Vudu Officially Rebranded as Fandango At Home

Vudu, one of the largest and longest-running digital video on demand retailers, has rebranded as Fandango At Home. Fandango, the movie-ticketing giant, actually purchased Vudu back in 2020, but kept its branding in place until yesterday. In February, the company informed fans that Vudu's traditional branding would go away, and that the company would henceforth be known as "Fandango at Home." Before acquiring Vudu, Fandango had their own failed attempt at a digital video platform with FandangoNOW -- a program that had some level of integration with their movie ticketing service. That platform was folded into Vudu shortly after Fandango's initial acquisition of Vudu.

Fandango at Home will, at least for now, keep all Vudu's features alive, most notably their relationship with Movies Anywhere, a platform that allows users to share their movie libraries across various platforms, including Prime Video and Apple. FandangoNOW, like Movies Anywhere, never incorporated TV purchases, and given Fandango's close brand association with theatrical movies, this marks a theoretical expansion of that brand.

The announcement of the rebrand called Fandango at Home "your single destination for movie tickets and home entertainment."

Vudu was founded in 2004, and originally functioned similarly to Roku, with your digital library being accessed through a "Vudu Box" that users could connect to their TV. In 2010, Vudu abandoned the Vudu Box for an app, and shortly after that, Walmart purchased the company. Vudu's "after dark" service, which allowed users to buy adult movies, was folded in order to fit in with Walmart's conservative content policies.

In 2012, Walmart and Vudu teamed with Ultraviolet, and remained partnered with the company until it folded in 2019 to make way for Movies Anywhere (nee Disney Movies Anywhere), which had functionally the same purpose and had started attracting more studio partners than Ultraviolet by then.

For years, Walmart did retail exclusives with Vudu, including notable packages for blockbuster movies like Iron Man 3 and Man of Steel (if you bought those, the icon for those movies in your Fandango at Home library is still different now).

Walmart got out of the digital market in 2020, selling Vudu to Fandango (which itself is jointly owned by Warner Bros. and Universal). Around that time, they also integrated some "free with ads" movies that fans can watch even if they don't own them in their digital locker.