Warner Brothers pushing Redbox ‘window’ to 56 days
One of the most disturbing movies I’ve ever seen is the original 1978 Faces of Death. Honestly, I couldn’t finish watching — it was just too much. When it comes to America’s ever self eviscerating media companies, walking away isn’t an option as we have to sit through the whole bloody thing.
For the first time in years, album sales actually increased. After years of suing their customers and variously crippling digital sales outlets, the record companies finally loosened up enough to increase sales — go figure.
Some unlikely combination of Spotify, iTunes Match, internet radio, generally dropping DRM and licensing to every elevator operator on the planet and, behold, more sales than last year, the first time since 2004. Well, in the US anyway.
With that background comes the news that Warner Brothers will announce that it will increase the “window” it will enforce on movies sold to discount rental and streaming outlets Netflix, Redbox and Blockbuster from 28 to 56 days. And, where Warners Brothers so goes the movie business.
The move is designed to bolster flagging sales of those quaint DVD and Blu-ray platters, which have been steadily declining in recent years.
Thereupon, movies fans can either buy one of those little plastic thingies, wait 56 days for it to come to Netflix, Redbox et al or pirate it.
That’s the calculation and Warner Brothers is banking that they’ll get more DVD dollars than they’ll lose to the downloaders…
Do you think that math is gonna work out?
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