FilmFlex is turning its attentions overseas following the launch of a new white label service for EE and the rebranding of its established cable VOD service as Virgin Movies.
“The geographical location doesn’t matter anymore and we can just as easily supply a service to another country as we can to the UK,” Jeff Henry, CEO of the Sony Pictures Television and Disney joint venture, told Broadband TV News. “We’ve taken all of our technical functionality and ported it onto the cloud, so it makes geographical expansion for us a lot easier.”
No longer concerned about pushing its own name to the front, FilmFlex has created EE a combined cinema ticketing, listings, trailers and film download platform as part of its new 4G service.
It brings an additional 27 million customers on top of Virgin Media, HMV and Film 4. “If you go to the sites for each of them, although the content is the same, the way it’s displayed, the traffic’s that driven to it have some elements of editorial discretion about it,” says Henry.
FilmFlex has content deals with some 30 suppliers including all six Hollywood majors, all of the larger independents and boutique suppliers. This allows a current portfolio of around 300 titles. “We work in that window where we have got virtually everything. So when someone comes to us the benefit is they are getting the range of movies.
“The fact we’re able to offer the most new release offer to all of our clients they can then target and fashion their own service and even have elements of it tailored.
It is the tailiored elements that make the differentiation to the service that fools some customers into thinking that the competing services supplied by FilmFlex are actually created by the companies themselves.
Multiscreen is of course not far from FilmFlex’s plans, Henry says the consumer will simply default to the most appropriate screen, often the largest, but what the modern consumer expects from the device and the content.
The switch to Virgin Movies from FilmFlex has largely gone unnoticed, not that this worries the former ITV Consumer boss. “We took a view we were not able to compete as a consumer brand, so I set about enabling all of our brands, and Virgin Media, we wanted them to call their service Virgin Movies, because them getting behind the service.
“We’ll still provide the service, but what’s the point of having a Filmflex brand, when we don’t have the marketing spend of Lovefilm or Netflix. It shouldn’t be positioned as a negative, quite the reverse”.
Henry said he had proposed the change himself and the use of the Virgin brand meant it was now being picked up more often as part of Virgin’s promotional activity.
