Here’s a new one — in order to drive people away from watching movies on Netflix, Warner Bros has struck a deal that prevents users from adding them to their queue for 28 days until the DVDs have been on sale for four weeks. Users have to wait another four weeks after that to actually get the movies from Netflix. Anybody think this is going to wind up being a money maker for the film industry? It surely does not ingratiate Warner Bros or Netflix with me. (Via Matt Drance.)
January 26, 2012 at 7:01 pm
All that means is that I’ll never add WB movies to my queue. I’ll have forgotten about them by the time I can get them.
January 26, 2012 at 8:59 pm
Dance Netflix! Dance! Or no movies for you!
Not pretty when the industry throws weight around like this.
January 27, 2012 at 9:03 am
I’ve reached complete commercial media apathy: if I can’t stream something from Netflix I’m almost certain to pass it over completely. There’s already more video likely to be equally interesting than I could watch in several lifetimes and I can’t justify paying for a consumer-hostile experience.
This will get particularly interesting as Netflix starts offering their own original content, increasing the cost for a studio which guesses wrong in one of these financial games of chicken.
January 27, 2012 at 11:23 am
I’m with Ginger — they’re just taking their offerings out of my system. crazed.
January 27, 2012 at 4:08 pm
This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why we bailed on Netflix last year. Half the movies we wanted to watch were not available to stream. Studio douchbaggery not the fault of Netflix to be sure, but why pay for a service that doesn’t deliver 100% of what you want?
Was wondering if it was worth giving Netflix another whirl but stories like this indicate things haven’t gotten a lot better unfortunately.
January 28, 2012 at 3:05 am
That’s the reason to pirate everything. I’m not sure if Netflix will have what I want. I’m quite sure the pirate sites will, in a more convenient form that I can use on any device that I wish to.
Why does the content industry not understand this?