Given the way Amazon describes their streaming rental in the stuff I linked before, while there are licenses involved, it’s not Amazon going around asking people to please let them put movies on Amazon’s site. Rather Amazon opens the door and studios come to Amazon to submit stuff to be shown. Assuming this holds true for sites like YouTube or Apple that also do streaming rentals, it’s very possible that Netflix could get into the same business and get a lot of the same titles under their rental umbrella. After all, if I’m Paramount or Disney, every 8-10 rentals elsewhere netting me $2 is worth a month’s subscription without the overhead of someone streaming Encanto 24/7 or sharing accounts with half their extended family. And, if it isn’t costing you anything to put your product on Amazon’s shelf (or Youtube, etc) then why not?
So I don’t really think that the reason why Netflix doesn’t do this is really “licensing” in the same sense as “How come I can’t stream Marvel movies on Netflix as part of my sub?” There might be some level of Netflix’s more direct competition not wanting to assist Netflix in a new cash-making avenue but I don’t think it’s the biggest reason. Rather Netflix just doesn’t want to get into that marketplace for brand reasons or overhead or whatever.
The current situation is close to being able to choose your cable channels. Even in the “needing multiple services to get everything you want” . Sure before streaming and video rental , I would have had no services other than cable - but even then, it was pretty common to have “In order to get Channel A you have to have the Silver package and to get Channel B you need the Gold package and to get both A&B you need Platinum” or where certain channels such as HBO were purchased as add-ons so you would pay for your package plus HBO and any other “premium” channels you wanted. So even though I had only one actual provider and paid only one bill , I would still have to choose my package to get the channels I wanted. Which isn’t all that different from me wanting Hulu for some shows and HBO Max and Disney for others.
In fact, to some extent I can have only one bill - there are a bunch of Prime Video Channels , so you can subscribe to Paramount + and discovery+ through Prime and have it all on one bill in one place.
Google will give you the same information. Google the name of a movie and it will tell you what streaming services include it with a subscription, which ones you can rent it from, etc. That does have the slight disadvantage of not being able to jump straight to the movie on your TV.
I think maybe one of the reasons Netflix is leaving the digital rental money on the table is because there isn’t a lot of it to pick up in the fist place.
Across the entire industry, digital video on demand (non-subscription) revenue in the US has remained remarkably flat over the past 10 years. There have been ups and downs, but it’s pretty consistently been in the $2 billion per year range ($1.97 billion in 2012, $1.76 billion in 2021). That isn’t exactly a growth industry. And it probably shows that most consumers don’t care to rent digital content.
I use justwatch.com on a separate device to figure out where something is available. It would be nice if it were integrated into the TV itself or streaming box, but I really don’t want it integrated into the Netflix app.
Digital rentals have always been priced at a point where they’re a pretty bad value proposition. They’re like $5, which doesn’t compete favorably with streaming services since it’s like 1/3 of the whole month, nor with physical video rental services like Redbox or (for we lucky few) Blockbuster. This has sort of always been the case. When they first started and brick and mortar video rental shops were still fairly plentiful, they were priced higher than physical rentals, and physical rentals have gotten cheaper.
My impression is that the execs looked at the $3/rental blockbuster price in the early 2000 and either didn’t want to upset that apple cart or decided to try to capture most of the consumer surplus from not having to drive to the store, but it didn’t work well because Netflix and Redbox came along and undercut them anyway, and people either mostly don’t think about the saved trip to the store and just see $5 > $3, or they go pick up a rental at the place next to where they buy groceries or pick up their Friday night pizza anyway, so there really isn’t $2 in transport saved.
I occasionally digitally rent movies, but I’d do it a lot more (and probably cancel some streaming services) if they were priced lower. If Redbox can make money with actual physical disks and vending machines and all the nonsense involved at $1-2 a rental, VOD should be able to do so in spades. Server and bandwidth costs are way lower. They just… don’t want to, for whatever reason.
I don’t really know the economics of the supply side of content rental. But I do know that Redbox can buy a DVD, rent it as many times as they can until it won’t play any more, and the only cost (other than their fixed costs of distribution, machines, and administration) is a one-time charge to buy the DVD. No licensing, no royalties, they don’t even need permission. Streaming is whole other animal. I don’t know if a service pays a fixed license fee or if they have to pay a royalty per viewing. Redbox can pay maybe $20 for the DVD but Amazon might have to pay $1 every time they stream a movie. And I’m not so sure server and bandwidth costs are so low.
I think Redbox pays a percentage to the owner of the kiosk’s location. They also need to pay for an internet uplink for each kiosk (e.g. mobile data).
Are you sure they pay retail for the DVDs and do not need to pay a licence for commercial use? In ye olden tymes I thought legit video stores paid a commercial price for VHS tapes that they rented. Maybe that has changed?
No, the first sale doctrine says that once I have legitimately bought a work on physical media, i control that copy and can rent, lend or resell it. I think what you are remembering is the time when VHS tapes were initially released at a high price and only video stores actually bought them at that price. The video store was free to wait a few months until the price dropped from $100 to $20 and rent out the copy bought for $20 except of course by the time the price dropped no one wanted to rent it anymore,
That’s true, but the other side of it is that the $1 that Amazon has to pay isn’t written in stone. It’s set by the rights-holder who it seems like should have some incentive to not constantly be out-competed by a vending machine.
One possibility here is that the licensing mess involved in movies and tv is so bad that the rights-holders can’t actually be very nimble, which is one reason why Netflix and Amazon and Disney and Apple are being more successful at vertical integration than anyone ever was at horizontal, and why legacy technology like physical disks in physical machines continues to be more relevant than it seems like it ought to be.
I don’t have accurate inside-industry information here, but a little back of the envelope math using publicly available Amazon AWS prices I think supports my claim that they are likely pretty low. Amazon HD streams are ~2GB/hour, so let’s say 5GB for a full movie.
Retail Amazon S3 storage is $0.021/GB/month at the cheapest tier, which makes that movie cost a bit over $0.10/mo to store. Data transfer is $0.05/GB at the cheapest tier, so the movie would be about $0.25 per stream. And those are the prices charged by a very profitable wing of Amazon. Their actual costs are lower.
And while the disk in a Redbox kiosk can in theory be rented an infinite number of times, in actuality the disk will be physically damaged at some point, and of course the market for a given movie falls off quite quickly. A given copy might be rented… 50 times? That seems pretty optimistic, honestly. I bet it’s lower on average. If we assume the disk is $20, that makes the per rental cost $0.40. And the machines themselves have to be serviced. I found a claim that the kiosks are serviced each week, with a tech servicing about 60 kiosks a week. So you’ve got an employee costing, I don’t know, $1000 a week for each 60 * 700 or so disks. That works out to around $0.10/mo per disk in costs aside from the kiosks, the rent, or the disks themselves.
Which is all to say: it’s complicated. But I’d be extremely surprised if the physical infrastructure for streaming video at scale was more expensive per viewing than the physical infrastructure to distribute and service little disks to machines in grocery stores at scale.
I just gave up on Netflix DVDs since I like old content, and it appears that they are not replacing any DVDs that get worn out or broken. I had about 20 things on my queue that were listed but which they didn’t really have.
So you’re not missing anything.
Same here; I was a Netflix DVD-by-mail subscriber for, I think, 18 years but cancelled earlier this year. They had few new movies and their back catalog had lots of holes. Somewhere I have a list of movies that I wanted to see but weren’t available on the service and many were older titles.