Turner Networks has made its anticipated move into subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) streaming, announcing a new service, launched in partnership with the Criterion Collection, aimed at film buffs.
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As Turner’s first over-the-top TV offering in the U.S., FilmStruck will go after a younger audience – one that has become accustomed to getting movies through streaming video services such as Netflix and Amazon.
Turner says pricing for FilmStruck is still being determined.
He said FilmStruck will have a stream of exclusive original content and archival discoveries, as well as continual access to more than 1,000 films from the Janus Films library. The streaming movie service Tribeca Shortlist, which comes from Lionsgate and Tribeca Enterprises (the Tribeca Film Festival org), is also touting its own movie streaming service’s quality and curation as its advantage over Netflix, for example. Its library will also pull from other studios, such as the Janus Films library.
Specific titles announced for the new service include Seven Samurai, A Hard Day’s Night, A Room With a View, Blood Simple, My Life As a Dog, Mad Max, Breaker Morant and The Player. “FilmStruck is…tailor-made for the diehard movie enthusiast who craves a deep, intimate experience with independent, foreign, and art house films”.
By offering content not found on those channels, Breland believes that Turner can get that group to take on another monthly fee.
But Coleman Breland, president of TCM and Turner Content Distribution, said it would be programmed to appeal to passionate and knowledgeable film fans of any age. FilmStruck will be managed by Turner Classic Movies. “Working with TCM’s programming team, we’ll present a broad, constantly changing cross-section of Criterion titles on FilmStruck, a platform designed from the start to present films with the kind of robust supplemental features that Criterion is known for”.
Some of Criterion’s titles will be available through the basic service, but the rest of them will only be available on a “premium service” called the Criterion Channel.
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That makes these film-only movie services with limited selections niche competitors at best.
