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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
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.
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.
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?
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."
There are so many reasons to pirate movies. They just gave us another.
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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.