Are this movies that one would not be able to get right now from say Netflix? The prices are to high, but watching some of the silent films would be cool.
They're getting ready to have serious problems with ripping, as a 500 Gig hard drive is under $100 now, and it's not that tough to rip a DVD or VHS to disk. Also, most of these movies will be the old stuff that wasn't in high definition anyway, so they won't be able to make the "quality" claim.
Warner Brothers were the king of the gangster movie in the pre-Hays Code era. Great stuff.
Considering that (A) a lot (most?) old movies are much better than the crap that comes out today, thus stimulating demand, and (B) there will be no multimillion-dollar actor salaries, just residuals to dead actors’ estates — this is probably a very good business move.