E-Cinema

Watch new films live with the whole world on premiere night, dubbed by AI into your language. An AI concierge books your seat, and PayPal runs every payment, from tickets to studio payouts.

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Inspiration

In Lagos, a new film can be the talk of the city on Friday and still be months away for a fan in Accra, London or Houston. For most of the world, new releases arrive late, in the wrong language, priced in a foreign currency, or never. Piracy fills that gap, and the studios who made the film lose the night that matters most: the premiere.

We asked a simple question. What if a premiere happened once, at the same moment, for everyone on Earth, each viewer hearing the film in their own language and paying in their own currency? That is E-Cinema.

What it does

E-Cinema is a live, worldwide cinema for new releases. Every film premieres once, at one time, for the whole world, then returns as a weekly encore.

For viewers

  • Fair seats, real people. Sign-up checks email, phone and a 5-second face match (Sumsub liveness), and adds a passkey. One person holds one seat, and an account plays on at most two devices, so bots can't buy up premieres.
  • Find and book. Browse premieres by format (movies, anime, K-drama, Nollywood, Bollywood, documentaries), see a countdown, and pay in your own currency.
  • E-Cinema AI, an agent that books for you. Type "two seats for a Nollywood thriller on Sunday, under $15". The agent finds the showtimes, holds the seats for 10 minutes, builds the PayPal order and hands it to you to approve. It never pays without you. It stays under a $25 spending limit unless you say otherwise, it can give seats back, it adds the screening to your calendar, and it can "shop the film".
  • The watch room. Everyone's player is synced to the second. World chat is translated into each viewer's language, with live reactions, polls, watch parties and a 2D or VR cinema (WebXR). Late arrivals get an AI catch-up of what they missed.
  • Your language. AI dubs in 29 languages and AI subtitles for every film.
  • Around the film: gifts, family and kids profiles, a merch shop, community reviews and weekly encores.

For studios

  • A self-serve portal: verify rights, upload the film, set premiere dates and per-country prices (with AI price suggestions), and approve AI dubs line by line.
  • A live control room on premiere night with the audience size, a world heat map and an AI reading of the audience's mood.
  • Piracy protection: every stream carries a viewer code, so a leaked copy traces back to the account. The AI drafts the takedown notice.
  • Studios keep 70% of every ticket, paid out automatically through PayPal Payouts.

For the company: executive dashboards for money, PayPal disputes, uptime, safety and growth, plus switches to turn each payment method on or off.

How we use PayPal

PayPal product What it does in E-Cinema
JavaScript SDK v6 + Orders API v2 Every ticket, gift, pre-order, 18+ unlock, merch order and agent booking. The server sets the price from its own catalogue, creates the order and captures it. The browser never decides the amount.
PayPal Server SDK (@paypal/paypal-server-sdk) All REST calls (orders, captures, refunds) go through PayPal's official TypeScript SDK.
Pay Later Offered on pre-orders and bigger baskets where PayPal supports it.
Subscriptions Pro, VIP, Student and Family plans, with billing plans per currency and monthly or yearly cycles.
Refunds Cancelling a seat refunds the capture. The hold id is the request id, so a double click refunds only once.
Webhooks (signature verified) PAYMENT.CAPTURE.COMPLETED / REFUNDED, CUSTOMER.DISPUTE.* and BILLING.SUBSCRIPTION.* keep seats, plans and the disputes dashboard in step with PayPal.
Payouts After each premiere, a background workflow pays each studio its 70% share. It is idempotent per showing, so a studio is never paid twice.
Disputes Open disputes and their deadlines appear in the executive payments dashboard.

In Nigeria, viewers can also pay in naira with Paystack or Flutterwave. Everywhere else, PayPal is the checkout.

How we use AI

  • Claude (Anthropic), Opus 5.5: the E-Cinema AI booking agent. It uses tool calls (list_showtimes, create_ticket_order, release_hold, add_to_calendar, shop_the_film, my_tickets). The PayPal order is the approval step between the agent and the money.
  • Claude, Sonnet 5.5: dub scripts and subtitles, world-chat and message translation, catch-up summaries for late arrivals, the audience-mood reading in the studio control room, AI price suggestions, Studio AI (answers a studio's questions from its own numbers), takedown notice drafts, student ID and rights document reading, and executive daily briefs.
  • ElevenLabs eleven_multilingual_v2: the voices for AI dubbing.
  • Sumsub: face liveness and ID checks.

How we built it

  • Design first: every page and email was designed in Figma before it was coded, with web, Android, studio, licensee and executive views.
  • Web: Next.js 16 and React 19 (TypeScript). API: Go, with WebSockets for the synced player and chat. Database: PostgreSQL.
  • Hosting: Render (web service, API service, managed Postgres, cron job) in Frankfurt. Render Workflows run the long jobs: AI dubbing, subtitle translation and studio payouts.
  • Media: Cloudflare R2. DNS and security: Cloudflare. Email: Resend.
  • Sponsor tools: APIMatic, AG Grid, Bryntum, Channel3 and Render. Each is described below.
  • Proof on every push: a GitHub Actions job builds the app, creates a real PayPal sandbox order, then asks the AI agent to book two seats and checks that it returns a PayPal order.

Sponsor tools

  • APIMatic: we installed the APIMatic PayPal context plugin (TypeScript guides for client setup, auth, calling endpoints, errors, models and testing). We wrote all our PayPal code against it, using the APIMatic-generated PayPal Server SDK.
  • AG Grid (Enterprise): the "PayPal and agents" executive dashboard, a revenue-by-film grid with PayPal revenue, refund rate, disputes and each studio's 70% payout, filterable by film and studio.
  • Bryntum Calendar: the public release calendar (week, month and agenda views with genre filters) and the week view on the signed-in home page.
  • Channel3: "Shop the film". Inside the watch room and through the AI agent, viewers find real products inspired by the film they are watching.
  • Render: the whole platform runs on Render, with Render Workflows (TypeScript SDK) for dubbing, translation and PayPal payouts.

Challenges we ran into

  • Letting an AI agent touch money safely. We settled on hold, cap, approve: the agent can hold seats and draft a PayPal order, but only the viewer's PayPal approval captures it.
  • One person, one seat without making sign-up painful. Face match plus passkey plus a two-device limit took several tries to get right.
  • Keeping a worldwide audience in sync while each viewer hears a different language track.
  • Paying studios exactly once. Payouts retry on failure, so every payout is keyed to its showing.
  • Local payments. Nigerian cards often fail on foreign checkouts, so naira payments run through local providers next to PayPal.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • It is live at e-cinema.net as a registered company (Online Cinema Ltd, trading as E-Cinema), not a mock-up.
  • 137 pages and 94 API routes, every one designed in Figma first.
  • A real agentic-commerce loop: natural language in, seats held, a PayPal order out, a human approval, and a captured payment.
  • Studios get paid automatically, by PayPal Payouts or local bank transfer, within an hour of the credits rolling.

What we learned

  • PayPal's order model (create, then approve, then capture) is a natural safety boundary for AI agents.
  • Idempotency keys (PayPal-Request-Id, sender_batch_id) are what make retries safe in payments.
  • Typed SDKs and API context for coding agents (APIMatic) cut integration mistakes sharply.

What's next for E-Cinema

  • PayPal Vault for the agent. Viewers save PayPal once, then E-Cinema AI completes small bookings under their own spending cap, with a receipt and one-tap undo.
  • PayPal Agent Toolkit and the PayPal MCP server for our internal agents: a finance agent that reconciles payouts, answers disputes with evidence and flags refund patterns.
  • PayPal Invoicing for merch licensees and group or corporate bookings, and PayPal Donations for the charity stage of the 18+ unlock.
  • Going live: switch from sandbox to live PayPal after a full review, then open the first licensed premieres with partner studios.
  • The Android app (already designed), voice-cloned dubs with lip-sync, and more local payment methods (crypto, bank transfer).
  • Scale: regional media edges so a premiere can hold hundreds of thousands of viewers at once.

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