Less than two years after its opening, the digital platform ITsART, commissioned and funded in 2020 by then Minister of Culture Dario Franceschini with the aim of creating “a kind of Netflix of Italian culture”, is about to close. The new minister Gennaro Sangiuliano decided not to refinance the initiative and therefore ITsART was put into liquidation by Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (CDP), the financial institution controlled by the Ministry of Economy that managed the platform, together with Chili, a company that acted as brought a technical and commercial partner.
In November, CDP had told the Ministry of Culture, which had invested €9.8 million in ITsART with Franceschini, that the company was in serious economic loss and asked if the government intended to refinance it. The answer was negative, and that is why CDP and Chili wrote to the Ministry of Culture on December 29th, announcing the liquidation of ITsART, ie the sale of the company’s assets and its closure. Despite the announcement of the resolution, the platform is still online and usable at the moment.
ITsART’s speech had started in April 2020, when Franceschini had said he wanted to create an Italian paid digital platform for cultural and artistic content, which would have been particularly useful during the lockdown “to offer cultural content with a different method”. Back then, theaters and cinemas were closed due to the pandemic, and the platform was supposed to try to somehow offset the live shows crisis. However, the idea was to be able to continue attracting users even after the emergency period had ended.
The platform had opened in May 2021, but immediately received widespread criticism for not containing really original and exclusive content: some of what it proposed was already available for free on RaiPlay. The prices were not very competitive either: on ITsART, which, unlike Netflix, does not offer subscription formulas but sells individual content, renting a film costs 2 euros, buying 5, watching a “live” concert in streaming even 10 euros . The platform also offers other types of content, for example virtual tours of places like the Museum of Science and Technology in Milan, at a price of 7 euros.
Originally, the Ministry had provided 9.8 million euros and Chili another 10 million, but according to the ITsART budget, seen by Foglio, 7.5 million were spent on maintaining the platform in the first year alone: 6 million of which was spent on services and goods, 900,000 for staff. Despite the costs, however, the income was very low: around 141,000 users registered for the service, for a total turnover of 246,000 euros.