It seems that Warner Brothers went shopping recently and has closed the deal to buy the Movie Social Media website Flixster.
SanFrancisco Chronical reports:
About ten minutes ago we entered into a definitive agreement for Flixster to be acquired by the Home Entertainment division of Warner Bros.
We’re going to have an all-hands company meeting today to talk through why we’re doing this, what it means for everyone and when we will be distributing the bugs bunny hats. But to answer just a couple of your most pressing questions immediately:
Why are we doing this?
The big strategic vision behind this deal is that Flixster can provide a platform to improve the user experience of owning and watching digital movies from any device – which is a really big deal for the future of the whole movie industry. The plan is to expand all our applications beyond discovery to include digital movie storage and access. However, while we will talk about it less in the press, we also expect to launch a number of new initiatives that will grow our audience and thus our advertising business substantially as well.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/we-just-got-bought-heres-the-internal-memo-from-the-60-million-flixster-sale-2011-5#ixzz1LrvZPOaP
Now Flixster has been seeing a decline in use over the years but still holds a decent amount of a following so I could see why the Brothers Warner would want to acquire the property and remold it into something they can use to deliver digital media.
This is good news for Flixster, and the current staff is remaining un-fired so they are duely excited about this takeover claiming they will still be working with all studios maintaining “strict editorial independence” suggesting the WB ownership will now sway their loyalties.
However, that is what concerns me.
If they develope Flixster into a media sharing portal, allowing legitimate and convenient legal acquisition of digital media, I have no issues with WB playing the distribution game. This is not something new for them.
But its editorial side of things. I have a hard time thinking that an editorial staff can remain objective while a specific studio is signing their paycheques. I understand that keeping the existing editorially neutral review staff helps here, but can they maintain it while “distrubuting the Bugs Bunny hats”. Flixster also owns Rotten Tomatoes, a popular user generated review website.
Would you have faith in the reviews and opinions on this site if you were to find out that WB bought us??
So long as the Tomato aggregator doesn’t change over at RT, I don’t have any huge problems with this. If they do distribution over this, which it seems like they’re trying to do, they’d only be biting themselves in the foot if they make things too WB centric. They have to compete with other services out there, or the $60 million goes down the drain — and I doubt even the WB is willing to flush $60 million down the toilet.
total conflict of interest, Rotten Tomatoes is dead after this.