Brief:
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Amazon's IMDbPro paid mobile app for entertainment industry professionals this week will let subscribers keep tabs on actors and film projects at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah with personalized news and notifications, according to an announcement. In July, IMDPro added a Track feature to help follow the latest industry news and to receive notifications in a personalize news feed, Variety reported.
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IMDbPro is the official sponsor of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival Industry Office at Festival Headquarters while the broader IMDb platform will produce four days of exclusive coverage at Sundance. Filmmaker Kevin Smith will conduct on-camera interviews with actors, writers and directors such as Mindy Kaling, Armie Hammer, Demi Moore, Jenny Slate and Zach Galifianakis, among others.
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Industry professionals can also follow IMDbPro on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and take advantage of an app tool for generating custom digital assets to promote their work on social media and other platforms.
Insight:
IMDb’s coverage of the Sundance Film Festival helps to highlight the online TV and movie database’s role in monitoring the latest developments in the entertainment industry. Its IMDbPro service, which costs $19.99 a month or $149.99 a year, has gradually added features to help industry insiders keep tabs on the latest news, including casting notices. IMDbPro, which added an iPhone app in December 2016, tracks 25,000 titles that are still in development and aren’t shown in its free database of more than 5 million titles.
The IMDbPro app points to how Amazon is leveraging mobile to connect entertainment industry professionals as part of its strategy to expand the IMDb brand beyond its core role as a TV and movie database. The e-commerce giant this month launched IMDb Freedive, a free, ad-supported streaming video channel that's available on the company's website and Amazon Fire devices. The channel has movies and TV shows, including IMDb original video series like "The IMDb Show" and "Casting Calls," and doesn't require a subscription. Amazon's launch of IMDb Freedive followed months of reports about the e-commerce giant's plans to create an ad-supported channel amid a broader push into ad sales.
