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Pay-Per-View to Provide DVD After Viewing?
Anonymous Coward writes to tell us that Comcast is entertaining an idea that would allow digital cable customers to purchase a pay-per-view movie for roughly $17 that would also include a hard copy in the mail a few days later. From the article: "The only snafu in the entire idea is the fact that only 40% of Comcast cable subscribers have the required digital box at this point in time. But still, that is 40% of 21 million customers which is not too bad. DirecTV and Dish, are you listening?"
They should just put DVD burners in the Cable Boxes and save postage.
Ignore Alien Orders
If you watch it, and find out it sucks, can you cancel the order/send the hard copy back? How much do they charge you, then?
if it's in the normal DVD packaging then you could leave it unopened and resell if you didn't like the movie. but if it's a cheap copy with their own branding then I think it costs too much. if you're the type of collector who is proud of their collection you wouldn't want this, and if you don't care about your collection the hard copy wouldn't matter too much either.
however it turns out at least it's something new.
This sounds like a great idea to me. I've often watched a movie on PPV and wished afterwards I had purchased the hard copy. The best thing is that it sounds like they're selling the DVD at a reduced rate.
My lame blog.
...Pay-Per-View comes out after the DVD release, so everyone who wants the DVD for home viewing probably would have it by then. I can't really see the point to this.
I don't get it.
The only way I would ever find this useful, is if the option to purchase w/ a DVD copy would come *AFTER* you've watched the movie. That way you can tell if it's worth getting a hard copy.
i.e. You purchase the movie for $3.95 or whatever, at the end of the movie, you're prompted to purchase a discounted hardcopy at 13.05 ($17 - $PPV).
This is the only way I see it to be useful, otherwise you wind up with the same 'But I don't want to pay for a shitty movie' problem.
You pay $3 bucks to watch it; if you like it, you can upgrade at the end to a "hard" copy.
Or $3 to watch it, $10 to burn your own, or $17 to have a "good" copy sent to you (some of us don't realllly trust BYO DVDs to last, having had media/upgrade problems in the past).
Face it, people are stupid, and the internet is the place where they all meet.
I am willing to bet that if this goes into place, people will start buying DVDs that they would not normally want to own and will probably bypass going to see movies in the theater altogether. For instance, how many people would probably PPV & buy M. Knight Shyamalan's 'The Village' rather than just rent it or see it once in the theater? After seeing that so-so movie, I don't think I would want to own it on DVD, but if given that option when I first saw it, I might.
People may just buy the DVD and own it through PPV, rather than go to the movie theater/store and deal with the hassle. Even if the movie is not that great, people will still purchase the DVD anyway as a convenient alternative to going to the local movie rental store or theater. The DVD then would sell at a greater profit, since it may not otherwise sell at full price or would just sit in inventory.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Hold the press, folks!!! Comcast actually gets it.
They're going to take a business model (Pay Per View), add value by giving more to the consumer, rather than less (the ability to purchase the DVD), and deliver it at market prices.
You know, it's nice to see a company that actually wants to do business. Sure, you're paying top dollar prices for the media, but most movies you can buy on pay per view are new enough to still be charging premium prices anyway.
If they're smart, they'll offer the option to buy the media after the movie has been seen as well. (For all those users who will want a copy after seeing how great a movie is.) I can think of a number of times when a movie I've seen once has turned out to be a must-own. For example, Fight Club. The movie wasn't about what public perception thought it was about. As soon as I saw it, I knew I would watch it many times, and so bought it
It's about time a company came up with a mutualy beneficial product for customers rather than the take-em-for all their worth.
If I have to pay $17 for a PPV movie, I'm not likely to use it. If I pay $4 for one, and have the option to shell out another $13 after it for the DVD, thats something I'd use. Thats a try-before-I-buy sort of option.
:)
Comcast is definitely a company that "gets it" though. The on-demand works well, they're pushing out more and more HD content. 5+mbit cable modems, etc. If they could only get reasonable software on the digital PVR cable boxes, I wouldn't even be entertaining a switch to satellite. That and if they got Universal HD, so I could see BSG in HD
Which part of burning downloaded DVD's is legal?
I have no sig yet I must scream.
On one hand we have companies like this trying to extend our view time of their media by sending us a hardcopy to watch later.
Then we have twits trying to make self-destructing DVDs that only work for a couple days before turning into coasters.
They need to collectively make up their mind.
It seems to be a case of them not wanting to charge for the media, but wanting to charge for each viewing of the media. Yet another in the endless examples of why the concept of "licensing" sucks.
Though i suppose in 20 years every video the consumer can get will be pay-per-view. What a mess.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I think this is too expensive. Here's why. The majority of people that watch a movie Pay-Per-View do not go out and buy the movie, nor do they watch it on Pay-Per-View again. Now there are always exceptions - people that really like a specific movie so they go out and buy it. However for most it is about watching something new and different, not watching the same movie over and over (think about how many movies you've rented from the movie store more than once).
So the extra cost is pure profit for Comcast and the movie producers. It's another a way of getting someone to commit to buy a movie before they've watched it - before they find out it is another one of the mindless, forgettable flick comprising 95% of what Hollywood produces these days.
Why do you think they've started premiering movies world-wide? So as many people can see it as possible before negative word of mouth spread, reducing ticket sales. This is similar, but more on an individual scale.
Now if they put a burner in their box, and let the customer burn their own copy for say $5 extra, then that would be reasonable.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
If Apple sent me a CD when I bought an album from ITMS, I would buy all my music from them.
"They're going to take a business model (Pay Per View), add value by giving more to the consumer, rather than less (the ability to purchase the DVD), and deliver it at market prices."
That would be a terribly interesting feat indeed - to some how arrive at a market price on a monopoly (though copyright) good. Make no mistake, even though some DVDs are less than others they are still maximizing profit by leverging their monopoly power by pricing the product to gain maximum profit given the demand *for each type of DVD*. This is not (free) market pricing, it is monopoly price discrimination.
Do you really believe that the "cost" of the DVD depends on things like DVD burning, stamping, cover art, and a box? There's usually a multi-million dollar film to be made before any of that can happen. Cutting out burning and packaging costs would save the consumer almost nothing.
Circuit City's divx program did this - after purchasing your 48 hour disc, if you enjoyed it you could "purchase" it and fully unlock any time constraint DRM built into the system.
For $17 one could easily go through 10 movies a month at Netflix. Granted you don't get to keep a hard copy unless you burn one. Walmart has shelves of it's movies at $9.
I suppose there's a market. This might appeal to a single mother who wants a copy of a Disney movie for her kids (assuming they're shown on PPV) or Spiderman. If someone only wants one movie a month I guess it's okay. But at two movies that's $34, three is 50+. I suspect this is going to get real expensive for some households real fast. But, then again, these are households that are already spending $90 a month for cable in the first place.
What interests me the most about this article is how Comcast plans on delivering the movie. Will they keep a large inventory of DVD's in a warehouse, ready to ship to the customer (incur carrying costs), partner with another company that can ship the movie such as Amazon, or just have the movie drop shipped from the manufacturer? I think those would be the three most logical choices but all have their own unique hurdles. I really couldn't imagine Comcast keeping inventory of the movies they show on PPV but it seems like the best route to me if they truly wanted to offer this service. Just keep checking Ebay for a user named "Comcast" selling 100,000 copies of 13 Going on 30.
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They should just have a "Buy DVD" button attached to every television show, movie, superbowl advertisement collection, movie preview collection, whatever. DVDs are so cheap these days, with that kind of volume and throwing in a few ads, you could probably charge a lot less than retail.
Actually... maybe they shouldn't. That might be something too tempting for me.
E pluribus unum
My concern is what kind of DVD it would be. I don't mean factory-pressed versus DVD-R. I mean, it is the same kind of DVD that I would see in the retail store or is it some kind of Comcast-branded version?
More than that, the majority of pay-per-view that I see is in pan-and-scan/open-matte format. For example, if a movie was intended to be seen in 2.35:1 widescreen, that's how I want the DVD. Since most pay-per-view that I've seen is 1.33:1 (and a few 1.77:1 here and there), would the DVD be in its intended 2.35:1 aspect ratio or would it be in the pay-per-view 1.33:1/1.77:1 AR?
Same with audio. If a movie is Dolby Digital 5.1 or DTS but the PPV version is two-channel, is the DVD going to be in the intended audio format or the PPV format?
The article didn't mention how these particular issues would be handled and it needs to be a concern, not only for those of us who want to see movies in the way that the film makers intended but also for the opposite. What if someone who doesn't like widescreen watches a pan-and-scan/open-matte PPV movie then receives a widescreen DVD? What if someone who tolerated the non-widescreen version on PPV expects to get the widescreen DVD and instead gets the pan-and-scan/open-matte (euphemistically called "full frame") version? Will customers be given the option of the widescreen or P&S/OM version?
Unfortunately, TFA doesn't address these issues. I think that a lot of people will want to know this before they decide whether it's a good thing or not. This is an idea that we in the home theatre community have discussed for several years; but Comcast needs to make its customers very aware of what kind of DVD they will be getting or else Comcast risks getting a lot of complaints and returns.
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