Noah Media Group has won £2m of backing from a roster of investors across tech, media and sports to aid its future growth plans.

Noah Media Group, founded six years ago by Chairman Barry Smith, CEO and producer John McKenna and directors Gabriel Clarke & Torquil Jones has credits including theatrical releases Finding Jack Charlton and Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans and Adam Hills: Take His Legs that was broadcast by Channel 4 in the UK and Bobby Robson: More Than a Manager that was picked up internationally by Netflix.

The new stakeholders include ex-Skyscanner CEO Gareth Williams, former XIX Entertainment President James Clayton, Hollywood entertainment lawyer Kevin Yorn, former editor of WIRED magazine David Rowan and multi F1 Grand Prix-winning motor racing driver Mark Webber.

These plans will focus on bringing together a world-class technology team to “build a data-driven evaluation engine, which will allow Noah greater scrutiny in their choice of films and series to produce, on a per-project basis, at a global scale, in order to maximise the distribution and commercial opportunities for all of their content.”

Also, development will begin on an end-to-end platform that will deliver “greater transparency for the entire filmmaking process: from finance, production and distribution, through to sales, marketing and collection.” Plans will allow for this platform to be licensed to independent filmmakers in the future.

Noah Chairman Barry Smith explains, “This is an extremely exciting time for Noah Media Group. This injection of investment will go directly into advancing and improving our evaluation processes, leading to better production and distribution decisions. Firstly, identifying and then reaching a bigger audience will, we believe, lead to greater profitability for independent filmmakers and financiers through a combination of targeting and growing this audience (transactional D2C) and creating films and series with an increased international appeal to our downstream partners (SVOD, broadcasters etc).”

CEO John McKenna continues, “This new investment will enable us to make smarter decisions to continue delivering world class content for some of the biggest streaming platforms, broadcasters and sport federations in the world. We believe this will allow us to be more effective for our partners.  As far as we know, this isn’t being done at scale by any other independent production company and we are very excited to get started on this next phase for the business.”

2021 Investor and Co-Founder, ex-CEO of Skyscanner Gareth Williams adds “Noah Media Group delivers outstanding films and I am delighted to be able to invest into Noah. The software they are building will bring some norms of internet distribution to challenge some of the inefficiencies that exist in this industry. I join some amazing technology and media investors – and I believe John and his team will continue to execute strongly as they enter this growth phase.”

Jon Creamer

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