The problem wasn't a lack of content. Netflix had more films than anyone could watch in a lifetime. The problem was surfacing: every platform had built its product around watch time and engagement metrics, which meant algorithmically surfacing what was already popular. If you wanted to find Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles on a Friday night, you had to know to search for it. Discovery was dead.
Maarten had a private FTP server that he used to share films with friends. It had grown to about 80 people by late 2018 — journalists, festival programmers, academics, a handful of archive curators. The conversations in the email threads were better than any film discussion forum he'd found online. But the technical setup was a nightmare, rights were murky at best, and it wasn't sustainable.
"We kept emailing each other links and saying 'you have to see this.' We thought: what if we just built the thing we actually wanted to use?"
In early 2019, they licensed a small initial library — 140 films — from three Dutch and Belgian distributors willing to experiment with a subscription model. They wrote their own curation criteria, built a basic streaming interface, and invited the 80 people from Maarten's server plus another 60 from Sofia's network.
By the end of 2019 they had 600 members. They hadn't advertised. People were inviting their own networks.
The invitation-only decision
The hardest decision they made in 2020 was to stay small on purpose. Several early investors suggested that the model could scale — that with a bigger library and a freemium tier, PölderPlay could become a proper competitor to MUBI. Maarten and Sofia declined every offer.
Their reasoning was simple: the quality of the discussion and the sense of community they'd built depended on a certain density of engaged, knowledgeable viewers. The moment you optimise for scale, you optimise for the median user — and the median user doesn't want curator's notes on Hungarian New Wave films from 1970.
The cap they settled on was 5,000 active members. They're currently at 4,800 and admit that they've been "a bit slow" about approving new requests as they approach that number. They're deciding whether to raise the cap or open a second, sister service.
How we license films
PölderPlay licenses directly from rights holders wherever possible — production companies, estates, distributors, and increasingly from filmmakers themselves. They pay a per-stream royalty on most titles rather than a flat licensing fee, which they believe aligns their incentives with getting films watched rather than just acquired.
Their catalogue currently sits at 1,240 titles across feature films, documentaries, and short films. They add 30–40 titles per month and actively remove titles when rights expire or when they feel a film no longer fits what the library is trying to be. That second reason is controversial among members — they've had heated forum discussions about the ethics of removing a film from a library. Sofia's position is that a library with editorial curation is different from an archive, and curation means having opinions.
The team
The full team is nine people: Maarten and Sofia as co-founders and editorial directors; five additional curators with specific regional and genre expertise; one developer (Pieter van der Berg, who has been with them since 2020); and one person handling licensing and rights administration (Anya Kowalczyk, who joined in 2022).
They're based in Rotterdam, in a rented office above a bookshop on Witte de Withstraat. They screen films there on Friday evenings for members who happen to be in town.
Contact
For general questions: hello@polderplay.fun
For membership requests: join@polderplay.fun
For rights and licensing enquiries: rights@polderplay.fun
For press: press@polderplay.fun or see the press kit
Physical address: Witte de Withstraat 14A, 3012 BP Rotterdam, Netherlands
PölderPlay is registered as PölderPlay B.V. (KvK 74829163) in the Netherlands.