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Film Studios May Block DVD Rentals For One Month
Ponca City, We love you writes "The LA Times reports that in an effort to push consumers toward buying more movies, some major film studios are considering a new policy that would block DVDs from being offered for rental until several weeks after going on sale. Under the plan, new DVD releases would be available on a purchase-only basis for a few weeks, after which time companies such as Blockbuster and Netflix would be allowed to rent the DVDs to their customers. 'The studios are wrestling with declines in DVD sales while the DVD rental market has been modestly growing,' says Reed Hastings the CEO of Netflix. 'If we can agree on low-enough pricing, delayed rental could potentially increase profits for everyone.' Three studios have already tried to impose a no-rental period of about a month on Redbox, the operator of kiosks that rent movies for $1 per night, believing that Redbox's steeply discounted price undercuts DVD sales. Redbox has responded by suing the studios, seeking to force them to sell it DVDs simultaneously with competitors. Meanwhile, the company is stocking its kiosks with DVDs it can't otherwise obtain by buying them from retailers."
I'll do what I already do, save it in my Netflix Q, and wait for the rental. I already waited for the rental rather than going to the theater. Hope it works out for them.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
With BluRay here, but more expensive, many people may have decided to wait a bit on buying until the BD version gets a bit cheaper. I wonder if these people have even considered that.
Until very recently, most Hollywood heavyweights were loath to speak too openly about the promise of digital entertainment — the downloading and streaming of movies and television shows on computers, Internet-enabled televisions and mobile devices. Nobody wanted to anger retail partners like Wal-Mart or do anything that might slow the DVD gravy train.
followed up with
A variety of factors have influenced Hollywood’s new aggression on the digital front. This year, Wal-Mart and other big-box retailers started cutting the amount of shelf space they devote to DVDs, and some other retail partners, like Circuit City, have gone out of business. So movie studios now worry less about angering them by pulling digital levers.
The article actually highlights some moves that Disney (I know, I was shocked as well) has made to improve digital ownership for the consumer. And there are going to be a lot of failures (Disney already tried Moviebeam) but it's probably pretty clear that this is the future past Blu-ray.
The film studios' reasons for falling sales? First it was piracy. Now that that's been reigned in it must be rentals, Netflix and Redbox. And once that tapers off and the DVD gravy train doesn't kick back up it'll be some other bullshit. Never will it be the fact that 99% of movie trailers I see today I don't care for and 99% of the ones I watch have little to no replay value. Never will it be the declining quality of the product. Never will it be the fact that I have bought this movie in three other formats goddammit--why do I need to pay for blu-ray? Never will it be the fact that buying it on blu-ray allows me to play it on only one device in my house when I have many more capable of playing movies.
Go ahead, pin the blame on someone else. I don't care. But you won't fix the problem until you look at all the contributing factors. It is ignorance to think it is just one of these. Die a slow painful death, I just hope my children don't have to put with you acting like children.
My work here is dung.
Let me check something here ... just a second ... yup, thought so, I don't really care if I get to rent a movie 2 weeks after it leaves the cinema or I have to wait 6 or 8 weeks.
In neither case am I going to feel any more or less compelled to buy the movie instead.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
I have heard of modern film making described as a form of investment banking where somehow magically a movie comes out the other end of the process. Taste, aesthetics, or common sense seem to be no part of this process. I can see why the studios would view the public as the same witless drug addled types as they star in these movies and therefore think them incapable of making the simple choice of not buying a poor product.
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Actually, this is so stupid I don't even feel like making a snarky comment.
All I really have to say is the obvious: Screwing people only drives them towards piracy. People rent a movie because they don't want to pay $20-30 for something they will only watch once. Doing this won't change that, so if the option goes from "pirate it or rent it for $5" to "pirate it or buy it for $20", do you really think that's gonna help the studios?
So fucking stupid.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
The three major players of an industry getting together in an attempt to shut out a perceived competitor? I don't see anything shady there...
Isn't enough that I ruined a pony, making a gift for you?
Maybe people aren't buying DVDs cause there isn't much worth owning anymore, or they have found, in a recession, it's just more cost-effective to rent it rather than buy it. How many DVDs do you really watch 15+ times that makes buying it worthwhile?
So if this is the case, which seems most likely, their "plan" is going to flop. You can't force people to buy something they don't want. They'll just wait the extra month till the DVD hits the rental market, watching other rentals in the meantime.
I mean seriously, do these idiots really get paid for their "brilliance"? Who are the morons that come up with these ideas, not to mention those that hop on the bandwagon and think it's the best thing since sliced bread? How do they manage to stay employed?
In neither case am I going to feel any more or less compelled to buy the movie instead.
Really? Because I'm the type of guy, when someone tries to push me around, I will do the opposite of what they want just to show them they shouldn't try to push people around. Screw these bozos, I'll put off buying any new movies until they quite this greedy behavior.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
delayed rental could potentially increase profits for everyone."
Hmm... wait a minute. This sounds familiar.
Oh, yeah, "anti-competitive collusion"
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
They've almost got it pegged, I've stopped buying DVDs because I can rent them from RedBox. I watch most movies about once and then they sit on my shelf for a very long time before I watch them again, if ever. So, I now only buy movies I think I'll watch multiple times. RedBox has saved me from many bad purchases. RedBox is different than Hollywood Video in that I pay a buck versus 5 bucks. If I rent a movie for $1, if I decide that I later want to buy it, I don't feel like I've overpaid for my watching experience. That is to say, 16/15 is not a bad ratio of overpayment. If I rent a move for $5 and later decide to buy it, I feel like I over spent (20/15 somehow crosses my threshold). So, they have it right that RedBox is cutting into their sales, but only of crappy movies which covers 2/3's (depending on who you are, this number fluctuates wildly).
What they don't understand is that if it takes a month longer to get to RedBox, I'm just going to wait another month before I "preview" the movie. Before RedBox, I would often wait for a film of suspect quality to reach the $5 bin before watching it. Now with RedBox, most movies will reach the $5 bin before I buy it making the ratios more like 6/5.
So the executives at the Film Studios can think a month delay will help their sales, but it's more likely to drive people to torrents. I think in the long run, nothing is going to make them happy. Consumers want the feeling of value, and RedBox offers that. I can rent from them all I want for a buck a pop and not feel guilty about copyright infringement. If they do stupid things to take away my feeling of value, then I'm just going to sense greed and have no compunctions against "piracy".
I used to buy lots and lots of DVDs. I still have a pretty decent collection after selling some and trading others. Then one day I was watching a new DVD ("Se7en", or "Seven") when it skipped. I watched it jostle and jiggle for a few minutes, ejected it, wiped it, same effect. Tried the upstairs DVD player. It was even worse.
The store I bought it from looked at the open shrink wrap and said "Sorry". They wouldn't even let me exchange it because, according to the manager, they'd have to eat the cost of it.
So having some free time I wrote to New Line Cinema, finding an address online for consumer feedback. I asked them if I could obtain another disc from them and I would gladly ship back the old one and pay to ship a new one to me. The canned response I received back basically told me I was SOL and to go buy another DVD at full cost. Have a nice day.
Instead, I now spend the equivalent to one DVD a month on Netflix, my fiance and I can each rent our own movies and return them whenever, and if it skips I have a new one in a day or two. I won't buy a DVD anymore unless I have a very compelling reason to, such as a gift for someone or if it is a movie I will enjoy over and over, such as "The Shawshank Redemption".
Like many, I am tired of paying $19.99 or higher for new DVDs and getting rebuked when the time came to get a replacement disc when another disc became unreadable. So I'll Netflix it, stream it if I am unsure about it, and rip it if I want a copy and it costs too much. I feel a little guilt, but then I remember how the store and New Line screwed me and then I feel OK with it. Bottom line: If you make it difficult for a customer to get something legally that he or she paid for, you better believe that customer will find ways to get around that (and keep getting around it). No one likes to be screwed. I just can't afford to be screwed as much as the studios, distributor, producers, etc. can.
"This food is problematic."
How could they prohibit rental? There's nothing illegal about renting out movies.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
What are they going to do about all the little independent video stores? Those places often do good business b/c they have a pretty good inventory and cost way less than blockbuster.
If I owned a little store I would tell the studios to kiss my ass after I was able to stop laughing at them.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_sale_doctrine
There are *some* limitations. But if you RTFA, these are voluntary agreements by the DVD rental places, so they get cheaper DVDs to rent, but delayed.
IMHO, it's basically trying to effectively bring back the equivalent of the "video rental window", where the VHS tape originally cost $85 or so, so the rental companies would have to pay a lot so they could rent the "hot new releases"... The people that really want it the day it's released (might) buy it when it comes out.. The DVD rental places that don't want to pay full price can wait... As someone else said, RedBox apparently already buys retail copies of movies, and might continue to do so.
What makes you think that has any kind of legal weight? There's the doctrine of first sale here in the US, and believe it or not, it is mostly still valid.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I'm completely with you. This won't change the way I do things one bit. I love all of the "screw the man" rhetoric that's all over the place, but really, how is this going to affect most people?
There will be a few people too impatient to wait for a rental so the run out and buy it right away, but most people who want to see a movie that bad will have already seen it in the theaters. There are obviously a few anti-authoritarian types who are going to use this shift in policy to justify breaking the rules. The rest of us will just continue operating the same way we've been operating. We'll buy it if it is a movie we wanted to buy or we'll rent it if it is a movie that we want to rent.
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.
Angry internet posters? I don't know, there's already a lot of those and the world doesn't seem to be getting any noticeably better.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
There are so many reasons to pirate movies. They just gave us another.
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Then don't buy their products. They can not profit from you at that point without some type of socialism.
Yeah, MGM is *really* going to find they've gotten themselves into a pickle when *I* personally decide not to buy a movie...
"Voting with your dollars" is a load of bullshit, used in order to get people to act *against* their own best interests.
Here are three reasons why it doesn't work.
1. Most people will never know about this scheme. The informed "voters" will be overwhelmed by the ignorance of the masses.
2. Even informed users will work against their long-term benefit in order to attain short-term gains. In this case, some will buy the movie now, instead of waiting a month to rent it.
3. (granted, this doesn't apply here, but it is still a prevalent aspect in the "vote with your dollars" dynamic) Individual purchasers are often vastly outweighed by corporate purchasers.
So, yeah, I can "vote with my dollar", not that it'll do any good. So why put myself through the trouble? Why deny myself a movie (if I really do want it) just to show some corporation a lesson? It'll amount to nothing *and* I'll have missed out on a film. That puts me worse off than where I started!
Really? Because I'm the type of guy, when someone tries to push me around, I will do the opposite of what they want just to show them they shouldn't try to push people around.
Screw these bozos, I'll put off buying any new movies until they quite this greedy behavior.
But the real problem for them is, that you do not have to put off watching them...
Delay in distribution means more people pushed to torrents.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
People too impatient for the rental?
Maybe 3 of them.
This is like piracy.
If they weren't going to buy your product before, eliminating an alternate access method is not going to change anything.
People have lots of other stuff to spend their money on.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
trying to sell people what they want or how they want it
People want free, anytime they can get it. Not a good business model.
Voting with your dollars does work - it's just that like many elections, your vote isn't always in the majority. You can't bitch about the results when you have an unpopular opinion.
However, witness the demise of Sega. The failure of New Coke. Circuit City closing it's doors. You know what that was? People voting with their dollars and companies seeing the results.
If you don't like something then don't buy it. If you don't like a store then don't shop there. If enough other people agree with you and don't buy the crap either than you'll see results. Otherwise you're just bitching about losing an election. You have my sympathy there (hell the guy I vote for at the polls rarely wins either), but it's simply the way the system works.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
So basically, what this means is that Redbox will get a window when they can rent their retail-purchased copies without competition form Blockbuster! Which will probably drive Redbox's profits up enough to make up for the higher cost they'll have to pay for the disks.
Blockbuster is probably doomed, though...
Redbox can afford to pay retail, because red boxes are a lot cheaper than bricks and mortar. Blockbuster cannot, so they lose either way.
Maybe a win for Netflix, though. They don't have Blockbuster's costs, and since most subscribers have a long queue, they aren't so concerned about the release date of particular movies, so they can afford to observe the lockout. And they aren't really in competition with Redbox, because Redbox can't match Netflix's inventory of older movies, or their ability to deliver content directly to your TV/PS3/XBox360/Bluray player.
For the film studios, the net result will be the loss of Blockbuster, a big disk purchaser. It's very unlikely that individual DVD sales will make up for that. So a big lose for the studios, too.
My Netflix queue is already 200+ movies long. I'm watching movies for the first time that came out 20+ years ago. So I don't really care if it takes another month for the DVD release because I have plenty of other movies to watch. I can't think of many situations where I absolutely need to watch a certain movie and I will be in that one-month, money-suck period. I'm sure the great majority of netflix and other movie renters fall into the same category.
I say we let the studio's try this and let the market decide. If it doesn't bother too many people and they make a little more money then fine. If no one likes it and they see a continued decline in sales then they will get the message and drop the idea. The one big fear is that they see a decline in sales and don't get the message and then go whining all the way up the hill to the congressmen that they own.
"Oh dear, she's stuck in an infinite loop and he's an idiot" -Prof. Farnsworth (Futurama)
This would only be plausable if they charged less than the cost of the DVD they were showing. Since a movie rental is roughly $5, and for that I get to watch it as much as I want, with as many people as I want, in my own home, a shared viewing of a DVD on a large screen should be $2-3/person. At that rate, they pay for the DVD with 10 people and I save a little money over renting it at the cost of having to deal with other people.
Lifting your finger to complain yet do nothing constructive to rectify the situation. Increasing your odds of reducing your Karma. Take your pick.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
What planet do they live on? I haven't used anything of those for years. When I buy them, I buy them digitally. If they are not available digitally, I don't buy them, but get them elsewhere. Simple as that.
Film studios: Welcome to the 21st century!
On the other hand, I refuse to buy movies digitally. If they stopped selling media, they'd stop getting money from me.
DRM on digital files prevents me from taking movies to a friend's place if I so chose. Even if they dropped that, the cost of adding hard drives to store the high resolution videos would be too much, considering they're not selling the digital versions sufficiently cheaper than the discs.
I don't want to live on your idea of 21st century. Just add DRMless "digital copy discs" to the purchase, and the option of downloading the thing online, and both you and I can be happy. I'm guessing most people still side with me in that they would be extremely unhappy if physical media went away.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Bullshit. The Studios have never discounted to the renters. They hate the renters and would love to see them out of business. If the sold to the renters in advance of retail availability they would charge MORE not less, as that's EXACTLY what they used to do with movies when they came on tapes. Netflix pays EXACTLY the same amount or MORE for what you can buy, the big distributors might cut a slight discount (at a hit to their own profits) for bulk purchases but they don't pay a dime less than the studio's dictate. What the studios are proposing here is illegal restraint of trade, it's an illegal trust action and something the music companies already got sued for and lost.
However, they cannot stop the rental companies from buying the things at retail.
There are a couple of significant ways they can put pressure on rental companies, however. First, make them pay full retail for disks instead of wholesale as they do now. Secondly, the law allows them to rent physical disks only, so those that offer streaming rentals must have an agreement with the studio. So, one pressure tactic might be to cut off all streaming rental agreements, if a rental company rents out physical disks from their studio before their supposed to.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
When I hear about a new movie, I immediately (before I forget!!!) go to Netflix and add it to my queue. Then, I know, just like planting tulip bulbs in the fall, that some day in the future I will have a pleasant surprise when the movie shows up as available. Add a month, take away a month ... who cares ... only if the movie were really exceptional would I actually buy tickets and go see it in a theater. Not that it is impossible, I went to a movie in the past year ... but it better be really good and it better benefit from the big screen, big speakers, and big popcorn .... or I will wait patiently for Netflix.
(I mean, who ever made a profit pleasing customers?)
(Whores?)
You can't take the sky from me...
This is why you can go to walmart and buy their entire stock and open a DVD rental store. you USED to have to buy the $250.00 a copy VHS tapes for rental, but the movie industry lost a lawsuit and now you dont have to pay for special rental movies.
Yes and no. You used to have pay "rental pricing" for VHS because that was the only price tapes were sold at for the first month or two of sales.
Eliminating rental pricing was a deliberate strategy by the studios to increase sales to end users (and cut out those pesky video rental stores), especially Paramount who dragged the other studios kicking-and-screaming into the new era.
There have been a few lawsuits regarding rental pricing and what-not, but they had very little to do with the lack of rental pricing for DVDs.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.