Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Speaking of Physical Objects People No Longer Buy . . .

. . . Vinyl albums, CDs, VHS tapes, and, next in line, DVDs.

Netflix to Stream Films From Paramount, Lions Gate, MGM - Media Decoder Blog - NYTimes.com: "At a cost of nearly one billion dollars, Netflix on Tuesday said it would add films from Paramount Pictures, Lions Gate and MGM to its online subscription service.

It was a coup — albeit a costly one — for Netflix, which knows its needs to lock up the digital rights to films as customers stop receiving DVD’s by mail and start receiving streams via the Internet. The deal will commence Sept. 1.

Ted Sarandos, the chief content officer for Netflix, said he is essentially taking the “huge pile of money” that Netflix pays in postage for DVDs by mail — about $600 million this year — “and starting to pay it to the studios and networks.”"

6 comments:

Richard Prosch said...

We sold most of our DVDs a year ago as we stream movies and old TV shows via Netflix and Amazon almost every night.

Anonymous said...

Stop the world - I want to get off and go home.

Jeff (curled up in the fetal position)

PS - I still have a box of 500 45s (records, not guns) even though I have nothing to play them on.

Steve Oerkfitz said...

Streaming movies just don't look as good as a Blu ray or regular DVD for that matter. It's the equivalent of listening to music thru old car speakers.

Richard R. said...

I bet my Netflix subscription price is about to go up.

Steve is absolutely right. I think the whole digital-via-bandwidth thing, streaming video, incoming e-books, even most music downloads - results mostly in inferior end products. The sound on most downloaded music is vastly inferior to a CD, and the same is true with streamed video. This is all compromising quality for convenience, which seems to be just fine with the disposable, connected, TTT* types.

Besides, I don't want to watch movies on my computer.

* Tween-To-Thirty

MysterLynch said...

I like having physical copies, as do most that buy a movie.

This is great for rentals, but I don't see it having too much impact on actual sales.

Camping Clint said...

As the quality goes up and the means of delivery improv, the DVD will start to lose.

Right now we stream Netflix on to our kids Wii. It is awful quality and I will not watch it, but the kids love it. I still get DVD's delivered. The Wii is not an HDMI device, so I'm not sure how much better a HDMI streaming device would be.

Eventually, that's all the new generation will expect. On Demand is the future.