Well your vudu stuff might never go away. Remember what’s gone on with the kindle when Amazon lost their e-license to some books, and those were on people’s kindles, vudu’s stuff is entirely on their servers. If they lose their license to a movie you bought for stream it’ll be gone POOF.
A lot of the older content they don’t have is a matter of license. NBC has a lot of their old shows on the stream on their website, so they aren’t putting them on the stream on Netflix. I just did a search for Christmas and it came up 110 pages, lots of it with the blue stream button. Don’t know about gay lesbo content, never shows up in my suggestions.
I don’t think they could have done things much differently. The streaming requires a separate license. Every time the go to the content owners for that license it’s the balancing act, they need to find a way for the owners to make more money letting Netflix stream than doing their own stream. As you point out more and more networks are doing their own stream, and they’re going exclusive. Netflix can’t stop them from doing that. The one thing they’ve got these guys beat on is the devices, pretty much every internet enabled entertainment device out there has a Netflix client, and unless they have some kind of wide open net browser they probably can’t get to NBC/classic TV, or HBOGo. This limits their competition, but it doesn’t stop the competition from trying. As long as these companies don’t want to let Netflix stream their stuff Netflix has no choice, except possibly offering to pay a lot, which quadrupled their license fees, and forced a rate hike.
In the end though they’re still in the strong position because of the devices. And I think they’ll win the battle. I’m not going to stream anything off NBC because my bluray doesn’t do NBC and connecting the computer to the TV is more annoyance than I’m willing to do. So whatever revenue NBC thinks they’ll get from doing their own stream they won’t be getting from me. What they probably need to negotiate is portal style, let NBC keep their stuff, but portal it through Netflix, thus NBC gets access to my bluray and still gets the revenue they wanted by keeping it in house, and Netflix gets the added bonus of not having to store all those shows on their servers.
I like that vudu’s stuff is entirely on their servers and you can be sure if something goes ‘poof’ they are going to be in a world of lawsuits. I did a double check and Netflix has improved the Christmas content. I still would like to be able to custome profile a device. As for the gay lesbo stuff its there and it can’t easily be blocked and one of the great things about these services should be customization to tastes and enhanced parental control. Also It’d be cool. I think neflix should have a cable tv channel offerring. It’d expand their brand and help feed their service. There is so much more they could do. They definently need to get into kiosks or some kind of instant rental system. They may not be hurting now but they risk becoming stagnent. The cable tv companies are coming and some of those who they currently purchase rights from will soon be competing. It is going to get tough in netflix land. Even I have found myself not using them as much since my cable options have improved considerably through xfinity. Maybe its just me but Netflix just isn’t exciting any more. Hulu plus would be good for me if they would just duplicate the service they have on the pc but we can thank the funny money way rights are sold for that not happenning. That is low on my list but I’d like to see a bit of reform on how media and intellectual property is treated legally. I’d like to see it become easier for companies like Netflix to acquire rights to media. I’d like to see the law changed so that Netflix could simply purchase 2 million copies of a movie and then be able to offer up to two million streams. Imagine if a car rental company had to license the rights to rent a certain type of vehicle? They have deals but you’d think it were crazy. A dirt lot in the middle of Alabama can buy and rent any vehicle they want why should media be different? We apply strange counterintuitive rules to things that benefits consumers not one bit.
The itunes model works, though it may be too heavily balanced in favor of iTunes. Content owners get up to 70% of the fee, 30% goes to iTunes for delivering it. Content onwers in this case could be shared, e.g. production company gets some and “US distributor rights” gets some, depending on the deal they struck originally.
At some point something close to standard will emerge and then it won’t matter who is providing the content, the content owners will be happy knowing they get the cut whether sold on Netflix, Google, Hulu, Itunes, NBC, Amazon, Comcast, Time Warner etc etc etc.
What the owners need to work on is how to keep the audience interested when so much on demand is available. It becomes a marketing challenge. They won’t want to break the model of Theatrical Release, as that is where the most noise is made, and the costs recently incurred and they want to recoup it Selling a movie 10 years after it is released out is a different economic model, and iTunes actually showed music people how to make more money by abandoning the previous line pricing, and allowing singles to sell from as much as $2 to as low as 39 cents, when previously it was all $1 a song and $9.99 an album.
Content owners will be able to determine how much to charge, and Netflix will be able to offer first run or second run movies for an upcharge. Older content will be sold in a licensed package.