Flixster
Flixster was an American social-networking movie website for discovering new movies, learning about movies, and meeting others with similar tastes in movies, currently owned by parent company Fandango. The formerly independent site, allows users to view movie trailers as well as learn about new and upcoming movies at the box office. It was originally based in San Francisco, California and was founded by Joe Greenstein and Saran Chari on January 20, 2006. It was also the former parent company of Rotten Tomatoes from January 2010 to February 17, 2016.[2] On February 17, 2016, Flixster, including Rotten Tomatoes, was acquired by Fandango.[3]
Type of business
Social networking service
January 20, 2006
February 20, 2018 (USA)
October 31, 2019 (Internationally)
Joe Greenstein
Saran Chari
Film, social networking
75
January 20, 2006
History[edit]
In February 2016, Fandango acquired Flixster[3] and began migrating Flixster Video users to its competing service called FandangoNow, closing the Flixster Video service.[4] On August 28, 2017, Flixster shut down its digital redemption and streaming video service and directed customers to use Vudu.[5] On December 22, 2017, the company sent an email to customers saying that it would cease all operations in the U.S. as of February 20, 2018. Starting in late January 2018, visitors to Flixster.com were encouraged to download the Flixster app or were redirected to Fandango.com. They were also directed to continue watching videos and redeeming digital codes via Vudu.
In February 2018, the Flixster website was no longer functioning and directed users to Fandango.com. Flixster Video's website and mobile apps, including UltraViolet code redemption, streaming, and downloading services are still available in various other countries, such as Canada. Flixster account holders would later have any of their purchased content sent to its competitor Vudu.
In June 2019, Flixster announced that it will shut down its streaming video services in all countries that Flixster Video operates outside of the U.S. on October 31, 2019, due to the shutdown of UltraViolet. Customers in these areas were asked to transfer their content to Google Play, although Flixster warned users that due to rights restrictions, not all videos purchased on a Flixster library would be transferable depending on country.[6]
Marketing practices[edit]
Flixster's growth was described in the trade press as attributable to "its aggressive viral marketing practices,"[17] including "the automated selection of your email account's entire address book in order to send a Flixster invitation to all of your contacts."[17] Although company claimed this procedure was an industry standard used by other services, Flixster differed in that its system automatically selected all contacts in the user's address book and required the user to manually un-select each address to prevent email from being sent to a user. Cofounder Joe Greenstein described the difference between Flixster and other sites as: "We make it easy to invite your friends. Other sites don't provide good ways for people to spread the word."[17]
As a consequence of its policy of emailing users' entire address books with advertisements for the site, the website was criticized on numerous Internet blogs.[18] At one time, email from Flixster to Hotmail users was being filtered and deleted as spam.[19]