Warner Bros. acquires Flixster, Rotten Tomatoes

[Emil]

Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group today announced an agreement to acquire Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes. Under the terms of the deal, the two will continue to operate independently and will expand their services beyond movie discovery to enable digital content ownership and delivery across any connected digital device. The Flixster team will stay in San Francisco and the Rotten Tomatoes team will continue to work autonomously in Los Angeles.

Flixster is a popular movie discovery platform, with over 25 million worldwide users per month. It is considered the number one movie discovery application on mobile platforms with over 35 million downloads to date. Rotten Tomatoes is one of the most trusted and influential brands in movie reviews and news, with 12 million unique visitors per month. In January 2010, Flixster acquired Rotten Tomatoes. Now both are owned by Warner Bros.

Warner Bros. plans to use the Flixster brand and technical expertise as a launch pad for a number of initiatives designed to grow digital content ownership. One of these is called "Digital Everywhere," a studio-agnostic application for consumers who want to organize and access their entire digital library from anywhere on any device, as well as to share recommendations and discover new content.

"We're thrilled that Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group shares our vision for how 'anytime, anywhere' digital entertainment can become an amazing user experience," said Joe Greenstein, co-founder and CEO of Flixster. "We're excited that Warner was willing to make this kind of commitment to a leading independent consumer platform. We look forward to working with Warner as well as each of the other studios to innovate and build products that users will love."

I frequently use the Flixster app on my BlackBerry, which includes movie ratings from Rotten Tomatoes. Its main purpose for me is to simply check which movies are playing in what theatre, so I don't ever use it for more than just for a few minutes. Have you used either Flixster or Rotten Tomatoes, and what do you make of the Warner Bros. purchase?

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https://www.techspot.com/news/43641-warner-bros-acquires-flixster-rotten-tomatoes.html

 

[Darkshadoe]

Correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn't acquiring Rotten Tomatoes be a conflict of interest since they review movies?

 

[CamaroMullet]

darkshadoe said:
Correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn't acquiring Rotten Tomatoes be a conflict of interest since they review movies?

I was thinking the same exact thing. WTH?

 

[gwailo247]

"I think this WB movie is great!. [Disclaimer: WB signs my paychecks.]"

 

[Per Hansson]

Well, Rotten Tomatoes just compiles reviews done by other people, most of them not in any way affiliated with Rotten Tomatoes to begin with...
But yea, it feels kinda uneasy, but still they gotta make the site go around, with that kind of traffic they are paying allot in servers and tech people I can tell you!

As for the Rotten Tomatoes site itself I love it, I use it several times per week to look up on movies, to know if they are worth watching or not...

 

[Guest]

RT is dead now as a reliable source of non partisan reviews.. then they have the audacity to claim they won't interfere with the reviews.. why would you feel the need to buy it in the first place if you didn't want control over the review process..

 

[Guest]

I guess it's a good time to start a new RT website as know one will be using that one anymore.

 

[Emin3nce]

Greeeaaaat, biased reviews incoming.

 

[gwailo247]

Per Hansson said:
Well, Rotten Tomatoes just compiles reviews done by other people, most of them not in any way affiliated with Rotten Tomatoes to begin with

Very true that was about the only bright side of the story, but they may start deciding whose reviews they do and don't compile.

I felt a lot more comfortable with Amazon buying IMDB, as Amazon sold all the movies regardless of how good or bad they were, but if IMDB was bought by Fox or Disney, it would have been a different story.

 

[princeton]

Just read eberts review if you really want an unbiased source of info about a movie.

 

[treetops]

Yeah this is bullshit, well that's what I thought on first impression and it may be true. But this also simply might allow a upgrade from the RT site so we can buy and download movies right after rotten tomatoes or order netflix movies from there. Trusting rich people not to try and dupe the masses to make more money is very hard. I will be looking for a new review site.