1MOV
About & Press · Founded Brooklyn, 2017
18,400 films, hand-curated. One restored 4K master per week. One recommendation per day, chosen by a human programmer in Brooklyn — not by an algorithm that thinks you liked Sicario because you watched it twice.
Start Watching FreeChapter One · Origin
The first 1MOV office sat above a Williamsburg bar whose jukebox played only Pavement. The lease was cheap because the radiator clanged at 4 a.m. Daniel Reyes had just left his post as a MUBI curator, frustrated that the platform's home screen had begun to look indistinguishable from every other one — a grid of red-band thumbnails engineered for the lowest common denominator of attention. Anika Sølver, three weeks out of her programming role at TIFF, had the same complaint on her way home from Toronto.
The thesis they wrote that autumn is still on the wall above the current office's reception desk, printed on a single sheet of Mohawk Superfine: Cinephiles deserve better than a recommender. They deserve a curator. It is a deliberately unfashionable sentence. It is also the reason 1MOV ships with one curated pick per day instead of a “Because you watched…” carousel.
The first title in the catalogue was Yi Yi, Edward Yang's 2000 Taiwanese family epic. It is still in rotation.
“A recommender optimizes for the next click. A programmer optimizes for the next film you'll remember at sixty.”
— Daniel Reyes & Anika Sølver, founding letter, October 2017
Chapter Two · The People
Every title in the library passes through a human being before it reaches the player. The editorial team is small on purpose — small enough that Anika still reads every rejection memo.
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Four members of the editorial team previously programmed for Sundance, Venice, and Berlinale. They spend roughly a third of the year on the festival circuit — the other two-thirds arguing with each other about inclusion criteria in our Tuesday editorial meeting.
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Nine full-time restoration engineers in our Brooklyn facility, working from original negatives and, where possible, the cinematographer's own notes. They have brought 2,100 pre-1970 titles to 4K HDR since 2019 — see the partnership below.
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Anika Sølver was selected for Variety's “10 Tastemakers Shaping Cinema” list in 2025. She still personally approves every cover pick for the weekly programme.
Chapter Three · Distribution
1MOV holds exclusive streaming windows with 67 film festivals worldwide. The following six are the ones our subscribers ask about by name.
Festival de Cannes
Toronto International Film Festival
South by Southwest Film & TV
International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam
Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica
Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin
… and 61 more, from Locarno and San Sebastián to Busan, Rotterdam, and Mar del Plata. Browse the festival index.
Chapter Four · Restoration
In 2019, 1MOV signed a ten-year restoration charter with the Library of Congress and the Cinémathèque Française. The terms were unusual for a streaming company: we agreed to fund the scans from original negatives, return every master to both institutions, and stream each title only after the partner archive had held it for a six-month embargo. Every restored title ships with a director commentary, an archival stills gallery, and a written restoration note from our engineers.
The 2,100th title — Miklós Jancsó's The Round-Up, 1966 — was completed in November 2025 and is currently in its six-month archive embargo. It enters the 1MOV catalogue in May 2026.
See the restoration index →Chapter Five · The 2025 Index
18,400+
Hand-curated films in the catalogue
The largest independent streaming library in North America.
1.84M
Active subscribers
Across 38 countries, as of Q4 2025.
94min
Average session length
Longest in the streaming category per Nielsen's 2025 State of Streaming report.
412M
Hours of playback in 2024
At 99.97% uptime — on carbon-negative infrastructure.
412
University film programmes served
Including NYU, USC, AFI, and the London Film School.
0.4m²
Rainforest planted per hour watched
Carbon-negative infrastructure via our Stripe partnership.