For our November Distributor of the Month interview, Cineuropa sat down with Charles Courcier, the founder and sales manager of Paris-based Soupir Distribution. Soupir is an AVoD (advertising-based VoD) distributor platform for premium animation series that uses a tech solution to bring top-quality content, typically made for television, to young audiences via various digital platforms.

Cineuropa: What led you to create Soupir, and how does it set itself apart?
Charles Courcier: I started off in the animation industry at the beginning of my career, 12 years ago. First, I did digital production for YouTube. We set up a studio called Amuse Animation, which is part of the Millimages group, a French animation studio. Then I worked at Xilam Animation for four years, and I was handling both production and digital distribution. It was interesting because they had a vast catalogue, so there were a lot of things to be done in order to distribute the content on digital platforms. YouTube was very strong when I arrived, and the idea was to amplify what was made on YouTube, and also go on other platforms and test a lot of things. After four years of doing this, I saw that a lot of independent studios could benefit from having a digital arm, but they could not really afford it.

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The other thing is that traditional TV producers were not really [expanding to] these platforms, but kids were getting on these platforms more and more. The idea was to convince them that it was necessary now to be there – helping independent studios get where the audience is today. And then we created Soupir. To do that, we needed a tech solution – a piece of software that would get rid of a lot of fastidious tasks, because it's very time-consuming to upload on platforms like YouTube. I partnered with a tech developer, who's my business partner and the CTO of the company.

What is your editorial policy, and what does your business model look like?
I started my YouTube journey in 2015, when there was a lot of mediocre content there for kids. Our goal at Soupir is to really focus on premium content mainly produced for TV, but to be broadcast on YouTube and other digital platforms. [Our main audience is] kids aged six plus. We also have some content for three to six, but never under three, as we say that kids between zero and three should not be watching much content. We have French content, and we have also signed with a UK producer, a Japanese producer and a Spanish producer. Our main business model is that we split the revenue, so we take a distribution fee – a percentage of what we generate on the platforms. The difference is that we do not really acquire content or put a minimum guarantee into a show. This is because there is a lot of set-up involved in order to install the property on one platform. That’s the risk we take.

Could you speak about the types of strategies you have for distributing a series?
One that interests a lot of people right now is how you make new content rise on a platform. I think what works is relying on something very similar that you can use to push the content towards the audience. For example, we used one series to promote the second one. We created some videos merging the two different contents, like cartoon characters that were watching the other cartoon. The idea was to get people to say, “Okay, those characters that I love also watched that content.” With this, we successfully grew a channel that was completely new from zero to 20,000 subscribers, something like that. But each series has its own specifics. With our model, we “talk” to the audience directly, while traditional distributors talk to adults while trying to understand what could be cool for kids.

What are you looking forward to in the future of Soupir?
Our third birthday is in about five months. We are very excited about reaching this milestone because I think it shows that we are stable. We grew from two to five people within a year and a half. Our goal in 2026 is to capitalise on what we have, and to consolidate the model and software we have as well as the relationship that we’ve built with our partners. They’ve all renewed their contracts. We see ourselves as a boutique firm that sticks to a select number of partners with strong and interesting IPs. We also want to start the distribution of short films on those platforms; it’s a project we’ve been thinking about for a long time.