Fandango is announcing the first partnership that will see its movie ticketing capabilities embedded on Internet-connected TVs.
Mark Young, the vice president of mobile strategy and business development at NBCUniversal (which owns Fandango), said that the service has been available on smart TVs before this, but consumers had to actually download it. Thanks to a deal with Samsung, Fandango will now be directly integrated into the Samsung Smart Hub.
Essentially, Fandango will be powering the Trailers section of the Hub’s Movies & TV section. That’s not exactly what I would have expected, since Fandango is best-known as a ticketing service — sure, it will offer ticketing capabilities as well, but that’s not what it’s leading with. Young described it as the “branded storefront for all movie trailers,” comparing the approach to music video site Vevo.
Although the announcement, which is being made at the Consumer Electronics Show, is the first of its kind for Fandango, Young said the team has been looking beyond ticketing for some time, for example with the launch of original video series FrontRunners and Weekend Ticket.
“We believe Fandango as the movie discovery brand has an opportunity to work with not just consumer electronics manufacturers but also other types of over-the-top delivery services,” he said, later adding, “It’s a definite strategy for us to be more forward-leaning in video as content discovery.”
The embedded capabilities are supposed to launch in the first quarter of 2014.
A few weeks ago, Fandango also announced that 2013 was the best year in its decade-plus history in terms of total ticket sales, visitor traffic, and mobile app downloads.
