Farewell, VHS… and don’t let the door hit you on your way out. Though most of us have given up our VHS players by now in favor of something a little less dated, there have been the usual stragglers in the “old ‘n’ busted video format” department that have kept VHS alive long past its expiration date.
Recipe for a (possible) rebound:
1 Movie and popcorn for a family of four: $70
1 Night at a “Ticketmaster event” for a family of four: $240
1 Year-long subscription for two-at-a-time unlimited movie rentals from Netflix: $163.20
Shake it up.
Now, if only it would affect the stock price.
The MPAA has offered a deal to the Federal Communications Commission that could bring movies to cable and satellite viewers more quickly after their original release. The trade-off, though, is that the movies couldn’t be viewed by some high-definition TVs, nor could they be recorded by stand-alone TiVos.
Remember the term “water cooler moment”–in which a TV show generated a social buzz and was talked about by colleagues at work after broadcast? It seems to me that there are fewer and fewer water cooler moments, in part because television has become less of a cohesively social experience.
PVRS, video on demand, BitTorrent, digital download stores, DVD box sets have all helped to fracture the common viewing experience. We tend to watch our TV content out of sync with one another these days.
Netflix shares are coming under pressure today following a skeptical note on the company from Needham analyst Charlie Wolf.
Wolf today picked up coverage of the company with an Under Perform rating; he writes that “the company’s current valuation incorporates unrealistic subscriber acquisition cost and churn rate assumptions.” He calculates fair value for the shares to be $22, well below the current level.
There was good news for Apple and Comcast, but bad news for Blockbuster woven into Time Warner’s conference call with investors today. Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner’s chief executive, said that the company’s Warner Brothers studio will now release movies for video-on-demand systems on the same day they are released as DVDs.
Even if you don’t care one bit–and this probably describes the vast majority of Americans–you have probably heard by now that a Great Format War has been fought, and apparently won. The HD-DVD format for DVDs, backed by Toshiba, has lost out to Sony’s Blu-ray format. To be sure, there are some caveats. Computerworld’s Lucas Mearian writes that Blu-ray’s victory may not be remotely as meaningful as it seems. Having recently spent a cold, rainy, but thrilling afternoon walking the Freedom Trail in Boston, I would put it this way: The Blu-ray victory may end up being as expensive, and as predictive of ultimate victory, as was the British victory of Bunker Hill. So what are we to make of this format skirmish? We gathered up a group of smart people who think about such things and asked them the following: Is the battle between HD-DVD and Blu-ray really over? What can we learn from it?
Twentieth Century Fox actually has two deals with Apple that Steve Jobs announced today with Fox Filmed Entertainment CEO Jim Gianopulos. A lot is being made of the video rentals, more on that in a bit. But we’ll start with a look at the DVD-download combo; the Apple version is only available for now with Fox. Fox first tried it with Windows on “Live Free or Die Hard.” Buyers get a digital version on the second disk of special editions; it can be uploaded to a computer and moved to portable devices. In iTunes’ case, the digital copy file goes straight to iTunes and can be used with only one iTunes library; it can be used on a PC or Mac, video iPods, iPhone or Apple TV.
What if nobody wins the high-definition DVD format wars? That increasingly looks to be the situation for the next-generation DVD technology, which is available to consumers in two incompatible formats.
“What if nobody wins the high-definition DVD format wars?” the New York Times asks in a non-news summary of the battle between Sony and Toshiba over Blu-ray vs. HD DVD. But that’s the wrong question. The relevant one is “Who’s losing the format wars?” and the answer, still, is: Hollywood.
Yet another example of bricks-and-mortar scale not translating to online sales power and of grand plans deflating. Reuters reports that Wal-Mart, one of the largest sellers of DVDs, shut down its same-day-as-DVD video download service, citing Hewlett Packard’s decision to discontinue the service that powered it. The plug was pulled Dec. 21, far more quietly than the movie/TV download service began in February. No download details but you have to think if the service was successful, Wal-Mart would have found a new vendor to keep it going.
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