Digital Distribution: Hollywood Finds New Life with Streaming Movies
By emeadows
September 18, 2012
September 18, 2012
- “Hollywood is discovering there’s life after the DVD,” reports Businessweek.
- Netflix, Amazon, Verizon Communications and Redbox are bidding for the rights to stream movies on mobile devices like Kindles, iPads and TVs, adding life to the home entertainment industry.
- “These days digital outlets such as Netflix and Amazon vie with Time Warner’s HBO and CBS’s Showtime for movies at the so-called premium cable window, a lucrative stop that comes after films have run in theaters, been sold as DVDs, and appeared on pay-per-view,” according to the article.
- “That’s given Hollywood the chance to play the services against each other and replace some of the revenue lost with the drop in DVD sales and the decline of rental outlets such as Blockbuster,” notes Businessweek.
- Earlier this month, Epix signed a multiyear deal with Amazon to provide films for the Prime Instant Video service. The studio-backed pay TV channel “ended its exclusive deal with Netflix and is expected to make as much as $80 million more a year selling the same content to the two streaming rivals and a third venture financed by Verizon and Coinstar’s Redbox, BTIG Research analyst Rich Greenfield says.”
- Home video sales have taken a significant dive in recent years, falling 16 percent from 2011. “And pay TV outlets are scrambling to find ways to retain viewers now that almost 90 percent of America’s 115 million TV households have the capacity to access a broad catalog of films via the Web,” adds the article.
- But if these expensive deals with major studios don’t cause significant upticks in subscriber numbers for streaming services, it’s likely that those services will lean more on original programming.
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