AV Rant #211: Dirty Looks
Tom and Liz are a microphone cable away from decent sound. Of course, skype, iChat, and ooVoo all conspired to make things ten times worse. No update on the novella this week but look for something just as soon as Tom’s cover artist sends him a draft. Oppo has a new player that Tom likes. Liz and Tom agree that tailored media is the wave of the future. Jade Design acquires Sherbourn… do you care? Tom does. Blockbuster is pretty much over a barrel. Tom sides with Monster for once. An opinion on the iPad iOS 4.2.1 and Daft Punk. Tom’s kids love The Annoying Orange. He sort of does too. Thanks for listening and don’t forget to vote for us at Podcast Alley! To see our (mostly) complete collection of show videos, click here. To get our iPhone app, visit the iTunes store.
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The studio strategy is streaming, not sale, in the 28 day window. The studio gets only one sale for rentals, but they get $3-4 for every $4.99 stream. And Directv, for one, advertises extensively that they have signed deals to avoid the 28 day period. Netflix could sign a similar deal, but they’d lose their shirts since they’re not PPV. That’s why Netflix streaming has so much less material.
The other Porche you were talking about is the Cayman.
Firefly and The Sarah Conner Chronicles were both victims of the “not-a-blockbuster-for-long-enough” disease.
Too bad. Such great shows. (No surprise that Summer Glau starred in both 😉
And then Summer Glau got cast in NBC’s “The Cape”. And there was much darkness and sadness in the world.
(God that show looks awful…)
@jfalk – great comment. Maybe it would be a good move for Netflix to also offer PPV streaming for new releases inside the 28-day window, in addition to their catalog title subscription service.
Does anybody remember the old Circuit City DIVX (not the DivX video file format) one-way DVD rental scheme back in the late ’90s? You “bought” a special kind of DVD for $4.99 and took it home, where it sat on your shelf until you popped it into the special DIVX-enabled DVD player connected to the CC server via phone line. At that point a 48-hour viewing period started. When it was over, you could later rent again for I think $3.00 for another 48-hour period.
While the CC DIVX system failed to gain general consumer acceptance for a variety of reasons, all this streaming technology seems to be moving the market closer and closer to the same business model that DIVX was trying to achieve.
Thanks, downtowner. I think there are a number of reasons why Netflix doesn’t offer PPV (and watch — they’ll start up next month or something) (1) A lot of people hate PPV on principle, so Netflix can be the ones who “aren’t greedy.” (2) Netflix is set up to collect once a month from people — setting up to collect stream-by-stream is probably a not insignificant expense (3) In the long run, Netflix will be killed by PPV, since their profit margins are way higher than PPV vendors. So they don’t want to encourage it. (4) Netflix doesn’t have much to offer as an offerer of PPV over anybody else. Why bother to take the extra step of going throught Netflix rather than my cable provider/satellite company? Unless they want to start a PPV price war, of course (Consumer grins widely…)
Just speaking for my own personal situation, I am a cable-cutter/dish-dasher, so all my programming comes OTA or OTI (over the internet…is that a valid acronym or have I just coined one?). So I don’t have cable/dish TV PPV as an option. As far as I know, my only PPV option right now is Zune via Xbox Live, which is a cool service for new releases and which is available as a pretty decent high-def download. I don’t have any device that can access Vudu. Since I already have a commercial relationship with Netflix and all my streaming devices can access it, I would welcome PPV new releases as a new service from them. I would also welcome day-and-date or two weeks after theatrical release PPV!