Hollywood Removing Hit Movies From Apple, Netflix
from the stupidity-knows-no-bounds dept
Some days you just wonder if entertainment execs wake up in the morning planning to shoot themselves in their collective foot. The latest display of entertainment exec short-sightedness is that the Hollywood Studios have apparently forced both the Apple iTunes store and Netflix's download store to remove certain movies just as they're getting close to being available for TV. As you probably already know, Hollywood makes a lot of money through a "windowing" system, where they release movies in different formats at different times: theaters, special locations (airplanes, hotels), DVD, cable and finally network TV. Of course, they're working on adding some more tiers to this as well, but apparently they convinced these online download stores that they need to kill certain movies as the timing reaches where the movies can appear on TV.The studios' myopic reasoning is that TV broadcasters pay a lot of money for those rights, and they don't want to piss them off: "It wouldn't make any business sense to do it any other way," claiming that allowing the videos to be downloaded via these online stores would kill some of its biggest money makers. Of course, this makes no sense. The movies are already released on DVD and the studios don't prevent Blockbuster or Netflix from offering the physical DVD for rent, so why do that with the download version? If people really want to download these movies, they're more likely to just go get them from an unauthorized site, rather than bother to watch the network broadcast version (which, given recent MPAA statements, they'll probably try to prevent you from recording via your DVR anyway). If TV networks have been willing to pay good money for the broadcasting rights all these years while DVDs and unauthorized downloads have been available, are they really suddenly going to stop paying because legal downloads are available? Unlikely.
So what are we left with instead? A bunch of consumers really pissed off at the movie studios yet again. One of these days movie studio execs will discover that business models are much harder to implement when a large percentage of your customers hate you.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: competition, downloads, movies, release windows
Companies: apple, netflix
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Stupid
I'm starting to wonder if the top tier execs at these companies aren't actually copyfighters.
Add Your Comment