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Epix Provides "Free" HD Studio Content Via TV and Internet
It looks as though the movie studios are at least trying to learn from past failures and others' success with the upcoming launch of Epix (beta starts today), an HD television channel and accompanying online 720p service. The good part about this service is, if you are lucky enough to have a television provider who decides to become a partner, you wont have to pay extra to get it. The main downside, of course, is if your cable company decides not to plug this service in you will have no way to subscribe. "Like Hulu, the Epix movie service is a joint venture formed by the content owners; in this case, the service is powered by the movie studios Lions Gate, Paramount, and MGM. The Epix TV network will air movies that are in the "pay-TV" window — those weeks before a film appears on DVD in which it is available on pay-per-view or HBO, among others."
Why would they do this? This is going to compete against both pay-per-view/HBO and DVD sales/rentals, both of which bring in real revenue. Are they really betting the ad revenue from Epix will offset that loss? Or are they simply trying to attract attention without a business model?
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1. Cable companies make money on pay-per-view. This product would provide the same movies for free to subscribers, and would probably cost cable companies themselves to offer it. Given that cable companies are in the business of making money, it would seem like they have every reason to avoid this.
2. The article says that Netflix isn't a viable outlet for the studios because it doesn't have many new releases.
"the real question is why the studios would launch their own distribution network instead of just offloading the films to partners already equipped to handle them? Rensing insists that the services are just too different. While Hulu does offer some films, it's focused almost exclusively on TV at the moment and is ad-supported. Netflix On Demand doesn't have access to the same super-recent hit titles." [FTFA, no edits]
How is that a reason? The studios don't let Netflix stream the new movies. That's not a distribution system issue, it's a policy decision by these very studios. It's just sloppy reporting, I guess. It should just say "The studios don't want to use Netflix On Demand."
we can all say, "Epix Fail!"
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Is this really a good idea?
Upsides:
No fees listed on cable bill
Can stream to computer or watch HD channel directly
No ads
Downsides:
Service is -not- free. Only way to get it is for your Cable provider to subscribe and pass that cost on to every single subscriber, whether they want it or not, as part of their standard cable bill.
This could be a nice service, if you could sign up for it as an individual and it was reasonably priced. I can't see how it could possibly be reasonably priced, though, since they are putting up movies that compete with rentals and PPV. Unless, of course, it's only old crappy movies, and then it's crap you could watch anyhow, but with ads.
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Did anybody else notice the binary block in their front page's HTML code ( 01010111011001010010011101110010 01100101001000000110111001101111 00100000011100110111010001110010 01100001011011100110011101100101 01110010011100110010000001110100 01101111001000000110110001101111 01110110011001010000110100001010 01011001011011110111010100100000 01101011011011100110111101110111 00100000011101000110100001100101 00100000011100100111010101101100 01100101011100110010110000100000 01100001011011100110010000100000 01110011011011110010000001100100 011011110010000001001001)? It translates to "We're no strangers to love You know the rules, and so do I"