“There was good news for Apple and Comcast, but bad news for Blockbuster woven into Time Warner’s conference call with investors today,” Saul Hansell reports for The New York Times.
“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,” Hansell reports.
“Until now, people who wanted to watch movies on cable pay-per-view systems or rental download systems like Apple TV had to wait a few weeks after the same movie was released as a DVD,” Hansell reports.
“Warner Brothers has been experimenting with the new approach for the last few months. It has found that DVD rentals only fell by 3 percent to 5 percent and sales of DVDs actually increased,” Hansell reports. “‘Taking a customer and moving that person over from rental-physical over moving them to VOD day-and-date is like a 60 to 70 percent margin instead of a 20 to 30,’ Mr. Bewkes said. ‘So it’s about a three-to-one trade.'”
“All this represents the beginning of the end for the Hollywood system of sales “windows” that are used to extract the most profits from a movie,” Hansell reports.
“I spoke briefly this afternoon to Kevin Tsujihara, the president of Warner’s home video unit. He said that we are moving to an era when there will be thousands of titles available to rent on systems like Apple TV,” Hansell reports.
Full article here.
About time, someone from Hollywood with a clue, amazing.
That’s great news! I imagine Paramount, Universal and others will likely follow suit eventually.
Hell yeah. That’s what I like to hear. Bring it!
Apple TV is awesome, just need more content!
Just wait until we can search on Apple TV with an iPhone, instead of the remote… June?
oh man this is the best news I’ve heard all day! So sick of dealing with discs. Let the domino effect begin.. This is gonna be a huge bump for the Apple tv
Bout time… thankgod
“it will have to make sure that the rules for a digital rental are at least as lenient as renting a DVD from Blockbuster”
72 hours, here we come
No MDN take?!?!
Good News.
I own an Apple TV, and the movie selection isn’t that good right now.. so keep moving forward!
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Great news!
Now that EyeTV integrates with FrontRow (via PyeTV) you can get live digital TV, pre-recorded movies off TV, on-screen TV guide, personal movies, handbroken DVDs, bought downloads and rental downloads on the one MacMini via FrontRow and into a standard older model TV with Apple’s DVI-to-S-Video converter cable. EyeTV remote even has extra buttons.
Nothing missing. It can also act as a Mac.
now if only theyd advertise it…
Warner Bros. gets it. I knew Bugs Bunny was kicking butts over there. He’s probably loving his ATV and straightened out those execs.
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They finally admit 70 to 80 percent margin! greedy fn bastages.
Sheesh, you mean Steve got something right, it’s about time.
I love it! But…so I haven’t kept up with Apple TV–
So is it 1920×1080, does it have 10 bit color, is it really as good or better than Blu-ray? Or is Blu-ray better?
That is awesome… Keep them coming!
@cw: As far as I know the AppleTV only does 720p, not 1080p. Blu-ray is the only shipping format that does 1080p24 (native film frame rate) with (typically) lossless audio (often in 5.1 or 7.1 sound).
When Apple starts pushing 1080p and lossless audio on the the movies they have available, I’ll start to be interested. Until then it’s physical media for me.
Next up? Apple TV needs to get new movies when the mega-plexes do.
No more sitting next to rude assholes, in a smelly overpriced room that could pass as a garbage can.
And the studios wonder why people wait for the DVD releases…
I’ve got to wait till the DVD release date?
I don’t even want to wait till the box office opening!
I want to see the dailies!!!…
“All this represents the beginning of the end for the Hollywood system of sales “windows” that are used to extract the most profits from a movie,” Hansell reports.”
Is he saying that the studios are no longer interested in extracting the most profits from a movie?
“I spoke briefly this afternoon to Kevin Tsujihara, the president of Warner’s home video unit. He said that we are moving to an era when there will be thousands of titles available to rent on systems like Apple TV,” Hansell reports.”
Well… good luck trying to make any money off of me or the unknown numbers of others who share my view. Who, I suspect, probably exist in far greater numbers that the studio execs will be happy about. For an idea of those numbers, think of all those who have bought DVDs. And I don’t mean just the movie collectors who have hundreds or thousands of titles in a collection, because there aren’t enough of those collectors.
I’m talking about all those people who have a dozen or tow or three or more titles. I’ll admit they probably rent more than they buy, but there are titles they own because they don’t want to keep renting them over and over. They want to OWN those titles.
Yes… I’m a collector so I’m not at all interested in renting. At all.
Excepting the very rare, potential social occasion, I won’t be renting any movies.
Sorry. Meant to say
“ll those people who have a dozen or two or three or more dozen titles.”
Gotta spell check.
@ nobodi:
You still didn’t get it right, but whatever… Keep trying.
Open the flood gates for my hungry eye-balls!
Hooray! Why caan’t they open their eyes and see that movies are about creating buzz.
A single launch day for all media types including cinema has to be the future..
Only in the US, I bet. As usual.