In 1999, Fırat Gülgen founded Calinos Entertainment in Los Angeles. He sold telenovelas until 2001 to CIS countries and then transferred the HQ of the company to Turkey, in order to start the global distribution of Turkish dramas and he became the founder of the industry in Turkey.

In 2003, Gülgen signed an output deal with Paramount and Universal Studios to distribute their content in Turkey.

As the pioneer of the industry, he established a joint-venture with Turkey’s main telecommunications operator TURK TELEKOM’s group company and leading ADSL provider TTNET in 2008, and provided full content consultancy management to Turkey’s first IPTV and WEB TV platforms for six years.

Also, he built up Mobile TV service TIVIBU and created a bouquet of more than 200 linear channels with a wide variety including movies, sports, documentaries, kids, life style, news etc. Gülgen, created FilmTivi, branded Pay TV channel for TIVIBU in 2012.

In line with his media business, Gülgen founded Calinos Films, which became the fastest growing film distributor in five years with its library consisting of more than 300 movies.

Up until 2023, Calinos has sold over 112,000 hours of TV programming to more than 105 countries on five continents by distributing more than 200 programmes.

Calinos Entertainment’s mission is to spread joy to global audiences, to make them “enjoy the drama” by enhancing the presence of Calinos dramas on all the platforms, in every country, with the newest content. Calinos’ phenomenal catalogue widens with content created by global producers in addition to Turkish dramas.