Hollywood is hoping to cash in by offering premium video-on-demand services which will see movies streamed direct to people’s homes just weeks after they debut in theaters. But I can’t see there being many takers.
Home Premiere
In April of this year an idea that had been floating around since the previous September finally arrived. ‘Home Premiere’ is its name, and it s a premium VOD service in which movies are streamed to people’s homes for $30-a-pop.
Filmmakers including Michael Bay, James Cameron, and Peter Jackson registered their objections to the service on the grounds it would both put movie theaters out of business and aid piracy. And they kinda had a point.
That hasn’t stopped other companies jumping on the bandwagon, with Comcast launching its own similar service.
Tower Heist Experiment
The upcoming Universal Pictures movie Tower Heist, an action-comedy starring Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy, will be the subject of this test, with 500,000 Comcast cable subscribers in Atlanta and Portland able to watch the movie at home for $59.99.
That’s double the amount charged on ‘Home Premiere’, but it’ll become available just 21 days after the flick makes its theatrical debut, compared to the 60-day window offered through the aforementioned service. What Hollywood gives with one hand, it takes with the other.
The objections to this are many and varied, but the main one is the shrinking of the window of opportunity afforded to movie theaters. It’s already shrunk from 120 days to 90 days, then to 60 days, and now it’s 21 days. It cannot be long before it’s down to 0 days, assuming there are any customers willing to pay the asking price.
Conclusions
TechCrunch writer Devin Coldewey says all that needs to be said about this plan, with three concise points: it’s too expensive, the test run is too limited, Tower Heist really isn’t a good movie to get the ball rolling. For these reasons alone this experiment will produce displeasing results for Comcast.
That will be the last we hear of premium VOD for a while. But it’ll be back, in some form. And one day it may even work. Which is terrible news for theater owners, filmmakers, and moviegoers. The only winners will be the Hollywood movie studios and their corporate parents.
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