Fancast wants to be your online one-stop shop for everything from the silver screen to the small screen. It has tens of thousands of free videos, but there's even more under the surface, holding it together and making it even more useful.
The first thing Fancast invites you to do as you enter the site is to watch some of their many free videos, including (as you can see) full TV episodes, movies and trailers. This alone is a pretty impressive library: full episodes of 460 programs from 52 TV networks, and just as many full-length movies.
If a film or show of interest is going to be on TV sometime soon, or is available on-demand through your cable service, Fancast keeps up-to-date TV listings and will tell you where and when you can catch it.
For movies and TV shows that aren't available for free - or to download content rather than rely on streaming video - there's the Fancast Store. There you can download-to-rent or own a variety of videos, with discounts for purchasing whole seasons of shows (including "season passes" for currently running seasons).
And if you come across a movie or show that you'd like to rent but prefer not to download, Fancast will direct you to Netflix and Blockbuster so you can put it in your mail-rental queue. If you'd rather buy the DVD or Blu-ray outright, the site offers the Amazon link to the product.
For movies that are currently in the theaters, Fancast will direct you to Fandango for local showtimes and tickets.
Think about all that: this one site offers you a flexible array of options to access safe, legal content, whether you want to catch it as it airs, get it delivered on-demand, download it to your computer, or receive it in the mail. You can rent or own. And for lots of the video you're looking for, you can watch it streaming right at the site, for free.
So no matter what you're looking for, Fancast is a portal to help you access it. But that's not apparent when you first visit the site. When you first arrive at the front page, there's scant evidence that Fancast has a vast, searchable, fairly easy-to-navigate database of information about the content, cast, crew, and even music of TV shows and movies. But Fancast does.
And if you register a profile at Fancast, then when you browse through shows, movies, cast and crew, you can start rating them and identifying your favorites. Using that information about your preferences--the more you provide, the better--the site makes recommendations for what you should be watching now on live TV, on-demand (including the free videos on Fancast), and in theaters. If you need a reminder when something is going to be on TV, you can just click the "Notify Me" button on its page and you'll get an email ahead of time.
The only content that isn't integrated with the rest of the site is Fancast's set of several blogs about the news and stars of TV and cinema; they're more of a front-page bonus to round out a site about video entertainment.
What Fancast delivers is a ton of content, tied together with an underlying database that helps you find and access the content you want, safely, legally, wherever it may be . . . and often free.
There's money to be made in getting people what they want: Fancast has managed to combine several different business models in one site, with the occasional ad, paid downloads, and tie-ins with other services all contributing. If that's what it takes to support a one-stop shop for viewers to browse, search for and access what they like, we're all for it.
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