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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."
trying to sell people what they want or how they want it~
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
...that they provide services that the market wants. (I mean, who ever made a profit pleasing customers?) I hope that anti-trust law isn't too eviscerated to go after them for this BS.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Just set up special places where they would show the DVDs on large screens before they tried to sell them.
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.
My brother in law works for redbox, and sure enough, every time a new major film is released to DVD, he goes to every walmart in his area (and we're not talking just one county here) and purchases anywhere from several hundred to a couple thousand copies, starting at midnight. He then takes them home and one by one puts them into non studio-branded cases, then goes out and stocks the redbox machines he manages.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
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?
Wasn't this settled in the 1980's Betamax Supreme Court judgment? I thought that movie rental shops had the right of first sale and don't need approval from studios to rent movies, or am I missing something here?
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How this is possible? I don't understand the whole rental world. How does the studio have any control over it? Sure, they own the copyright on the material on the disk but I own the disk. I can sell it, why can't I rent it out to someone?
What legal principle prevents me from loaning out, selling, or renting any (physical) CD/DVD/Book that I have purchased? Do these companies seriously have to buy special versions that they rent out? They have copyright which let's them dictate copying or performance, giving out the physical item I bought doesn't seem to fall in that category.
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?
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.
Then don't buy their products. They can not profit from you at that point without some type of socialism.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
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."
that in an effort to push their business model further towards irrelevancy, some major film studios are considering a new policy that would harvest ill will in increasing amounts from consumers for several weeks. Under the plan, new DVD releases would be available on a purchase-only basis for a few hours, after which time filesharing such as Bittorrent and eMule would offer the DVDs for free. 'The studios are wrestling with declines in DVD sales while the rest of the world adapts superior distribution technology,' says PHBasterd, the CEO of Clueless Inc. 'If we can agree on annoying enough artificial tollbooths, $0 could potentially seem far more attractive to consumers.' Three studios have already tried to impose arbitrary attempts to control what they can't control anymore on any forward looking company with a better idea, believing they can stop progress and return to some nostalgic time period when Sonny sang with Cher. Consumers have responded by not caring and doing whatever the hell they want, since IP law was never meant to be used as a club on the general consumer. Meanwhile, media execs snorting coke off hookers' asses have been complaining that there is less coke and less hookers and why don't people understand how vital and important they are to the flow of media and culture."
it doesn't reflect well on you when you've already lost and you won't admit it
game over dude
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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 think the word you're looking for is fascism. But hey, it's all the same thing, right?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
Few people seem to question the implicit goal that companies seem to hold, that profits must always continue to increase forever. Any deviation from this path is seen as a failure. Thus, even though they are raking in enormous profits from theatres and DVD rentals, movie companies must find a way to increase those profits by putting the screws on already profitable business practices such as renting DVD's.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
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
Because it, like many other things, can give you peace of mind. Sure, it may not be your cup of tea, and reading your response makes that pretty clear. But for some of us, the out of pocket cost of seeing a movie, plus the hassle of it all (be it in the theaters, or now waiting longer to rent), isn't a high enough value for me to want to pay for. I have better things to do with my time and my money. No doubt whatever movie it is will be released sooner or later on basic cable or I can borrow / watch it with a friend if any of them found the movie too good not to share (most of the better movies even end up in my local library to borrow). Regardless of any of this, I do not see how not seeing a movie somehow makes your life worse than it was without it (maybe from a cultural standpoint, but come on, it is only a movie). I guess we all have our own fix, and for you, movies must be one of them.
I though the only place to get new movies was through The Pirate Bay.
One of the universal rules of happiness is always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual
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)
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.
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.
Anti-competitive trust behavior. Also if all the studios do it at the same time it's collusion also. The music companies tried it then paid quite a bit of money to settle a bunch of class actions and a federal anti-trust action that could have revoked their copyrights.
But the point is RedBox DOESN'T HAVE a contract and doesn't need one. They buy their rental licensed DVDs from distributors the same way any other video store does for fairly set prices by the studios. The studios singled them out and interfered with the free sales of the distributors by telling distributors to withhold shipments from RedBox unilaterally. Now to get their scheduled purchases, the studios want RedBox to sign special agreements... when lots of other little video stores from the same distributors don't have to.
Or it implies that people are changing their habits. Netflix means not just renting movies, but being able to get it on ... well, not a moment's notice, but a few days' notice.
If people are just shifting from buying to renting, you would see a matching increase in rentals to the decline in purchases - but the purchasing decline is much greater. That's why I say the data agrees with his thought that people are simply not liking the movies being produced as much.
Not that I totally disagree about people changing habits... there's so much other media to watch perhaps people are a little burnt out on movies.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I lost faith in antitrust law when they failed to do anything significant to Microsoft. Or to Rambus. Or when AT&T recombined (which I want to go ahead and say was mostly symbolic to me and not an actual antitrust threat). Or how the FTC, DOJ, and other agencies have repeatedly declined to get involved hundreds of major mergers beyond a cursory investigation in the past few decades. Or how the Obama administration appointed dozens of RIAA & MPAA friendly attorneys to the DOJ. Or when I found out that there's an exemption in antitrust law for health insurance companies under the 1945 McCarran-Ferguson Act. (So why not record labels given bipartisan love for them?)
I vaguely remembered the MPAA & RIAA seeking an exemption a few years ago. It was part of the EnFORCE Act of 2003, but it apparently never passed. (I find myself cynically surprised.) I've always been struck by how flagrantly the RIAA & MPAA look like cartels and have long assumed that the reason they haven't been successfully sued was some kind of special legal loophole for them. Seems that there are a few long-running suits by sued file-sharing companies against the industries for antitrust violations that haven't been resolved (instead of simply losing and going away like I assumed).
Anyway, it seems to me like Redbox may have shot at this. I hope they win, but precedent that someone posted later in the discussion suggests that they may not. I find myself lacking much in the way of hope there.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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.