Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group announced today that it will acquire Flisxter, the popular website and application for movies and film discovery. The deal also includes Rotten Tomatoes, which specializes in movie ratings and reviews. Talk of an acquisition from Warner Bros. has been ongoing since the beginning of March and will give Warner Bros. access to 25 million unique visitors a month — from Flixster alone.
In a statement, Warner Bros. said that the agreement allows for Flixster to operate independently; the Flixster team will stay in San Francisco and the Rotten Tomatoes team will continue to operate in Los Angeles. But the acquisition will also "expand [Flixster's] services beyond movie discovery to enable digital content ownership."
The company plans to use Flixster for its recently announced Digital Everywhere application, which reportedly would allow consumers to store movies and television shows in the cloud. Digital Everywhere, combined with Warner Bros. support for UltraViolet (a type of DRM which Neowin reported on a couple months back), is giving the company hope that digital media ownership will grow.
"Driving the growth of digital ownership is a central, strategic focus for Warner Bros.," President Kevin Tsujihara said. "The acquisition of Flixster will allow us to advance that strategy and promote initiatives that will help grow digital ownership."
"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."
No comment was made about the purchase price.
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