One thing Flixster has managed to do over the course of the past four years is to evolve its product to match consumer demand. Flixster started as a destination site, made the leap to build on top of other social platforms like Facebook and MySpace when that was an emerging trend and then quickly transitioned to mobile. The company's nimble reinvention strategy has worked -- Flixster is now a profitable and expects to break even in 2010.
To date, Flixster has raised a little less than $9 million from angel, Series A and Series B rounds of investments. Greenstein says the startup is not looking for additional funding at this time.
But, are they looking to be acquired? That's seems to be a negative for right now. In fact, rumors that MySpace would buy Flixster were blown out of proportion, a mixup that Greenstein attributes to the assumption that Flixster's frequent talks with News Corp. were MySpace-related when they in fact were about the Rotten Tomatoes deal.
The Future is Mobile
Mobile has been huge for Flixster. Greenstein details that the iPhone has been the company's most successful platform, though in recent months he has seen Android bubble up in terms of importance. Today, Flixster downloads on Android are on par with iPhone downloads.
The company also projects massive Flixster adoption on tablet devices. Flixster's completely reworked iPad app has been downloaded more than 600,000 times since release. "We designed it from scratch around the idea that the iPad is a browsing and discovery device," Greenstein says.
That approach is paying off handsomely. iPad app users are proving to be Flixster's power users and are using it much more heavily than other mobile apps. Greenstein hopes to further cater to this content consumption crowd with a new 2.0 version of the app coming soon.
At some point, though, one has to wonder: is Flixster's growth on mobile devices sustainable? To that question, Greenstein responds by pointing to research showing that overall smartphone penetration is still quite low -- Italy has the highest penetration of smartphones at just 28%. This means that Flixster is poised to capitalize on the huge number of users expected to switch from feature phones to smartphones as they become cheaper and more accessible.
Plus, mobile growth is where the money is. "Direct brand advertising is up 300% in the last year, and there's ton of interest from advertisers in mobile products," Greenstein says.
Flixster's Small and Big Picture
Mobile innovation will help Flixster continue to grow, but the company also has designs to graduate and become the brand that most consumers use to discover and make decisions about the movies they see. Flixster's NCM Media Networks arrangement will go a long way to drive home brand awareness, but the company will also make a push for your living room attention as well.
Just recently, Flixster launched a channel on Roku set top boxes. That channel is essentially just a simple application that lets users watch movie trailers on their TVs, but it is already the number one downloaded channel on Roku.
Greenstein wouldn't disclose any specifics, but he did talk about connected TVs from the perspective of a savvy entrepreneur salivating over the next big platform. With that in mind, we can only make the educated guess that the Flixster experience will be carried over to Internet-connected television sets and even more set top boxes. Soon enough, Flixster will be everywhere.
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