Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group Buys Flixster

BURBANK: Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group has signed a deal to acquire the movie service Flixster, including the assets of the film website Rotten Tomatoes.

Flixster, founded in 2006, is used by more than 25 million people each month. The services include the destination websites Flixster.com and RottenTomatoes.com, as well as apps on Facebook, MySpace, iGoogle, iPhone, BlackBerry and Android-powered devices. The communities provide comprehensive movie information, including a database of more than 250,000 films, 2.3 billion user reviews, 500,000 critic reviews and 35,000-plus trailers and videos. Flixster will continue to operate independently and the Flixster team will stay in San Francisco and the Rotten Tomatoes team will continue to work in Los Angeles.

There are plans to expand the service beyond movie information to enable digital content ownership and delivery across connected devices. Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group will launch a number of initiatives surrounding the Flixster brand. It will be part of the recently announced consumer application Digital Everywhere, positioned as the one-stop destination for consumers to organize and access their entire digital library on any device of their choice.

"Driving the growth of digital ownership is a central, strategic focus for Warner Bros.," said Kevin Tsujihara, the president of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group and Office of the President at Warner Bros. Entertainment. "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."