A former vice-president of Paramount Pictures and MGM, Peter Kuyper founded MPLC in the US in 1986 after realising the need for rights holders to be remunerated for their audio-visual content being shown publicly.
Peter remains as a Non-Executive Director, continuing to support the business from his decades of sector experience.
Appointed in December 2021, Rory will drive the next stage of growth at MPLC, the world leader in licensing films, TV and other content for public exhibitions across five continents and more than 30 countries.
After spending 18 months in the business as Chief of Staff, he was well placed to lead the team to build a faster-growing, more digitally-minded business with a winning culture.
Launching in the UK in 2004, MPLC has grown to become the largest non-theatrical TV and movie licensing company in the world, largely through its Umbrella Licence that enables licensees to legally show that content publicly. Founder Peter Kuyper’s search for an exit strategy that was right for him and his family’s business led him to Tenzing, a partnership that has so far withstood a pandemic and has international growth firmly in its sights.
A combination of trust, likeability and being people-minded sealed the deal, said MPLC’s Former CEO Mike Weatherley.
Mike Weatherley
Former CEO of MPLC
A swift understanding of the MPLC business while implementing positive change in a collaborative fashion has not only “added value” but “been a breath of fresh air”. According to Mike, the Tenzing approach of asking, “what can we do?”, versus “telling me what to do every day”, has been a welcome surprise.
As MPLC expanded its global reach and grew beyond its origins as a family business; realising some of his investment, with the goal of exiting, increasingly became an attractive option for Founder Peter Kuyper. After considering a range of investment options, including flotation, private equity – and Tenzing – emerged as the perfect fit. MPLC could see Tenzing genuinely means it when we say “grow with us” – an ethos everyone in the company has bought into.
Within the first two months, it was clear that with Tenzing’s support, MPLC had the potential to soar as a business. Even under the strain of a global pandemic, MPLC’s growth strategy has held strong, with all planned growth projects launched, and 2020 revenues exceeding those of 2019. Tenzing has added extra firepower to areas like financial forecasting, staff development and business negotiations. MPLC is now well on its way to achieving its goal of becoming the global de facto standard for non-theatrical licensing.
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