Trouble for Tivo and NetFlix Partnership?

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday September 9, 2004 @08:50AM from the to-good-to-be-true dept.

lucabrasi999 writes "Well, things may not not be as good for the potential joining up of Netflix and Tivo as once thought. Herb Greenberg, of CBS Marketwatch has a commentary which hints that this deal may not be as great as it once appeared. Why? In short, distribution rights. It appears that Netflix may not legally distribute all of the movies in it's library via Tivo. As a side note, Netflix may also be feeling some economic pressure. It now forces all cancellations occur by phone, making it more difficult to cancel because of a long hold time."

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I was kind of wondering... by the_skywise · 2004-09-09 09:01 · Score: 5, Interesting

how NetFlix was going to be allowed to basically do P2P distribution of movies... even if it was completely secure and paid for. The Publishing houses (Disney, Paramount, Choam, Fox) go to great lengths to control their content viability. Especially Disney which cycles content in and out of the market to keep demand as high as possible. A download library like Netflix would take alot of that power to create market-hype out of the hands of the publishers.
(Though I still think it's a cool idea and properly setup could work around those concerns...)