IMDb TV ditches old horrible name for new, horrible-er name
IMDb TV is dead; you're living in a Freevee universe, now
When the world ends, and we’re thus all called before our creator to account for every single stupid streaming service name humanity allowed to exist on its watch, “IMDb TV” is going to pretty high up on the list of The Bad Ones. The Amazon-owned service—which tried to make a (terrible) name for itself by hosting new episodes of Leverage and old episodes of Mad Men at various points in its lifespan—was clearly a victim of the kind of thinking that suggests that any name that people on the internet recognize is game for cross-promotion. Even if it’s, y’know, just the web site people only ever go to to settle arguments about which Final Destination movie Mary Elizabeth Winstead is in. (Third one, FYI.)
Perhaps acknowledging this, Amazon announced today that it’s changing the name of IMDb TV, dumping that buzz-wordy-, largely meaningless title in favor of its new one… Amazon Freevee!
Jesus Christ.
First off: Let’s just acknowledge how dumb it is that Amazon has been running functionally two different streaming services for a couple of years now: IMDb TV (home mostly to various cheaply licensed syndicated material) and Amazon Prime Video, where most of its big original programming goes. Like, we get that modern tech companies want to get as many straws as they can into our precious data juice, but are they seriously going to make us remember two different logins in order to watch both Bosch and its spinoff, Bosch: Legacy? (Out this year…on Freevee!)
But, secondly: Freevee? That sounds like the name of a streaming service that runs exclusively on dishwashers in the 30 Rock universe. It conveys all the dignity of a hastily flung, dog-slobber-covered Frisbee. It sticks in the memory like a bad bout of food poisoning. It somehow lacks the simple elegance of “Quibi.”
Anyway: IMDb TV is Freevee now. Don’t fight it. Try whispering it to yourself. “IMDb TV is Freevee.” Feel the edges of reality start to fray. You are free now. You are Freevee.
Escape.