Movie Distribution Revolution

Mark Cuban, who cre­ated Broadcast.com before sell­ing it to Yahoo, and Steven Sor­der­berg, who directed many box office win­ning pic­tures like “Ocean’s 11″ and “Traf­fic” have decided to part­ner up and rev­o­lu­tion­ize the movie indus­try by offer­ing “films that would debut simul­ta­ne­ously in movie the­aters and on DVD, pay-per-view cable and satel­lite television.”

Fre­quent reader of TNL.net will know that this is a move I have advo­cated for a long time (see here and here for exam­ples). Part of the inter­est­ing issue here is how Mark Cuban is approach­ing the issue. In a recent Wired mag­a­zine inter­view, Cuban was recently saying:

“Peo­ple get fright­ened about all kinds of things in Hol­ly­wood,” he says. “That’s not my sys­tem. I don’t have a busi­ness to pro­tect. I have a busi­ness to build.”

This busi­ness has brought Cuban to fun­da­men­tally believe that bits are bits and is now putting seri­ous money behind the idea. I would like to applaud the effort and hope that it will be suc­cess­ful. If it is, expect the rest of the movie indus­try to follow.

Com­bined with the recent calls by Block­buster Video exec­u­tives to release movies on DVD at the same time as they are released in the­aters, it seems the idea has poten­tials for tak­ing hold.

Since the first step has now been taken, I think they need to also ensure that DVDs of those movies are avail­able in the movie the­ater (the ticket could get you a dol­lar off?) so that peo­ple could buy the DVD if they liked the movie they just saw.

The whole idea could rev­o­lu­tion­ize the way movies are dis­trib­uted, in a fash­ion sim­i­lar to the Fair­Share model I talked about in ear­lier entries. It will be fas­ci­nat­ing to see how the titles fair. I know that, come hell or high­wa­ter, I will be attend­ing the first week­end open­ing of the first movie to come out of this part­ner­ship, just to show the rest of hol­ly­wood that simul­ta­ne­ous release in the the­ater and DVDs can be done with­out hurt­ing the­ater box office sales… and I hope oth­ers will join me in this.