Pluto TV’s Katharina Feistauer Joins Mubi In Global Programming Push

EXCLUSIVE: TV industry veteran Katharina Feistauer has joined film service Mubi.

She has taken on a VP of Global Programming role at the film distributor, producer and streamer, having exited Paramount Global’s PlutoTV recently. Feistauer will report to Jason Ropell, Mubi’s Chief Content Officer.

Based in Mubi’s London office, she will lead Mubi’s programming team across all markets, driving the overall strategy of the streaming service and managing the pipeline of indie and filmmaker-driven content.

Mubi’s upcoming releases include Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, the Demi Moore-starring horror that was acquired for north of $10M in Cannes and will release wide in theaters on September 20.

Other films on the slate include Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, Ira Sachs’ Passages, Pedro Almodóvar’s Strange Way of Life, Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex, Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves, Kevin Macdonald’s documentary High & Low — John Galliano and Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents, Felipe Gálvez’s The Settlers.

Last week, we reported Mubi had acquired UK, Germany and Austria rights to Tilda Swinton musical The End.

The hire comes just months after Ropell told delegates at Karlovy Vary that Mubi plans “to scale” its business to meet growing demand for independent and arthouse titles. “We need to have global theatrical distribution capabilities on top of the global streaming ability, which we have,” he said at the time. “Over time you’ll see us moving in that direction. I feel very, very strongly that the global aggregate audience for our type of film is actually quite large and the room for growth is high.”

Feistauer will help propel that strategy, coming off a career in content that began at Discovery in the early 2000s. She rose to become head of German channels and then a senior programming planner before moving to Scripps Networks Interactive, where she was VP, Programming for the UK and EMEA. She then joined Nickelodeon in a similar post and in 2021 became Senior Director of Content Strategy and Programming for the UK at PlutoTV. She is considered an expert in content curation, acquisitions and licensing, and content strategy, and also works in content operations, marketing and research.