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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.
Then you are irrelevant as far as this topic goes. Why even bother to post?
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
You might not care, but the studios would. If they think they can increase DVD sales by not letting Netflix stream the movie, they'll do so. Netflix's library can already be a bit thin at times and this could worsen it. (Win win in the mind of the studios except that piracy would increase without Netflix.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
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?
I buy DVD's and BlueRays. I like to own the "Right to Use" the content. I like not to have to rely on a given provider to have a contract to to stream content in order to be able to watch to something. I will watch some shows and movies multiple times. So for a certain core set up media I want to own the media. All that crufty back catalogue of movies and shows that is no longer available on streaming services, mine to see at any time of my choosing. I even ( GASP ) buy actual books from time to time, it seems as though there is SOME content not yet kindlified, that may in fact never be on those platforms. The streaming / sharing / caring economy will eventually strip you of any remaining un-curated choice in what you read, watch, or listen to. Seems as though there is some music not published the day before yesterday thats worth listening to. So yes I own many hundreds of CD's as well.
It's clearly a generational thing. Many older individuals can't seem to understand that dvds are inconvenient.
We understand, but not everything, and certainly not everything worthwhile, revolves around convenience. You'll learn that as you get older.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
ability to stream whenever I like on an ongoing basis
Assuming you mean "rent the ability to stream, so long as the company doesn't go under and limited to my own lifetime - and loses all value at death."
My husband learned a valuable lesson long ago when Yahoo Music shut down and all that copy-protected content he'd purchased went up in smoke.