Fanhattan Aims To Be Go-To Content-Discovery App In Consumer Electronics

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With televisions increasingly capable of IP-delivered video, the cornucopia of content options presents a challenge: How do viewers navigate all of this while maintaining their sanity? That’s where Fanhattan comes in.

A source-agnostic content discovery app for the 10-foot experience, Fanhattan allows users to browse their video options regardless of whether the content come from DVR, VOD or streaming services like Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) or Vudu (live-TV listings are not yet available). Fanhattan also integrates with other apps to deliver companion content to those video options, whether its Rotten Tomatoes reviews or related YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG) videos.

Fanhattan comes from the makers and backers of Bittorrent app Vuze, which is headed by CEO Gilles BianRosa. He has $35 million in financing from NEA, Redpoint Ventures, GreyCroft Partners, BV Capital, and independent investors.

BianRosa is hoping Fanhattan can be to entertainment what Kayak is to the travel industry, a one-stop shop for accessing the increasing number of content aggregators who allow rental and purchase of programming. “The world of content is fairly byzantine to consumers, and it shouldn’t be,” he said.

While BianRosa is hoping to have Fanhattan as the go-to app on televisions, he’s pitching it to original equipment manufacturers who will be able to bake the navigation into existing remote controls because it just requires basic directional buttons to browse. Fanhattan is not announcing any partners yet, but expects to by end of January.

Consistent with its TV ambitions, Fanhattan is an intensely visual design that uses minimal text and goes heavy on images from the movies and TV shows to which it’s facilitating access. The experience will be available on a variety of platforms including a website. It will also be cross-promoted through Vuze’s massive install base of 150 million users, but that’s the extent of their synergy.

Fanhattan goes as far as allowing viewers to bypass the TV entirely and purchase movie tickets at local theaters, as well as serving up merchandise-transaction opportunities relevant to selected content. The business model gives Fanhattan a piece of every transaction that transpires over its completely free platform, though BianRosa indicated a premium layer of features may eventually be added.

To power the metadata for Fanhattan, BianRosa has acquired The Open Movie Database, or TMDb.

Fanhattan enters a crowded field of content-discovery platforms including Clicker, Google TV and Fancast. None go about their business in quite the same way, but one thing’s for sure: This category’s growing ranks may soon necessitate a discovery tool just to sort through all the content discovery options.

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