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Netflix is 'Killing' DVD Sales, Research Finds (torrentfreak.com)
Netflix has become the go-to destination for many movie and TV fans. The service is bringing in billions for copyright holders, but it also has a downside. New research shows that the availability of content on Netflix can severely hurt physical disc sales, which traditionally have been the industry's largest revenue source. From a report: A new study published by researchers from Hong Kong universities provides some empirical evidence on this issue. Through a natural experiment, they looked at the interplay between Netflix availability and DVD sales in the United States. The experiment took place when the Epix entertainment network, which distributes movies and TV-shows from major studios including Paramount and Lionsgate, left Netflix for Hulu in 2015. Since Hulu has a much smaller market share, these videos no longer reached a large part of the audience. At least not by default. The researchers used difference to examine the effect on DVD sales, while controlling for various other variables. The results, published in a paper this week, show that DVD sales increased significantly after the content was taken off Netflix, almost by a quarter. "Our difference-in-difference analyses show that the decline in the streaming availability of Epix's content leads to a 24.7% increase in their DVD sales in the three months after the event," the paper reads.
If the studios have hard proof that Netflix is costing them money, why would they allow their movies to be shown on Netflix?
The article doesn't say that Netflix is costing them money, just that they sold 25% more DVDs when they weren't available on Netflix. It's entirely possible that their streaming revenue would exceed the extra revenue from those DVD sales, but there aren't enough details there to say one way or the other.
It takes about 2 minutes of typing occasionally at the command line to rip the main title of the DVD and save it as an MKV file. Then, whenever you want to watch the film now or in the future, you don't have to deal with anything else that might be on that DVD. You never even have to take the DVD down from the shelf again unless you catastrophically lose data from your computer with no backups. I understand if the average man complains about unskippable ads or whatever, but how can one consider this a huge inconvenience on a "news for nerds" site?
That would depend on what's generating more money. What the studio's want is to have their cake and eat it too, in other words they want disc sales and streaming sales. Practically what that means is they will simply delay streaming availability until a certain number of months after the DVD/BluRay is available so as to capture both revenue streams. Several of the studio's already do this.