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.”
