Google To Acquire fflick For $10 Million
Back in August we wrote about a neat service called fflick that looked to harness Twitter to power a movie sentiment and recommendation engine, with an added dash of colorful style. Now the service is getting two big thumbs up from Google …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's move on movies is not new: the company was eyeing the big screen back in 2005, and last month it laid out plans to expand and market its movie streaming service through 2011. Buying fflick adds the missing layer — real-time audience reaction.
fflick built a Twitter-powered movie sentiment and recommendation engine, launching only months ago in August 2010. A $10 million price tag for a young team with no revenue line points at acqui-hire economics: Google is paying for the data pipeline and the people who built it, not a business.
First-order effects
- fflick's founders and its Twitter-sentiment technology join Google, giving the company a live read on what audiences think of films as they talk about them on Twitter.
- The deal lands the same week Eric Schmidt hands the CEO role to Larry Page and Google commits to 1,000 new hires in Europe — small by Google standards, but one more bet placed during a leadership transition.
Second-order effects
- Sentiment data becomes ammunition for Google's planned 2011 movie streaming push: recommendations driven by what Twitter is actually saying, rather than editorial reviews alone, put pressure on incumbent review aggregators and recommendation engines.
- Twitter-derived analytics startups become visible acquisition targets, and Twitter itself gains leverage — every buyer of this data deepens dependence on its firehose.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, entertainment distribution consolidates around platforms that own both the storefront and the social signal — discovery, sentiment, and purchase in one loop rather than separate businesses.
- Social data starts functioning as market research infrastructure for studios and distributors, shifting some power from critics' reviews toward whoever can parse the conversation at scale.
The trend: Entertainment platforms are absorbing real-time social sentiment engines so that discovery, reaction, and purchase sit inside a single owned loop.