[lbostral]

I love Morgan Freeman by the way. A man who played a president of the USA, and God multiple times, is exactly what you need to show everywhere, not only on Afrostream

Is it positive discrimination ? Since there is a political implication there, I don't think so, but I will try to answer.

Do you know the movie "Ride Along" ? It did more than 100M$ in the American market for a budget of 25M$. This movie has one of the best start of any movie all time in January.

Do you know how we could see this movie outside USA. Not in a movie theater in France, though. Piracy is the first channel to see african-american movies in Europe and Africa.

Some movies are not well distributed and it appears so that a lot of these movies are from or with an African descent castings. That's not fair. We will correct this fact. And if you want to call this positive discrimination, why not.

Afrostream is a service which will permit to show movies which are not shown in a lot of countries in a legal way. That's our political statement.

[Baghard]

I am all for positive discrimination. For instance I do not think it is a bad idea to have all-women hackathons -- I do not think that's unfair. I furthermore wish you all the best with the business and I get the pitch: Besides the mainstream movies there is an entire untapped market of non-Hollywood movies with a lot of potential for growth. This is, after all, a business, not a political party (please avoid this debate entirely).

[gcb0]

> Afrostream is a service which will permit to show movies which are not shown in a lot of countries in a legal way. That's our political statement.

this is my gripe with positive discrimination. it is still discrimination.

you could have been embracing everyone. but you did the same that was being done before, and picked the single second largest group. why not call it low-budget-movies-netflix. or hard-to-watch-in-france-netflix? why pick one group/race and leave others out? that is just ...bad business practice :) you could have been streaming iranian movies as well, for example.

[KingMob]

It's not really discrimination, since nobody is excluded here. If you weren't into sports, would you complain about ESPN excluding non-sports-watchers?

But in answer to your implied question "Why do you need a space/channel/site of your own?", the answer is that the larger space (France) is already white by default. Whites don't really need their own space, because they're the dominant majority, and media is generally made with them in mind already. So, if minorities don't carve out their own spaces, they will live entirely in a culture that doesn't represent them.

My fiance is half-black, and she's not that into TV/movies. I once asked her why, and she said that after a while, she just got tired of rarely seeing people like herself on-screen.

[lbostral]

You give me an idea with iranian movies ;)

you don't understand my point here : We do not do a service for specific people, we do a service with specific contents.

I will try with another argument : Tyler Perry is one the most prominent performer of the USA. He did movies, series, theater. All successful. He is maybe the most complete artist in the USA. These productions were distributed in the USA. You can't find these production in France by example, but either in a lot of countries. Why ?

Afrostream's goal here is to distribute Tyler Perry and other talents all over the world. As I said, I don't know if this is positive dsicrimination, but Afrostream is my political statement to this 'Why'

[gcb0]

so you think it's valid that the racist movie distribution industry in France only distribute non-African culture (whatever that is) movies? i mean, by your standard, limiting by skin color is doing a service to someone...

[lbostral]

The problem here is that movies with black people (as we said in France, we need to call a cat a cat, we need to define clearly the skin here), had to be seen everywhere, not only in France, because that's why the movies need to be : to watch by the most. And that's what we are doing, making exposure to underserved movies. And we are doing even in some underserved countries

We don't need to deal with racism, we want to tackle it.

[kaitai]

It's serving a specific market. Is it discriminatory that Maybelline, the makeup company, doesn't...embrace...men? or that there are specific makeup lines for people with dark skin? or light skin? Is it discriminatory that there exist companies that translate books only into Estonian, a language that very people read? Clearly they should also do Spanish and Xhosa to be "non-discriminatory," despite selling only in Estonia. DramaFever focused initially on Asian content; is that discriminatory? People wanted that stuff, and then paid for it. Just like tall people buy pants that are longer, and there's an IDE specifically for Ruby! (Positive discrimination, I cry!!)

To demand that every company do everything is ridiculous. It is very American to think that focusing on Afro-diaspora culture is somehow "racist" or "discrimination." The company is launching in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Senegal and Ivory Coast. Why would they stream Iranian movies as their first move? Should they also include documentaries and calculus lessons?

Why pick one group, one business goal? Because they'd like to have a successful business and that's how you start.