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Netflix and "Rental" Disks

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boykster:
There has always been contention between the movie industry and the rental business - remember the VHS days when there were retail versions and rental versions of movies?  The rental versions were list price of ~$80-100 even when the retail versions had dropped in price to $15-20 for new releases.  The price structure was meant to ensure high revenue to the studio for all rental titles.  Any rental shop caught renting retail copies was subject to a massive fine and generally shut down (it happened in my home town).

The DVD market sent things sideways - there wasn't a negotiated higher price for DVDs for the rental market, and the studios were scrambling to find ways to secure revenue.  Now video shops could afford to buy dozens of copies of new releases (instead of just a handful) and make them widely available on DVD release date.  Why buy for $20 when you can rent for $4?  The rental stores would just then sell them used for $8-10 and recoup 1/2 of their investment for the movie on top of the rental revenue.  Studios started offering 'rental versions' of DVDs at REDUCED cost to rental companies to reduce the value of the rental (fewer special features if any) as well as make it more difficult to offload copies at reduced cost. 

I remember during the vhs->DVD transition seeing commercials for movies coming out to video - they would almost always say "Rent it on VHS or buy it on DVD Tuesday!" - emphasizing that it was OK to rent a VHS, but you should buy it on DVD....

Now with Netflix and other direct rental outfits, things have changed again.  Throw BluRay into the mix, and i'm not surprised that rental versions are starting to spring up.  It really does defeat the value of the BD medium though, unless the version of the movie is making use of the extra storage, it's just wasted space....

newmanfamilyvlogs:
And all the while the slow creep of increased bandwidth quietly whispers the death of physical media, and with it, any sense of ownership over content.

RayB:
If you stream a Netflix movie, do you get "extras" ?

boykster:

--- Quote from: RayB on January 31, 2011, 02:29:55 pm ---If you stream a Netflix movie, do you get "extras" ?


--- End quote ---

nope - movie only

Mikezilla:
My VCR never told me things like that, or when I could skip ahead or whatnot.

Jesus. Thats ---smurfin--- ---That which is odiferous and causeth plants to grow---. I would have been outraged. Thats unbelievable. Does Netflix make their own DVD's and Blu-Rays? My GF brought to my attention all the discs say Netflix on them when we started getting season discs of Dexter. Then Inception and Get him to the Greek said it too. So what the ---fudgesicle--- do you have to do in order to see the extras, or the ---smurfin--- shorts?  :lame:

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