Wanna watch M’sian-made movies for free? This guy started a (legal!) streaming site

If you’re a kaki movie, you’d know that one of the joy in life is to walk down this aisle…

For most people, it may not be a big deal when you can’t watch movies in the cinema cos you may have other alternatives like Netflix, Astro, iFlix or even… uhhh… AFlix(?). But what if you wanna watch those good ol’ fashioned Malaysian-made movies like P. Ramlee movies, The Journey or even Sepet?

Well, there’s a new video-on-demand (VOD) platform that was recently launched called KiniDia. And the best part of it all is that you can watch local movies for… FREE?! We talked to its founder, Justin Wong, to find out more about it.

And he told us that…

KiniDia was originally a website for… memes?!

Although KiniDia was launched a week ago, Justin, who’s originally from digital marketing, mentioned that KiniDia had always been around for quite some time. In fact, the website that he built by himself was originally for… viral content about Malaysia.

“I started this a few years ago as a source of viral content, and now I’ve repurposed it to be a video-on-demand platform instead.” – Justin to CILISOS.

We were able to trace the website as far back to 2016 thanks to Wayback Machine and it was filled with what they call as ‘socialtainment’ content. If you were to take a peek at what it was like (you can do so here), you’d see content like hilarious Pokémon names by Malaysians.

So, why did Justin go from those kinda content to a VOD platform? Well, in Malaysia, you only have two options when it comes to watching movies at home – pay for subscription fees that can be quite expensive for some of us or stream movies illegally.

Noticing the gap in this issue, Justin came up with KiniDia to allow Malaysians to watch movies from home legally at a reallllyyyyy low price. As we mentioned earlier, you can watch local movies that have been released some 10 years back at KiniDia for free… but with ads la. 

You can also watch newer releases on KiniDia at RM9.90. That’s waaaayyyyy cheaper than other VOD sites. In fact, unlike other VOD or streaming sites, Justin said you don’t even have to subscribe to KiniDia to watch movies. Just pay once and, voila, you can start watching the movie you purchase dy.

“The ones that are not free under the KiniDia Pro section are typically newer releases. They came out in just the last couple of years. So, I believe that’s a good enough value there.” – Justin.

Waitamin, how is all this legal? Well, Justin mentioned that he would have to strike a deal that would benefit both filmmakers and audience. And since KiniDia doesn’t have any subscription fees, the revenue pretty much comes from ads and the KiniDia Pro section. So, this could mean one thing – unlike YouTube ads, there’s no way in escaping ads on KiniDia.

At the time of writing, there are only 18 movies available on KiniDia but Justin also told us that…

Movies from Netflix might be coming to KiniDia in the future

And, yes, that includes Mandarin and Tamil movies as well.

Justin mentioned that he does have some plans to add more movies on KiniDia in the near future. But for those who might wanna watch movies produced by Astro like Ola Bola, you might not wanna hope for them to be featured on KiniDia la.

“If anything else, I would not choose anything (movies) made by Astro because they have their own platform to publish on. Haha.” – Justin.

But if you’re one of those people who secretly downloads movies from Netflix, then KiniDia may be an option for you. 😉 And that’s because Justin might bring in local movies that are currently featured on Netflix like Puteri Gunung Ledang and Geran on KiniDia.

However, you just gotta wait for a while for that to happen because Justin can only do so once those movies’ license periods are over. Just to give you a clearer picture, license periods give VOD and streaming sites the rights to stream movies legally for a period of time according to the agreement between a movie distributor and VOD platforms. Once they reach the end of the license period, the movies can be streamed on other platforms like KiniDia.

If you were to browse thru the list of movies available on KiniDia, you may find some familiar movies like Nota, among other more famous Malay movies like Sumolah. But Justin would also like to bring in more indie local films on his website.

However, when we asked Justin if he has any specific movies in mind to put up on KiniDia and the only response we got was…

“Stay tuned…” – Justin.

So, if you’re curious as to what kind of movies are available on the website or what’s it like watching movies on KiniDia, feel free to browse thru the list of movies here. In the meantime, we’re just gonna order some popcorn and continue watching Kinks (uhh.. it’s a legit movie ok) on KiniDia that we paused for the sake of this article. 😛