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An Italian software firm captures the fancy of moviegoers across Europe with a simple but elegant Windows application for viewing movie trailers and finding out where to watch the upcoming films.

A Blockbuster In the Making

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“The Windows 8 and Windows Phone user experiences are very close to the kind of ‘identity’ that we wanted to achieve for CineTrailer,” says Morganti. “It is streamlined and elegant and simple to use. And from a developer’s perspective, the Windows platform makes it easy to make our application available on phones or tablets or PCs.”

While DDM built CineTrailer on Windows, it was also easy for the company to make the application available for non-Windows platforms, including iOS and Android.

Making money with continent-wide exposureThe popularity of CineTrailer across Europe is helping DDM make money through application-based advertising. The company works closely with the Microsoft online advertising and digital marketing division.

“We have had a very good experience with the Microsoft advertising team,” says Morganti. “The advertising offered on CineTrailer is not invasive to the experience, but instead is captivating. The advertising engages our customers and gets them even more involved with the app because it is often perceived as additional, value-added content. The overall quality of the advertising is far better than what we’ve seen on other platforms.”

DDM, which also receives revenues from movie production companies for promotional services, also benefits from the advertising revenue-sharing formula of the Windows 8 Store,

which provides a better return for application vendors than other platforms.

The surge in popularity for CineTrailer is laying the groundwork for more development efforts at DDM.

“We’re experimenting with additional features of Windows 8 to make the user experience even more interactive and to include more social features,” says Dufour.

“We’re working on creating more user-specific features based on their preferences, with a customizable user experience and an intelligent use of maps,” he says. “And we’re looking at providing the application for Microsoft Xbox, which will help close the circle of the most popular platforms.”

With customers giving CineTrailer two thumbs up across Europe and the broad availability across devices, DDM expects at least another 1 million downloads in 2013—all the makings of a blockbuster.

Microsoft Cloud Services

Windows Phone

Windows 8

SQL Azure

Windows Azure Table Storage

Windows Azure Compute (Web Roles)

Microsoft .NET Framework

Software and Services

A convenient front-row seatfor coming attractions

For the people running DDM, a small independent software developer, creating their latest application wasn’t so much about penetrating markets or making money—even though those benefits are arriving quickly.

The real business driver was, Noi amiamo i film—“We love movies.” The result of that passion is CineTrailer, a new but incredibly popular application that is spreading like crazy across Europe, with more than 2.5 million downloads across 10 countries since the product’s launch in 2011.

The application, which is available in nine languages, lets people watch movie trailers so they can find out about what the latest films in theaters and on home video. In Italy and Germany, users can also use location-based services to find the nearest theater showing a film—a function that DDM is working on making available in other countries as well.

“What led us to create CineTrailer was really personal interest—our love of the movies,” says Camillo Morganti, Chairman of the Board of Directors of DDM, a small independent software vendor based in Milan, Italy.

“We’ve had success developing other software and websites since 1997, including the highly profitable sale of a site in our early years.But CineTrailer has captured the public’s attention like no other project. A lot of that success is due to Windows, including the great Windows 8 user interface and Windows Azure.”

Setting the stage for growthDDM did an initial pilot project with CineTrailer starting in 2010, building it on the Windows Phone platform. But the original cloud-hosting platform that DDM chose—the Amazon EC2 cloud service—fell short of what the company needed for widespread distribution across multiple countries.

“Amazon was not the optimal solution for the plans we had for CineTrailer,” says Marco Dufour, President and Chief Executive Officer of DDM. “We are a small company and from our perspective, the EC2 architecture had drawbacks. It was not fully optimized for the Windows environment. Building a solution that could scale quickly and automatically was going to consume more resources than we had available. Also, EC2 would have cost us a lot of money.”

DDM wanted a cost-effective, comprehensive environment that the company could use to bring its new application to the widest number of users across many different smartphones, laptops, and desktop computers.

Opening the curtain with WindowsThe situation improved dramatically when DDM decided to use a comprehensive Windows platform. “After some evaluation we realized that a complete Windows platform, including Windows 8, Windows Phone, and Windows Azure would be ideal for our needs,” says Dufour.

The first step started with a switch to the Windows Azure cloud service. Windows Azure fully supports all the work done on the Microsoft .NET technologies that DDM developers are familiar with—and it can easily scale to meet the potential demands of new customers across multiple countries. It is also more cost-effective because the firm pays only for the computing hardware and services actually used, instead of being forced to allocate valuable capital on resources that may never be needed.

“Windows Azure costs roughly half of what we were previously paying,” says Dufour, “and we don’t have the costs associated with preparing and maintaining a dedicated database server.”

The introduction of Windows 8 and the easy-to-use Windows Phone interface added to the success of CineTrailer, which is a top-selling

Partner ProfileDDM is an independent web and mobile software development company based in Milan, Italy. It was founded in 1997.

For More Information: http://www.ddm.it

“The Windows 8 and Windows Phone user experiences are very

close to the kind of ‘identity’ that we

wanted to achieve for CineTrailer. It is

streamlined and elegant and

simple to use.”

Camillo Morganti, Chairman of the Board,

DDM

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