Versant wants to battle Tubi, Pluto and Roku Channel in a bid for free streaming scale.
The media company is overhauling its free streaming service, dropping the “Fandango At Home” branding in favor of a streamlined “Fandango” name, and adding a slew of new content and features as it seeks to grow a meaningful streaming business.
Fandango, of course, may be best known as the movie ticket service, selling tickets to new release films across the country. It also has a robust PVOD offering, renting out films that recently left theaters to users at home. The free streaming service is more nascent, but Versant executives say that simply by quietly ramping up the content in recent weeks, the service’s engagement has quietly been rising.
This week, the company will roll out a full-fledged marketing effort under the tagline “We Love Free” to try and drive users to the rebooted offering, which Versant president of entertainment Val Boreland says will have a 20 percent-plus increase in the number of titles and hours available to stream, including 3,500 hours of Versant-owned content.
“We have many hours of content, but now we’re focusing on increasing the quality of content we have,” Boreland says in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “So we’re really focused on growing our premium content library. We’re curating with hit movies and fan favorite franchises, popular television series. We’ll also have sports programming.”
That sports programming will include Bundesliga, Germany’s top soccer league, which inked a deal with USA Sports on Tuesday. It’s safe to assume other sports will eventually follow. Boreland says that the service will ultimately also have original entertainment fare as well, though Versant will take its time to do so. “We’ll build a slate that’s rooted in our own IP and complemented by programming that aligns with what we what we know our audiences will be looking for,” she says.
According to Will McIntosh, Versant’s president of digital platforms, the explosive growth of other free streaming platforms was a big part of why the company is choosing to invest in the space.
“Obviously the market has been validated by some of the largest players, Tubi probably most prominently in that,” he says, also noting the success of Pluto and Roku Channel, among others.
But Versant plans to lean into Fandango’s brand identity of new and recent theatrical films to help stand out, as well as its millions of consumers who have accounts to purchase movie tickets or movies at home.
“What we think differentiates us from all those different players is that we have this theatrical-adjacent brand that no one else has,” McIntosh says. “Any given month we have 50 million consumers who visit either Fandango or Rotten Tomatoes to figure out what they want to watch, whether that is at the movies or at home, and will lean into those as a megaphone.”
“Where Fandango has a unique advantage is that we can bring audiences in through recent theatrical releases,” adds Boreland. “That’s something that the others don’t really get to take advantage of with our movie library, that offering that we have.”
Suffice it to say visitors to those websites or apps will be encouraged to check out the revamped streaming service.
And the company is pouring resources into an enhanced product offering too, from content recommendations to ad tech.
“From an advertising perspective our goal is to have a better experience than what people have today, lower ad loads and ad units and experiences that don’t detract from consumption,” says McIntosh.
“We’re going to invest in a very strong recommendation strategy that will help people find the next thing that they love and keep them engaged within the Fandango ecosystem,” adds Boreland. “So in some ways, it’s similar to what platforms like a Pluto or Tubi have done, but where Fandango has an advantage is the relationship we already have with millions of transactional customers.”
Longer-term, the goal is to turn Fandango into the heart of Versant’s streaming strategy, at least for entertainment and sports, a strategy that will ultimately impact the company’s larger entertainment output.
“We definitely have obligations to our pay-TV ecosystem, but I also think that windowing is really going to be where we use our strategy to the fullest,” Boreland says. “Not everything needs to be on Fandango right away, but it does need to be there at some point. We’re also not precious about it living on a third-party platform as well. If our biggest concern is bringing awareness to our content and getting it in front of as many eyeballs as possible wherever that should be, a priority for us is building this Fandango AVOD service, so you will see all of our content eventually end up on that on that platform in some windowing strategy.”
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