Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Netflix and Warner Bros Agreement Screws Their Customers

Netflix Logo

The biggest news so far today wasn’t from the early CES news.  No, came from the normally friendly Netflix folks.  The two companies just created what the biz calls a DVD rental window – and not the good kind.

Today Netflix and Warner Brothers announced that they inked a deal for Netflix to wait for 28 days after the actual DVD release to make that DVD (and Blu-ray) disc available for Netflix rental.  In return Netflix gets a discount on those Warner DVDs and also gets more access to Warner Brothers movies and TV shows for streaming.  This is something Netflix has been offering the Studios since November and Warner is the first to bite.

The only positive here is that more content will be available for streaming from Netflix.  But the negative in this day and age is much more important.  This is likely the beginning of a delay for movie rentals beyond the movie purchase availability & watch for other movie studios looking for similar deals.  The next question is, what will Blockbuster and Redbox do here?  Does this create an opportunity for others to move in against Netflix?

I see this as further evidence of the media companies not caring what the customer wants and instead looking for more ways to deliver paid content to their customers in ways the customer wants they are saying too bad…

Press Release

via HackingNetflix