Italian platform ITsART appoints Guido Casali as new CEO

Italian digital platform ITsART has hired Guido Casali as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Content Director, succeeding Giano Biagini, who set up the launch. "I'm very happy with my new role in ITsART. It's a very strong challenge, a great responsibility, but I'm sure that our content has a very high potential because the Italian culture, Italian places and Italian movies are very popular everywhere and there are still a lot of stories to tell", commented Casali exclusively to Señal News. "As a CEO and I have to find new content, new collaborations and create new projects, that is our goal for the next months," he added.  

ITsArt was born last May and currently is available in Italy and The UK. The platform is owned for the 51% by the Italian C.D.P (Cassa Depositi e Prestiti) and for the 49% by the streaming platform Chili TV Spa and the main aim to promote Italian arts, music, history, ballet, and theatre. "In the next weeks ITsART will be available in all Europe and our goal for 2022 it's to expand to US and other countries all over the world and maybe also in South America, it's a very important market, a lot of South American countries have a strong interest in Italian culture," appointed Casali.

Combined business model
The ad-supported and transactional-VoD service providing access to Italian culture was conceived during the pandemic, when Italy’s cultural institutions suffered from a drop in physical visitors and tried to react with various disparate forms of digital distribution. The service offers content ranging from virtual monuments and museum tours to live opera, pop music, dance, theater as well as movies. It’s free to register to ITsArt and the website and app are accessible via smart TV, web, smartphone, or tablet.

"Our content is in Italian with Italian and English subtitles, and we are working to create subtitles on five principal languages talked in Europe, Italian English, French, Spanish and German. We are going to launch the platform in Europe with all these subtitles options", anticipate the ITsART CEO.

ITsART is divided into three sections: Stage, Places, Story. The Stage section features more than 250 performing arts shows. The library includes outstanding performances by Maestro Muti, La Scala Theatre, Turin Royal Theatre, La Fenice Theatre, Philarmonic Hall of Trento, San Carlo Theatre, the Fondazione Società dei Concerti, Orchestra and Choir Giuseppe Verdi, the Opera Streaming, the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, and more.

The Places section includes more than 200 exclusive videos, allowing the viewer to travel around Italy from their home, and visit the most iconic places, monuments, museums. Along with a virtual tour of the Archeological Park of Pompei, it will also be possible to visit the Leonardo da Vinci National Science and Technology Museum, the Egyptian Museum, the National Archeological Museum in Naples, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Arts, the Colosseum Archeological Park.

The Stories section includes more than 250 of movies, and exclusive interviews with the most important personalities of the past and the future of the Italian cinema.