Fourteen seasons: CycleCinemaClub Vienna

Vienna, 2012 to 2026

The CycleCinemaClub was founded in Vienna in 2012 by Andreas Reiter and Alec Hager, with a first screening on Yppenplatz in May 2012; it is the longest-running pedal cinema documented in this corpus ¹. Its fourteenth season runs in 2026: thirteen screenings ran "von Wien bis Villach" — from Vienna to Villach — in 2025, a Burgenland-to-Hungary tour is under way in 2026, with an ORF 2 television feature on 10 July 2026 ^1,2.

The founding configuration

Die Presse documented the founding configuration: screen, amplifier, two loudspeakers, projector, laptop, cabling and "massig Akkus" — masses of batteries, so that power does not dip while one rider dismounts and the next mounts — carried on three to five converted e-bikes, rebuilt by students at a technical college so that their motors serve as generators, with the whole cinema moved between venues by cargo bike ³. The word "massig" is the operator's description of scale, not a number; the buffer's capacity is not disclosed.

250 watts, 50–60 per rider

Two pieces of Austrian journalism converge on the load. Die Presse: "Benötigt werden für Filmprojektor und Verstärker übrigens etwa 250 Watt. Sehr sparsame Geräte… 'einen Wasserkocher oder einen Toaster könnte man damit nicht betreiben'" ("Film projector and amplifier need about 250 watts, by the way. Very frugal devices… 'you couldn't run a kettle or a toaster with it'") ³. Biorama supplies the per-rider half: "Der CycleCinemaClub verwendet einen Beamer und Lautsprecher, die mit sparsamen 250 Watt auskommen. … Jeder Radler erzeugt etwa 50 bis 60 Watt, also kommen die Kinos mit zehn bis zwölf aktiven Teilnehmern locker aus." ("The CycleCinemaClub uses a projector and loudspeakers that manage with a frugal 250 watts. … Each cyclist generates about 50 to 60 watts, so the cinemas manage comfortably with ten to twelve active participants.") ⁴

Both figures are press-reported, from journalism quoting the operators, not instrumented. The arithmetic holds: 250 watts served by roughly five riders pedalling at a time out of a rotating pool of ten to twelve matches the 50-to-60-watt rider in Germany's KLAK manual and the 40 to 50 watts Electric Pedals' founder gives for an average adult ⁵. KLAK reaches the same design point with a purpose-built LiFePO4 pack and a published manual; no published guide to the Vienna conversion was located.

What the conversion involves

Stock mid-drive motors and geared hubs contain internal freewheels that disconnect the pedals from the motor in both directions, so an unmodified e-bike clamped to a stand generates nothing, and forcing generation by reverse-charging a stock battery through its controller risks destroying the controller and, at the battery, a fire. CycleCinemaClub's machines are workshop conversions: direct-drive-capable hub motors run as bare generators with the factory control architecture removed, and the bikes' own batteries repurposed as buffer rather than as pedal assistance. What e-bike hardware contributes to a pedal cinema is storage, not generation — a pre-charged, undamaged, factory-grade battery pack discharged through its own protected terminals.

London Fire Brigade recorded 206 e-bike and e-scooter fires in 2025, and UK product-safety notifications attribute 45% of such fires to post-market conversion kits ^6,7. The club's conversions sit on the other side of that line: motors stripped to bare generators, batteries discharging as their manufacturer intended.