Time Warner FTW, Again.

Jeff Bewkes may be guilty of double talk sometimes, but that doesn't mean he isn't a smart guy.  Warner's acquisition of Flixster proves it.  The next phase of Flixster's service will provide a user-friendly interface for people who want to manage their home video collections in the digital cloud, the company's CFO John Martin told an investor conference sponsored by Barclays Capital.  Consumers will be able to "upload your existing physical DVDs, have the ability access them across multiple devices anywhere you want, have the ability to manage your collections with social aspects as well, go in, have friends see what movie collections they have, (and) see who has been watching those films," he says.

On Deadline, there are a few negative comments on how DVDs are dead, and no one is going to want to spend the time to convert their physical DVDs and upload them to the cloud.  While that may be true, I still don't think this is a "lame idea" (sorry, GornCaptain).  The true value in purchasing this service is the access to the mountains of data generated by the sharing, liking, commenting on and posting of films, television shows, trailers, clips, and web series.

For all Hollywood's recent embrace of "social", they've yet to advance beyond a campaign model.  Social efforts and data-collection are film-focused, and the insights learned from each process are thrown out after the film is released on DVD and other platforms.  With each new movie, marketing departments are essentially reinventing the wheel.  Dan Scheinman notes in a post on Cisco's blog a conversation he had with one startup that "said it was fascinating to watch studio CFOs scrutinize the ROI on every campaign as measured by impressions, click through rates, etc, but then walk away from the most valuable assets–the data and the relationship with the consumer–that the social app was generating."

Time Warner's purchase of Flixster gives the company access to the type of rich social media that can be mined to determine future interests.  Flixster is the #1 social movie site on the iOS, Android and Blackberry mobile platforms with 35 million downloads to date. Its sister site, review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, attracts 12 million monthly visitors.  With a targeted consumer base of this size and access to all of its activity, analyst will be able to utilize predictive modelling with frightening accuracy.  And then marketing--freely--to this same rapt audience? I don't have to be a math genius to see there's huge profits to be made.