taxpayers finance national cinema through INCAA; CINE.AR returns that cinema to them. A commercial platform would have little reason to maintain deep catalogues of older Argentine films with small audiences; a public one has every reason, because the cultural value of the archive does not depend on viewing figures for any single title.

Significance

CINE.AR is one of the few examples worldwide of a national film institute operating its own television channel and streaming platform as a permanent public window for national cinema. Born as INCAA TV in 2010, professionalised through a major archive digitisation effort, and unified under the CINE.AR name in 2017 with an HD channel, a relaunched platform, simultaneous premieres and an international service that reached 200,000 users abroad by 2019, it embodies a simple idea: that a country's films are a public heritage, and that the state which helps to finance them should also help its citizens to watch them. For viewers, it remains the most direct route into the richness of Argentine cinema, past and present.