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Netflix's DVD Rental Business Is Still Profitable (fortune.com)
Netflix might be focusing on its streaming business, but the product that made its name is still alive -- and apparently well. From a report: The company's DVD.com DVD rental business has 3 million subscribers and generated a whopping $56 million in profit on just $99 million in revenue during the first quarter, CNBC is reporting. That staggering profit margin aside, Netflix's business has a wide selection of 100,000 DVDs, which easily overshadows the 5,600 streaming titles available on Netflix, according to the report. DVD.com's profitability might surprise some who moved on long ago from disc-based entertainment in the living room to streaming. Indeed, Netflix itself seemed to have moved on in 2011 when it split the DVD division from its now-core streaming operation. And whenever Netflix discusses its business, the company focuses on streaming and its place in the original content market rather than DVDs.
As long as studios keep up outrageous fees for online streaming licenses, the physical discs will remain popular - both for rental and purchase. Over the long term they will probably decline, but I wonder if greed has any expiration...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The DVD/BD catalog is vastly superior to the streaming catalog. About once a year, I get onto a chat with Netflix and we go through my queue (of around 15 to 20 movies) to see what is available in the streaming catalog, and typically there's only 1 or 2 titles available on streaming out of my queue. Until Netflix can offer up a statistically significant number (is 80% too much to ask for?) of movies in my queue via streaming, I'll stick with the DVD/BD subscription thanks.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
Great selection, no commercials? The only real drawback is the lag time, but between the library and Netflix DVDs just about all my video needs are met.
12:50 - press return.
I need to return that Netflix DVD that's been sitting on my shelf for over a year.
Honestly, streaming still has a lot of catching up to do.
Every Bluray I buy comes with a free digital copy. Now my hearing isn't what it used to be, so the audio that comes over a digital stream is fine, but to this day the quality of the video is noticeably better. I just bought the Black Panther Bluray and the disc is heads and shoulders above the Google Play stream. For Star Wars or Marvel movies, it's a an easy choice to pick up a disc.
I watched "It" on Prime and the encoding was amazeballs, have fun with your hipster DVDs.
I still get the BluRay discs. Some view it as old-fashioned, but how do you do it otherwise? The movie content available for streaming is abysmal on both Netflix and Amazon, but with the disc plan you can get every theatrical movie as soon as it's released to disc.
Otherwise, you'd have to go to a RedBox (are those still a thing?), or gods-forbid an actual movie theater. Yeah, let me pay almost twice as much (for one movie!) to drive to a location to watch a movie on someone else's schedule, that I can't pause, that's front-loaded with tons of commercials, in room full of people that can't STFU.
Talk about old-fashioned!
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
Movies have been made, now, for oever a century. How many does NEtflix have in its catalog... and what percentage of it is streamable?
A few years ago I looked for a number of titles, nope, nope, nope, DVD only. But then, I might want to see something other than Star Wars that was made more than 10 years ago.
Of course it is still profitable; it has a manageable cost and royalty structure that has been established for decades; it actually has all of the content that their customers want to see; and they aren't spending billions of dollars out of the revenue stream trying to make their own films while simultaneously trying to hide the fact that all other content on the service is gradually migrating away to a fractured mess of competing services.
At this point people are putting up with the minor inconvenience of the "mail a disc" bit because it's the only service that gives the customer what they actually want. If someone is honestly surprised by this they should take a moment to quietly contemplate how it is possible that they became so stupid.
Trump will die in prison a traitor either way
and internet service is still shit for a lot of people.
What do the letters DVD stand for?
All of the following have been proposed as the words behind the letters DVD:
- Delayed, Very Delayed (referring to the many late releases of DVD formats)
- Diversified, Very Diversified (referring to the proliferation of recordable formats and other spinoffs)
- Digital Venereal Disease (referring to piracy and copying of DVDs)
- Dead, Very Dead (from naysayers who predicted DVD would never take off)
- Digital Video Disc (the original meaning proposed by some of DVD's creators)
- Digital Versatile Disc (a meaning later proposed by some of DVD's creators)
- Nothing
And the official answer is... "nothing." The original initialism came from "digital video disc." Some members of the DVD Forum (see 6.1) tried to express how DVD goes far beyond video by retrofitting the painfully contorted phrase "digital versatile disc," but this has never been officially accepted by the DVD Forum as a whole. A report from DVD Forum Steering Committee in 1999 decreed that DVD, as an international standard, is simply three letters. Nevertheless, Toshiba —the maintainer of the DVD Forum Web site— still confusingly prefers "digital video disc." And after all, how many people ask what VHS stands for? (Guess what? No one agrees on that one either.)
mfwright@batnet.com
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In my personal experience, I am seeing more and more "long waits" on the DVDs I select, and some shows missing DVDs of certain episodes. The number of shows with missing DVDs is increasing.
If the business is so friggin' profitable, why doesn't Netflix make it work?
I have held off on buying an Ultra Blu-Ray player because it seems to be nearly impossible to rent them. I have no interest in buying movies in 4K that I will likely only play once or twice.
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
Streaming: You watch what they make available, but it's ready nearly instantly.
Mail: You watch what you want to watch (almost any movie title and many TV shows you can think of) but you have to wait a couple days for it to come in the mail.
To me, the DVD by mail option is much more valuable.
I used to be a Netflix DVD subscriber, but then they raised their prices so I dropped them and switched to Redbox (which turned out to be a good thing - I only rent about 2 movies a month which works out to $3 if I don't have a coupon). I had no idea Netflix still rented DVDs. Every time I hear someone mention Netflix they are clearly talking about the streaming service.
US internet sucks and with caps this may get bigger.
Say comcrap really forces you to buy tv or you are stuck with our new 500GB cap with $10 50GB overages.
1) Catalog. Pretty much any movie made is available. The titles available through streaming are a tiny, tiny fraction of what is available on DVD / blu-ray. This is especially true of any thing niche. Like old westerns? Martial arts flicks? Musicals? What about watching all the Alfred Hitchcock films? If there is a particular era / genre of film you are interested in pursuing you can't do it through streaming.
2) Only 81% of Americans have broadband internet. Rural areas may still be relying on wireless (cellular / satellite) broadband, for which streaming is not an option at all because bandwidth caps.
3) A great deal of the broadband in the US barely meets the definition of Broadband. I'm talking about you, DSL. Streaming quality is poor, and if anyone else starts using the internet at the same (or a device decides it's time for that 1GB OS update, etc) playback will stutter.
4) Some fraction of the population simply won't adopt to the latest in technology - that being streaming. I'm sure there are people still playing stuff on VHS. There are people that use 30 year old cars as their daily driver. There will be people using DVD for a long time to come. The number of DVDs out there exceed that of any other type of video media that has ever existed (8mm film, beta, laserdisc, vhs). As of 2011, 1 billion dvd *players* had been sold. Imagine how many DVDs have been pressed...
Better known as 318230.
Netflix might be focusing on its streaming business, but the produce that made its name is still alive -- and apparently well. From a report:
Lettuce not get carried away, here.
And say any film released on DVD must be made streamable, and if the studios refuse, tell the customer to pirate it.
So you want Netflix not only violate copyright laws but also encourage their customers to do so? [sarcasm]No ramifications would ever happen to Netflix because of your advice[/sarcasm]. I can only imagine that would put Netflix out of business and as consumers we'd have fewer options.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Netflix might be focusing on its streaming business, but the produce that made its name is still alive
I can't be the only person who had no idea that Netflix sold fresh fruits and vegetables.
I'm moving to someplace I'll be on satellite, which has limitations that may make me want to get stuff on disc. But I'll also be using a PO Box, and I'll have to go to the post orifice to get my discs, and I live literally at the other end of town from it. Town is tiny, but it's still an annoyance :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
When you are making 55% profit on your quarterly revenue why change a thing about how you market and deliver the product.
They are never going to place any big-time bets on physical media as that would be asinine. Physical media is all but dead in mainstream consumer consumption and for anyone to think it will ever be a thing to the masses again is ignorant. Sure there will always be niches of consumption for example the recent resurgence in tape and vinyl but for the general masses physical media is out. Yes we do buy movies on DVDs still for the kids at about 3-4 movies a year - used almost primarily for car trips at this point.
SO, Netflix has has this DVD by mail business running so smoothly now that it will continue to make easy money for another decade or so. Access to broadband and change/reform in media licensing will obviously play a large part in how long Netflix can milk the literal cow that made they the household brand they today.
Cock butter for breakfast.
I think that this has to do with the loophole that physical media creates. Or perhaps, more accurately, the sad situation that digital media rights has created. Physical media can be passed along, but digital media is locked down. Consequently, it's far less expensive to rent out physical media to folks than it is to rent out digital media. I would guess that Netflix pays out less than $1 for each DVD that they mail out (including the cost paid to buy the media or the fee paid to the content owner). If it costs more than $1 they would lose money on it, since you can get about 10 DVDs a month for about $10.
Now, how many of us would happily pay $1 to stream any arbitrary movie? We all would, but the studios won't give us this deal. Why not? I don't know. I guess they figured that they had no choice with physical media, but with digital they control the flow, so they can charge what they want.
I tried streaming for a while. Here's what's wrong with it: You add a show to your queue. You start to watch the show and get anywhere from 1 to 2 seasons into it. Netflix tosses up a warning, "This show will be removed in less than two weeks." Sometimes it is true, sometimes it isn't (i.e. contract gets renewed just in time). You decide to not waste your time trying to binge-watch the entire thing and remove it from your queue. This process repeats ad nauseum.
So I quit streaming but I still have a DVD plan. Here's what's great about the DVD plan: You add a show to your queue. It arrives in the mail and you get to watch about 4 episodes at a time. There's no time limit and Netflix doesn't randomly remove shows either at the same frequency. DVD is also of generally higher quality than even Netflix's HD streaming options.
Seems obvious to me as to who uses the DVD plan: Anyone who has realized that streaming shows has been made artificially terrible for the consumer.
The streaming service is a steaming service.
It's the DVDs that keep me coming back. "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" is not on streaming. "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof" is not on streaming. "Cool Hand Luke" is not on streaming.
If Netflix folds the DVD services, I'm out.
Lot of people still have limited access to good broadband so streaming is problematic and then you face lower quality streaming. Renting or buying DVD's seems to still be attractive to some who value absolute quality and convenience.
8k to become more mainstream. Then that shit should pick up again.