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Warner Bros. Latest Movie Release Strategy? Confuse The Hell Out Of The Market And Prop Up Blockbuster?
from the at-least-that's-what-it-appears-to-be dept
It's tough to figure Warner Bros. out these days. It got both Netflix and Redbox to agree to delay renting new release movies for 28 days in an effort to get more people to purchase DVDs. For this, it got hit with a class action lawsuit. But now comes the news that it's signed a new deal with the financially troubled Blockbuster that has no such restriction. This has lots of people scratching their heads. The obvious answer is that Blockbuster is promising Warner a lot more money...
But there's a bigger issue here, which goes beyond just commentators scratching their heads: this is going to confuse a lot of customers at a time when that's the last thing Warner Bros. should be doing. Your average movie renter isn't paying attention to the silly games that Warner execs are playing, and all they want to know is how come they can't rent the latest release. If Warner somehow convinced all players not to rent until a certain date, then that would effectively have just shifted the release date further back (a dumb move in an age when windows are shrinking... but that's Hollywood for you). However, by having the movie available for rental in some places, but not others, it's now setting itself up for mass customer confusion, where people will hear that a movie is available, but then get pissed off that it's not available in their preferred rental system.
It's as if the folks in Hollywood haven't been paying attention to what happens to companies that aren't providing what their customers want.
But there's a bigger issue here, which goes beyond just commentators scratching their heads: this is going to confuse a lot of customers at a time when that's the last thing Warner Bros. should be doing. Your average movie renter isn't paying attention to the silly games that Warner execs are playing, and all they want to know is how come they can't rent the latest release. If Warner somehow convinced all players not to rent until a certain date, then that would effectively have just shifted the release date further back (a dumb move in an age when windows are shrinking... but that's Hollywood for you). However, by having the movie available for rental in some places, but not others, it's now setting itself up for mass customer confusion, where people will hear that a movie is available, but then get pissed off that it's not available in their preferred rental system.
It's as if the folks in Hollywood haven't been paying attention to what happens to companies that aren't providing what their customers want.
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Reader Comments (rss)
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Umm?
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Antitrust Issues
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I'm not buying a DVD movie, paying full retail price plus almost 10% in city, county and state sales taxes. If I can't rent the movie from Netflix or buy it used from an Ebay seller, I really won't miss it.
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Any questions?
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dead dog
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Of course they are helping blockbuster
/sarcasm
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Blockbuster's Last Gasp
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chicken or egg
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THEN to make it more funny
YUP good management strategy there....
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Do you really want to make free but high quality bittorrent rips the attractive and rational alternative for consumers? Think about it, please.
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I'll just keep using Netflix.
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Re:
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Re: Of course they are helping blockbuster
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It's a business, stupid!
For Blockbuster, they don't just have stores - so have you not been paying attention??? They have a by-mail subscription service too, kiosks with NCR and a very strong a-la-carte digital rental service where the studios get a piece of the pie. If Warner can get a piece of every rental dollar from Blockbuster (and none from Redbox or Netflix) why wouldn't they do such a deal to make the most money on their precious new releases???
This is a business, and it's up to each vendor to make the hard choices to ensure they can actually make money. Blockbuster is a partner to studios with the revenue sharing agreements. Netflix/Redbox are just customers.
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WB and the Sinking Ship
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Mike sometimes over estimates, sometimes under estimates . . .
Just a somewhat related comment. It seems that sometimes you greatly over estimate the competence of the average consumer, and sometimes greatly under estimate their competence, depending on the point you want to prove.
I know no specifics of this deal. Seems to me, though, if Blockbuster started a campaign "Blockbuster has new releases four weeks before anyone else," even a so-called "moron in a hurry" would have little confusion that, indeed, Blockbuster has new releases before Netflix, Redbox, etc.
Of course, this (my opinion) is coming from a guy who thinks if his town was covered in speed cameras to the extent that everytime he ever broke the speedlimit, once he got 12 tickets in a ten day period, he'd make darn sure he slowed down. But, since apparently everyone on TechDirt argued that this would do nothing to slow anyone down, I guess it's (once again) just me.
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Blockbuster Online could have mitigated their downward spiral
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Re:
"Mass Consumer Confusion" = Mass Consumer Downloading
Good luck, Mr. and Mr. Warner
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Netfilx
Redbox here I come.
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