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Where the hits are streaming

Film

There’s been a lot of dis­cus­sion lately about how Net­flix is in the process of mov­ing from a DVD dis­tri­b­u­tion com­pany to pri­mar­ily a stream­ing ser­vice. The ques­tion, though, is how close this future truly is.

In order to assess their progress, I decided to look at how many of the 2010 top box office earn­ers were on the ser­vice. Fig­ur­ing that we also needed a yard­stick to com­pare Net­flix offer­ings against, I took the top three online stream­ing ser­vices and got the data for each of them (gen­er­ally speak­ing, rentals are around $3.99 to $4.99 and pur­chases seem to be around $14.99).

First, I pulled up the Box Office data and then put each title in the search engine for each of the ser­vices. I also looked up DVD avail­abil­ity from both Ama­zon and Net­flix to ensure we had a yard­stick we could mea­sure against in terms of online vs. offline avail­abil­ity of titles. The assump­tion here was that some box office hit might not be avail­able in either form due to the fact that they were recently released. I also made a deci­sion to reject titles that are avail­able on a pre-order basis as it is not yet pos­si­ble to watch them. For future ref­er­ence, all this data was pulled together the third week of Jan­u­ary 2011.

2010: Box Office Win­ners availability

Once I did all this work I had a table for the  2010 box office num­bers win­ners and it looked like this:

Rank Title Net­flix Ama­zon iTunes Vudu DVD
1 Toy Story 3 No Rental only Yes Yes Yes
2 Alice in Wonderland Yes No Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Yes
3 Iron Man 2 No Yes Yes Yes Yes
4 The Twi­light Saga: Eclipse No Yes Yes Yes Yes
5 Incep­tion No Yes Yes Yes Yes
6 Harry Pot­ter and the Deathly Hal­lows: Part 1 No No No No No
7 Despi­ca­ble Me No Yes Yes Yes Yes
8 Shrek For­ever After No Yes Yes Yes Yes
9 How to Train Your Dragon No Yes Yes Yes Yes
10 Tan­gled No No No No No
11 The Karate Kid No Yes Yes Yes Yes
12 Clash of the Titans No Pur­chase only No Yes Yes
13 Grown Ups No Yes Yes Yes Yes
14 Tron Legacy No No No No No
15 Mega­mind No No No No No
16 Lit­tle Fockers No No No No No
17 The Last Airbender No Yes Yes Yes Yes
18 True Grit No No No No No
19 Shut­ter Island Yes Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Yes
20 The Other Guys No Yes Yes Yes Yes
21 Salt No Yes Yes Yes Yes
22 Jack­ass 3D No No No No No
23 Valentine’s Day No No No No Yes
24 Robin Hood No Yes Yes Yes Yes
25 The Expend­ables No Yes Yes Yes Yes
26 Due Date No No No No No
27 The Chron­i­cle of Nar­nia:
Voy­age of the Dawn Treader		 No No No No No
28 Date Night No Yes Yes Yes Yes
29 Sex and the City 2 No Yes Yes Yes Yes
30 The Social Network No Yes Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Yes
31 The Book of Eli No No No No Yes
32 The Town No Yes Yes Yes Yes
33 Prince of Per­sia:
The Sands of Time		 No Yes Yes Yes Yes
34 Red No No No No No
35 Percy Jack­son & The Oplympians:
The Light­ning Thief		 No No No No Yes
36 Para­nor­mal Activ­ity 2 No No No No Yes
37 Yogi Bear No No No No No
38 Eat Pray Love No Yes Yes Yes Yes
39 Unstop­pable No No No No No
40 Dear John Yes Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Yes
41 The A-team No Yes Yes Yes Yes
42 Knight & Day No Yes Yes Yes Yes
43 Black Swan No No No No No
44 Din­ner for Schmucks No Yes Yes Yes Yes
45 The Fighter No No No No No
46 The Bounty Hunter Yes No No No Yes
47 The Tourist No No No No No
48 Diary of a Wimpy Kid No Yes Yes Yes Yes
49 The Sorcerer’s Apprentice No Rental only Yes Yes Yes
50 A Night­mare on Elm Street (2010) No Yes Yes Yes Yes
51 The Last Song Yes No Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Yes
52 The Wolf­man No No No No Yes
53 Get him to the Greek No Yes Yes Yes Yes
54 Res­i­dent Evil: Afterlife No Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Yes
55 Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Mar­ried Too No Yes Yes Yes Yes
56 Tooth Fairy No No No No Yes
57 Sec­re­tariat No No No No Yes
58 Easy A No Yes Yes Yes No
59 Tak­ers No Yes Yes Yes Yes
60 Leg­end of the Guardians:
The Owls of Ga’hoole		 No Yes Yes Yes Yes
61 Life as We Know It No Yes No No No
62 Let­ters to Juliet No Yes Yes Yes Yes
63 Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps No Yes Yes Yes Yes
64 Preda­tors No Yes Yes Yes Yes
65 Hot Tub Time Machine No No Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Yes
66 Kick-Ass No Pur­chase only Pur­chase only No Yes
67 The King’s Speech No No No No No
68 Killers No Yes Yes Yes Yes
69 Saw 3D No Yes No No Yes
70 Cop Out No No No No Yes
71 Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore No Yes Yes Yes Yes
72 Edge of Darkness No No No No Yes
73 Death at a Funeral Yes Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Yes
74 Step-Up 3D No Yes No No Yes
75 The Last Exorcism No Yes Yes Yes Yes
76 Legion Yes Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Yes
77 The Cra­zies Yes No No No Yes
78 Gulliver’s Trav­els No No No No No
79 Bur­lesque No No No No No
80 For Col­ored Girls No No No No Yes
81 The Back-up Plan No Yes Yes Yes Yes
82 Vam­pires Suck No Yes Yes Yes Yes
83 The Amer­i­can No Yes Yes Yes Yes
84 Green Zone No No No No Yes
85 Mar­maduke No Yes Yes Yes Yes
86 Devil No Yes Yes Yes Yes
87 Here­after No No No No No
88 When in Rome Yes No Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Yes
89 Love and Other Drugs No No No No No
90 She’s Out of My League No No No No Yes
91 Scott Pil­grim vs. the World No Yes Yes Yes Yes
92 Char­lie St. Cloud No Yes Yes Yes Yes
93 Morn­ing Glory No No No No No
94 Day­break­ers No Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Yes
95 How Do You Know No No No No No
96 Nanny McPhee Returns No Yes Yes Yes Yes
97 The Switch No No No No No
98 Brooklyn’s Finest Yes No Pur­chase only No Yes
99 Machete No Yes Yes Yes Yes
100 Ramona and Beezus No Yes Yes Yes Yes

Aggre­gate Rental data

When you tally it up, the rental chart looks as follows:

Net­flix Ama­zon iTunes Vudu DVD
Top 10 1 7 7 7 8
Top 25 2 14 14 14 17
top 50 4 25 25 25 34
Top 100 10 48 46 46 74

The first thing one notices here is that Net­flix seems to have a long way to go before hav­ing any claim to strength in that par­tic­u­lar arena. With only 9 per­cent of the top 100 2010 movies, Net­flix seems to come on the short end of the stick when it comes to mak­ing streams of box office win­ners online. In a future post, I will exam­ine whether this is because their strength is more in older titles than in recent ones but, as far as the data cur­rently show, the sub­scrip­tion model offered by Net­flix would prob­a­bly have a hard time fight­ing with a pre­mium cable TV movie channel.

The story gets more inter­est­ing when one starts look­ing at the Video on Demand data for ser­vices like Ama­zon on demand, iTunes, and Vudu. My selec­tion of those par­tic­u­lar ser­vices was largely due to the fact that they are avail­able in sys­tems that can con­nect to your tele­vi­sion. For exam­ple Ama­zon is avail­able on the Roku box, iTunes is avail­able on AppleTV, and Vudu is avail­able on the Boxee box.

What I con­sider to be the most strik­ing find­ing in this is the rel­a­tive con­sis­tency of offer­ings across the board. None of the VoD play­ers seem to have any par­tic­u­lar advan­tage over the other. All of them bat­ted in the 45–50 per­cent range, as far as the 2010 hits are con­cerned. By com­par­i­son, just under 75 per­cent of the movies were avail­able on DVD at the time I did this research, giv­ing DVDs a 1/3rd advan­tage over VoD at this time. One can only hope that the trend will go to that gap clos­ing over the next few years.

Sales Data

Another inter­est­ing point is the clos­ing of the gap between DVD and Vod when it comes to avail­abil­ity of titles on an own­er­ship basis:

Ama­zon iTunes Vudu DVD
Top 10 6 8 8 8
Top 25 15 16 17 18
top 50 27 29 30 35
Over­all 56 60 57 75

Here, the data seems to show increased avail­abil­ity of titles on an own­er­ship basis as opposed to a rental one. The VoD ser­vices per­formed 10 per­cent bet­ter on avail­abil­ity, com­ing much closer to the num­ber of titles offered over DVD.

Con­clu­sion

While Net­flix has been her­alded as the leader in online stream­ing, the real­ity on the ground is much more com­plex. The Net­flix model is pred­i­cated on an all you can eat model but if what you want to eat is a movie that was in the top 100 at the box office last year, view­ers are left with only crumbs. The rental model offered by other inter­net based stream­ing com­pa­nies is more in line with the tra­di­tional video on demand offer­ings avail­able on cable tele­vi­sion and the data seems to high­light that Hol­ly­wood is more com­fort­able with that model than it is with the Net­flix one. This could present a strate­gic chal­lenge for Net­flix as it tries to nego­ti­ate more stream­ing contracts.

While DVD is still the king of the roost, the gap between DVD and online streams is slowly clos­ing. The list I’ve cre­ated here can serve as a base­line against data next year to assess whether more titles will be made avail­able. There also appears to be a pref­er­ence in the film indus­try towards mak­ing titles avail­able for sale instead of rent. I believe that this may be a short-sighted view as rental mod­els can gen­er­ate more income over the long run. It will be fas­ci­nat­ing to see how all this develops.

Update: A more recent ver­sion of this post is now avail­able.

Originally published on January 20, 2011 in Business, Media . You may find related thoughts pieces under the following terms: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

  • Anony­mous

    I’m curi­ous, why wasn’t Red­box included?

  • http://www.tnl.net Tris­tan Louis

    I didn’t include red­box because I wanted to focus on stream­ing as the model. The only rea­son I have DVD avail­abil­ity is as a stand-in for other means (Red­Box, Block­buster, local video store, direct pur­chase) to pro­vide a yard­stick as to what is gen­er­ally con­sid­ered “avail­able”. My assump­tion is that if a title isn’t avail­able on DVD, it prob­a­bly is OK for it to not be avail­able on stream­ing yet. This assump­tion is due to the fact that I didn’t want the dis­cus­sion to be about poten­tial NEW release win­dows but rather about match­ing exist­ing ones…

  • kk_ck

    Net­flix is a sub­scrip­tion video-on-demand. Rest are not. Rest are only dig­i­tal rentals / phys­i­cal rentals. This is an apples-oranges comparison.

    • http://www.tnl.net Tris­tan Louis

      What would you com­pare Net­flix to then? With­out a base­line, it’s hard to say. What this data indi­cates is that online stream­ing is com­ing of age but Net­flix has a long way to go before its model is accepted by Hollywood.

      • Jimmy

        Maybe you should com­pare it the most glar­ingly obvi­ous ser­vice. Hulu Plus.

      • http://www.tnl.net Tris­tan Louis

        Hulu Plus is pri­mar­ily TV-centric. This study was focused on movies. Maybe I should do a sim­i­lar piece on the top TV shows last year.

  • Egru­en­wedel

    Great arti­cle, Tris­tan.
    I believe Net­flix is more inter­ested in TV con­tent than movies for stream­ing. Its data regard­ing about 15 min­utes streamed per month by the aver­age sub­scribers sug­gests view­ers opt to stream a TV episode com­pared to a 90-minute movie. But that could also mean there aren’t any movies avail­able worth stream­ing … as your study sug­gests.
    Erik

    • http://www.tnl.net Tris­tan Louis

      That’s an inter­est­ing point but if that were the case, why would one go with Net­flix over Hulu Plus?

  • http://twitter.com/JimTheFrog Jim Tay­lor

    I count 10 yeses in the Net­Flix col­umn. Did your spread­sheet mis­count? That aside, excel­lent analy­sis. I checked Cin­e­maNow and got essen­tially the same num­ber, so it’s clear that title avail­abil­ity is pretty much the same across non-subscription ser­vices. It’s also inter­est­ing to note that some titles (Percy Jack­son, Tooth Fairy, etc.) used to be avail­able for stream­ing from Cin­e­maNow and oth­ers but are no longer avail­able because they’ve gone into the HBO VOD hold­back window.

    • http://www.tnl.net Tris­tan Louis

      You were right. I cor­rected it. I sus­pect that Cin­e­maNow would prob­a­bly end up with the same movies as iTunes, Ama­zon, and Vudu… The results on those seem pretty con­sis­tent, high­light­ing that there is hardly any dis­cernible dif­fer­ences between them.

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  • http://twitter.com/fallsmatt Falls Matt

    I can han­dle the delay of movies of that came out a year ago. There are plenty of older titles that I need to catch up on. What rubs me the wrong way is why top 10 movies from 3, 5, and even 10 years ago are not avail­able. I just looked at the top 10 box office gross­ing movies of 2008, which is more than 2 years ago now… how many of those 10 movies are avail­able for instant­watch? ZERO. I decided to roll the clock back fur­ther, and then looked at the top 10 gross­ing movies of 2006, all movies from 4 to 5 years ago, and guess how many are avail­able for instant watch? Just one! No Night at the Museum (which is all over basic cable), no Pirates of the Caribbean Dead Man’s Chest, no DaVinci Code, no Super­man Returns, no Cars. I’m not com­ment­ing on the qual­ity of these movies, just their audi­ence appeal. Rolling back to the mid/late 90s, Instant Watch doesn’t even have Titanic, the biggest movie of all time and by no means a recent movie in any way, shape, or form.

    This is the biggest hur­dle for Net­flix to over­come, in my opin­ion. When I have peo­ple over to the house and they first start look­ing at my Roku and what is avail­able on Net­flix, they are inter­ested. Then they start look­ing up movies in the last 5 to 10 years that they remem­ber (a lot of them on that list above), and when they see rel­a­tively few of their favorite movies listed, they get turned off pretty quickly.

    Does any­one know why pop­u­lar movies from 5 years ago, which aren’t really hot titles any more, aren’t avail­able on Net­flix stream­ing yet? Are they too expensive?

    • http://www.tnl.net Tris­tan Louis

      Matt,

      I’m in the process of com­plet­ing an upcom­ing entry on this, look­ing at the top 10 hits since 2005 and their pres­ence on the dif­fer­ent ser­vices. Stay tuned :)

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  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_LAJEJBPTLP4QVHCBOHQPWRHSTE John Mor­gan

    I sub­scribe to Dish. Strangely, I don’t like, nor do I watch, recently made movies.
    Per­haps TCM should start a stream­ing VOD ser­vice.
    The Net­flix “No” list, I wouldn’t watch.
    I never had to be at the box office to see the new hot release although I was there when “Gone With The Wind” first came to town. Every­one in the the­ater stood up and clapped when Scar­let shot the yan­kee between the eyes. That is a movie..

    • http://www.tnl.net Tris­tan Louis

      I wasn’t account­ing for taste when I put the list together. Ulti­mately, the box office is decided by what the major­ity of peo­ple want to see. A lot of the movies on the list are movies I per­son­ally don’t care about but the major­ity of the view­ing pub­lic has voted with their dol­lars and shown they’d want to watch those movies. So it seems like what is offered is not nec­es­sar­ily in line with what peo­ple gen­er­ally want.

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