Netflix equals absolution
Tonight I watched a bootleg copy of X-Men 3. I don’t feel bad about it. I would have rented it at some point anyway.
I subscribe to Netflix. I can get any movie or TV show in the mail at any time. Downloading a movie or a TV show is simply a more efficient means of me getting what I normally would have received in the mail anyway.
Now, I’ve been a Netflix customer for many, many years. I’m on the plan where I get to have four DVDs out at once. The turnaround time for me getting movies is about three days. I mail one back and two days later a new one arrives. Theoretically I could stagger my DVD rentals so that I would have a new one coming in every single day. I don’t do this for a few reasons, but mainly because there is not that much stuff I want to watch.
My understanding of the movie rental business is that the rental companies buy each copy of a DVD from the studios for hundreds of dollars because they are expected to recoup their expenses with many rentals. The movies are already paid for and my monthly bill to Netflix takes care of me paying them. I’m paying for at least one DVD per day by that logic and the studios have my money in their pockets.
I certainly do not download and watch that many shows or movies in a month. Even if my method of getting my Hollywood entertainment doesn’t conform to the industry’s preferences, the ones who are in the business to profit are still coming out ahead with me.
I do not really see any problems with my way of thinking about this, but I would love to hear another take on it.
technorati tags:netflix, filesharing, downloading
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I think there is a flaw in your argument: Netflix somehow decides how many copies of a movie to buy based on expected demand so that they can make enough of their users happy simultaneously. I would imagine that they looked at a couple factors to decide how many copies of X-Men 3 to buy. First would be past rental patterns, probably of prior X-Men films, and also of films that tended to gross about the same amount of money as X-Men. Second would be to look at how many users had X-Men 3 in their queues to be sent out when it became available.
If some Netflix users have a pattern of downloading big films rather than renting them, then they won’t have them saved in their queues, and they won’t end up renting them. That means that group of users will influence the way Netflix calculates how many copies of a film to buy, and therefore they end up buying a few less copies, which means a little less money to the studio.
If you’re the only one downloading with this rationale, then it probably isn’t a major impact on Neflix and studios. If a LOT of Netflix users are downloading with this rationale, then it will be.
By Scott on 09 Aug 2006 @ 10:33 am
Scott,
I had thought about what you bring up: that if many people acted the same way as me, then something would be affected. I just chose to ignore it.
I know that’s not the best way to make a good point, but it happened in this case.
If I were to adjust my behavior to have the least impact, queuing movies and then rating them would probably be less detrimental to Netflix deciding which movies to purchase.
Not that I feel I need to defend myself, but I do get plenty of DVDs in the mail from Netflix and watch more of them than downloaded ones. Oftentimes it’s easier to put a DVD in my queue and forget about it than to hunt through all the BitTorrent forums and then wait and wait for something to download.
When the business models change so they offer a mixture of home delivery and downloads of movies I’ll be quite a happy customer.
By Tommy on 09 Aug 2006 @ 10:56 am
I agree that the companies aren’t keeping up with the way that people would like to get access to their media. I am hoping that we’ll be there soon; iTMS is already doing TV shows, so it seems like it would be a natural next step to do films. Of course, the sales model might not be palatable (pay-per-view vs. rental style subscription, etc.)
There are of course some technical/political challenges here, it’s always nicer to have un-DRMed content than deal with DRM.
By Scott on 09 Aug 2006 @ 11:22 am
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