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Where the hits are streaming in 2011

Film

A year ago, I looked at the avail­abil­ity of recent block­buster hits in online stream and dis­cov­ered some inter­est­ing pat­terns in online stream offer­ings. This year, I’m doing the same with the 2011 list of box office hits. The great news is that we appear to see some progress.

2011: Box Office Win­ners availability

For each movie of the top 100 movies at the box office, I pulled data on for stream­ing info on Net­flix, Ama­zon on Demand, iTunes, and Vudu. I also pulled up avail­abil­ity of DVDs to use as a yard­stick in terms of over­all movie avail­abil­ity. The final chart looked like this:

Rank Movie Title Net­flix Ama­zon iTunes Vudu DVD
1 Harry Pot­ter and the Deathly Hal­lows Part 2 No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
2 Trans­form­ers: Dark of the Moon No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
3 The Twi­light Saga: Break­ing Dawn Part 1 No No  No No Yes
4 The Hang­over Part II No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
5 Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
6 Fast Five No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
7 Cars 2 No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
8 Thor No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
9 Rise of the Planet of the Apes No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
10 Cap­tain Amer­ica: The First Avenger No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
11 The Help No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
12 Brides­maids No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
13 Kung Fu Panda 2 No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
14 X-Men: First Class No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
15 Puss in Boots No No  No No No
16 Rio No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
17 The Smurfs No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
18 Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble — Ghost Protocol No No  No No No
19 Sher­lock Holmes: A Game of Shadows No No  No No No
20 Super 8 No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
21 Rango No Pur­chase only  Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Yes
22 Hor­ri­ble Bosses No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
23 Green Lantern No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
24 Hop No No  No No No
25 Para­nor­mal Activ­ity 3 No No  No No No
26 Just Go With It No Pur­chase only  Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Yes
27 Bad Teacher No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
28 Cow­boys & Aliens No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
29 Gnomeo and Juliet Yes Pur­chase only  Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Yes
30 The Green Hornet No Pur­chase only  Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Yes
31 Alvin and the Chip­munks: Chipwrecked No No  No No No
32 The Lion King (in 3D) No Pur­chase only (non-3D) Pur­chase only (non-3D) Pur­chase only No
33 Real Steel No No  Pur­chase only No Yes
34 Crazy, Stu­pid, Love. No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
35 The Mup­pets No No  No No No
36 Bat­tle: Los Angeles No Pur­chase only  Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Yes
37 Immor­tals No No  No No No
38 Zookeeper No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
39 Lim­it­less Yes Yes  Yes Yes Yes
40 Tower Heist No No  No No No
41 Con­ta­gion No Pur­chase only  Yes Yes Yes
42 Mon­ey­ball No Yes  Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Yes
43 Justin Bieber: Never Say Never Yes Pur­chase only  Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Yes
44 Dol­phin Tale No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
45 Jack and Jill No No  No No No
46 No Strings Attached Yes Pur­chase only  Pur­chase only Pur­chase only No
47 Mr. Popper’s Penguins No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
48 Unknown No No  No No Yes
49 The Adjust­ment Bureau No No  No No No
50 Happy Feet Two No No  No No No
51 The Girl with the Dragon Tat­too (2011) No No  No No No
52 Water for Elephants No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
53 The Lin­coln Lawyer No Pur­chase only  Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Yes
54 Mid­night in Paris No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
55 Friends with Benefits No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
56 I Am Num­ber Four No Pur­chase only  Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Yes
57 Source Code No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
58 Insid­i­ous Yes Pur­chase only  Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Yes
59 Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Big Happy Family No Yes  Yes No Yes
60 Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules No No  No No Yes
61 Foot­loose (2011) No No  No No No
62 The Adven­tures of Tintin No No  No No No
63 Hugo No No  No No No
64 The Dilemma No No  No No Yes
65 New Year’s Eve No No  No No No
66 Arthur Christ­mas No No  No No No
67 War Horse No No  No No No
68 Hall Pass No No  No No Yes
69 We Bought a Zoo No No  No No No
70 Soul Surfer No Pur­chase only  Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Yes
71 Final Des­ti­na­tion 5 No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
72 The Ides of March No No  Pur­chase only Yes Yes
73 The Descen­dants No No  No No No
74 Hanna No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
75 Some­thing Borrowed No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
76 Spy Kids: All the Time in the World No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
77 Scream 4 No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
78 Big Mom­mas: Like Father, Like Son No No  No No Yes
79 Red Rid­ing Hood No No  No No Yes
80 Paul No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
81 The Room­mate No Pur­chase only  Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Yes
82 Jump­ing the Broom No Pur­chase only  Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Yes
83 The Change-Up No Yes  Yes No Yes
84 30 Min­utes or Less No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
85 In Time No No  No No No
86 Colom­biana No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
87 J. Edgar No No  No No No
88 Sucker Punch No No  No No Yes
89 Larry Crowne No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
90 50/50 No No  No No Yes
91 Drive (2011) No No  No No Yes
92 A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas No No  No No No
93 Coura­geous No Pur­chase only  No Yes Yes
94 The Rite No No  No No Yes
95 Arthur (2011) No No  No No Yes
96 The Debt No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
97 Priest No Pur­chase only  Pur­chase only Pur­chase only Yes
98 The Mechanic No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
99 Abduc­tion No Yes  Yes Yes Yes
100 Beastly No Yes  Yes Pur­chase only Yes

But the infor­ma­tion, in a raw form, doesn’t really tell us much. To get a bet­ter sense of where we are, we need to re-aggregate the info.

Aggre­gate rental data

Look­ing at the rental mar­ket, we can now see the aggre­ga­tion pro­vid­ing us a clearer picture

Net­flix Ama­zon iTunes Vudu DVD
Top 10 0 7 7 7 7
Top 25 0 16 16 16 19
top 50 4 25 25 25 35
Top 100 5 45 44 44 74

The data shows that Net­flix appears to be miss­ing the Flix part of its name when it comes to stream­ing, as it offers only 5 of the top 100 box office win­ners of 2011. By com­par­i­son, pay-per-view seems to be doing a bet­ter job at mak­ing top hits avail­able for stream­ing, with the num­bers declin­ing as you go deeper into the list. So top movies seem to be widely avail­able this year (in fact, 64 per­cent of the top 25 movies were avail­able for stream­ing only 9% short of what’s avail­able on more tra­di­tional for­mats like DVD).

Another inter­est­ing thing to note here is that the data seems to be rel­a­tively con­sis­tent across online pay-per-view ser­vices with Ama­zon, iTunes, and Vudu appar­ently get­ting access to the same movies, lead­ing one to think that there is lit­tle dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion between those prod­ucts (of note: Vudu has actu­ally tried to dif­fer­en­ti­ate on offer­ing by pro­vid­ing 7.1 sur­round sound and 3D movies to avail­able TV sets.) With prices across those ser­vices being roughly the same (movies are rent­ing for $3.99 to $5.99 on aver­age), there is a ques­tion as to how those ser­vices will be able to pro­vide a dif­fer­en­ti­ated expe­ri­ence in the future.

But the big advan­tage of doing this again this year is that we can com­pare the infor­ma­tion against last year’s data and see if progress has been made:

Net­flix Ama­zon iTunes Vudu DVD
Top 10 –1 Same Same Same –1
Top 25 –2 +2 +2 +2 +2
top 50 0 Same Same Same –1
Top 100 –5 –3 –2 –2 Same

The story here isn’t that pretty for Net­flix, which has lost sub­stan­tial ground from last year’s posi­tion, offer­ing less than half of the hits it used to offer last year. If you think of their recent moves towards cre­at­ing orig­i­nal con­tent, it appears that Net­flix is slowly mov­ing away from its ini­tial strat­egy of pro­vid­ing online stream­ing of movies on a sub­scrip­tion basis and mov­ing more to a model more akin to that of a TV network.

Another inter­est­ing devel­op­ment here is that online stream­ing seems to be some los­ing ground com­pared to DVDs. One could assume that, as a new tech­nol­ogy, online stream­ing would be gain­ing ground on DVDs but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Granted, we only have a cou­ple of data points so next year’s data will pro­vide us with a bet­ter under­stand­ing as to whether hol­ly­wood is try­ing to slow down the progress of online streaming.

Sales Data

If we are wit­ness­ing such a slow down, one of the rea­son may be that movie stu­dios are look­ing to max­i­mize rev­enue com­ing from sales.

Ama­zon iTunes Vudu DVD
Top 10 7 7 7 7
Top 25 18 18 18 19
top 50 33 34 34 35
Over­all 61 62 61 74

The first inter­est­ing item to show up here is that we are now see­ing remark­able con­sis­tency in avail­abil­ity of titles on stream­ing ser­vices. How­ever, the avail­abil­ity of legal movie streams is still trail­ing the avail­abil­ity of movies on DVDs. This gap seems to be less pro­nounced when it comes to the top of the list than when ones goes fur­ther back into the box office records.

Once again, look­ing at how avail­abil­ity this year com­pared to last year’s avail­abil­ity pro­vides some inter­est­ing information:

Ama­zon iTunes Vudu DVD
Top 10 +1 –1 –1 –1
Top 25 +3 –2 –1 +1
top 50 +6 +5 +4 Same
Over­all +5 –2 +4 +1

As opposed to online rentals, sales of stream­ing movies seem to be gain­ing on sales of DVDs, with an increas­ing par­ity in avail­abil­ity of movies as bits (streams) or plas­tic (DVDs). This appears to con­firm the sus­pi­cion that movie stu­dios are try­ing to pro­tect their sales rev­enue at the expense of pro­mot­ing pay-per-view.

Con­clu­sion

The past year has seen an increas­ing align­ment in the libraries of titles offered by online stream­ers in an on-demand basis. At the same time, we have seen Net­flix appar­ently aban­don its strat­egy of offer­ing pop­u­lar movies on a sub­scrip­tion basis. Next week, I will look at whether Netflix’s efforts are get­ting more focused on tele­vi­sion streams or whether we are see­ing them pull back across the board in terms of avail­abil­ity of more recent content.

We are also see­ing Hol­ly­wood now treat­ing online as more equiv­a­lent to DVD sales, offer­ing titles for sale online at roughly the same rate as they do on DVD. Let’s hope that this trend con­tin­ues to hold and that the indus­try sees the wis­dom of pro­vid­ing online streams in an ear­lier release win­dow. A few inde­pen­dent movies have done simul­ta­ne­ous releases online and in the­aters this year and Hol­ly­wood has a poten­tial to increase its rev­enues if it were to increas­ingly go in that direction.

Two sets of data only pro­vide a small view into an over­all trend but I promise I will con­tinue grow­ing the data set and revisit those num­bers next year, giv­ing us a bet­ter sense as to whether there is any changes in this seg­ment of the media dis­tri­b­u­tion puzzle.

Originally published on January 14, 2012 in Business, Media . You may find related thoughts pieces under the following terms: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_OQA2VCRGTBML5CF7DUBTVCVKPQ rob­limo

    The Net­flix thing is to pro­vide most or all of the best newer movies only on DVD. That way, their cus­tomers are less likely to stay with their ser­vice than if they pro­vided more stream­ing movies or at least back down the addi­tional cost of DVD ser­vice + stream­ing to $12/month. Sad to see a com­pany sui­cid­ing like this. Glad I’m not a stockholder.

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

      Actu­ally, it seems more com­plex than that. It appears Net­flix has been want­ing to go big in stream­ing but so far, it’s efforts seem lack­ing. Their DVD offer­ing (the orig­i­nal part of the com­pany) is strong but it appears they still have quite a ways to go before becom­ing a long-term player in the online stream­ing business.

  • Daktx2

    Your com­par­i­son is a bit mis­lead­ing because Net­flix only offers an unlim­ited stream­ing at a monthly fee, while the oth­ers are rental/buy ser­vices for instant stream­ing. It would be more fair to com­pare Net­flix to Ama­zon Prime’s free instant stream­ing. When com­pared on a level play­ing field, both are equally bad.

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

      Net­flix is indeed a dif­fer­ent type of ser­vice but Ama­zon offers both subscription-based and pay-per-view so the com­par­i­son is between avail­abil­ity as a whole.

      The Netflix/Amazon Prime model may be flawed when it comes to box office hits, based on the data. It appears, how­ever, that the pay-per-view model, while bet­ter than the sub­scrip­tion one in terms of avail­abil­ity, still have some catch­ing up to do too.

      • Ivan

        Like Daktx2, I think there’s a valu­able dis­tinc­tion is between flat-fee vs PPV stream­ing the chart elides. Com­par­ing NFLX’s flat-unlimited selec­tion to AMZN’s PPV offer­ing is not an apples to apples com­par­i­son, as they’re not likely exclu­sive from each other; one can both sub­scribe to NFLX and use AMZN’s PPV stream­ing, where sub­scrib­ing to two flat-unlimited ser­vices is unlikely unless the selec­tion is rad­i­cally diver­gent (e.g. NFLX and Hulu).

        Break­ing down the AMZN selec­tion between Prime unlim­ited and On Demand PPV is nec­es­sary to make the chart use­ful and fair, par­tic­u­larly because you label AMZN’s offer­ing as sim­ply ‘Ama­zon’. At the very least, it should be made very clear that he com­par­i­son is with Ama­zon On Demand, not Prime.

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

        If you read through the analy­sis, it becomes clear I’m not talk­ing about Prime. At this point, Prime is too new to eval­u­ate against Net­flix. I’m con­sid­er­ing adding it in next year’s analy­sis and am cur­rently using Net­flix as a proxy for subscription-based services.

        The rea­son for using Ama­zon, iTunes, and Vudu as com­par­i­son is that last year, the 3 ser­vices had sub­stan­tially dif­fer­ent cat­a­logs. This year, it appears we’re mov­ing towards align­ment when it comes to avail­abil­ity of movies on those ser­vices. So it looks like Hol­ly­wood is essen­tially shut­ting the door down on Netflix-like sub­scrip­tion ser­vices and look­ing at online as an on-demand medium.

      • dcgreg

        Bot­tom line: if you want your analy­sis to be viewed as legit­i­mate, you need to clearly split it into two cat­e­gories: all-you-can-eat sub­scrip­tion stream­ing ser­vices and pay-per-view/rental stream­ing services.

        Absent that, you are cre­at­ing a fal­la­cious com­par­i­son between busi­ness mod­els that are intended to be dif­fer­ent … and known to be dif­fer­ent to their respec­tive cus­tomers. For $8 I can rent about two recently released movies per month or get a month’s unlim­ited access to a back cat­a­log of 10K+ titles, most of which aren’t recent. Con­sumers under­stand that they’re pur­chas­ing dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories of prod­ucts — why don’t you?

        Apples and oranges, but you’re pre­sent­ing it as apples & apples. Bad form. You can rec­tify it sim­ply be edit­ing the table to have three head­ers:
         - Stream­ing  Sub­scrip­tion (with Net­flix and Ama­zon Prime as sub­head­ers)
         - Stream­ing Rental (with Ama­zon, iTunes, and Vudu as sub­head­ers)
         - DVD Purchase

        You  might include a fourth col­umn (Dig­i­tal Down­load Pur­chase) if you want to be dili­gent, and include data for Ama­zon and iTunes down­load options

        As it stands now, though, your analy­sis appears bogus because you’re not accu­rately rep­re­sent­ing the dif­fer­ences in your data.
         

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

        If you actu­ally read the analy­sis below (sales vs. rental), you would actu­ally see that it’s not that far from what you’re describing.

        Fur­ther­more, I made all the data avail­able right there on the screen so you are free to build your own research based on it if you dis­agree with the approach I’ve taken.

      • Ivan

        Four things:
        – The idea that Prime is too new to break it out beg­gars belief. NFLX stream­ing as a stand­alone offer­ing sep­a­rate from DVD is newer than Prime, yet you have no prob­lem sep­a­rat­ing them.
        – Your own data indi­cates hat it’s not true the ser­vices had, as you claim, ‘sub­stan­tially dif­fer­ent cat­a­logs’. We’re look­ing at vari­a­tions of at most 10% (+1/-1 on a top ten).
        – The fact hat your break out a mar­ginal ser­vice lke Hudu but ignore one with far more reach like Ama­zon Prime makes the com­par­i­son at the very least sus­pect.
        – You’re jump­ing to unwar­ranted con­clu­sions with your last state­ment. At best, it sug­gests that Hol­ly­wood is *try­ing* to *push out the avail­abil­ity win­dow* on new hits for all-you-can-eat ser­vices, not that they’re shut­ting the door on them, and that they are *try­ing* to push users to a PPV model for them (users, of course, have a mind of their own and plenty of com­pet­ing options for their atten­tion, so they may not

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

        Net­flix stream­ing is, at this point, 3 years old. Prime Stream­ing is under 1 year old.

        It is true that Vudu is mar­ginal but my inter­est there is that it is backed by Wal­mart, the largest DVD retailer in the coun­try. At such, one might expect that some spe­cial deals would exist to increase avail­abil­ity (and the avail­abil­ity of 3D titles in 3D seems to point to some dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion there) .

        I’ll grant you that I may have jumped the guns on Hollywood’s stance but with 2 weeks of data, it appears that Hol­ly­wood is try­ing to lower the avail­abil­ity of titles on sub­scrip­tion ser­vices. More on this in a cou­ple of weeks :)

  • Bryant

    Justin Bieber’s Never say Never is avail­able on Net­flix. Also, Mon­ey­ball is avail­able for rent from iTunes. This is as of Jan­u­ary 15th, but I’m pretty sure they’ve been avail­able before Jan­u­ary 14th (date of pub­lish). There may be oth­ers but those were the two I recalled.

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

      I did the research last week­end so yeah, there are a few vari­a­tions (I will make the change on “Never say Never”). Mon­ey­ball, how­ever, is only avail­able as a pre-order on iTunes (just checked) so it’s not avail­able for instant stream­ing right now.

      How­ever, these do not mate­ri­ally affect the fact that selec­tion is poor.

  • Gb

    If the ISPs (cable, dsl, wireless, satellite) and the gov ever get their act together and actu­ally get decent, afford­able inter­net ser­vice (with fair, rea­son­able or no caps) to the pop­u­la­tion of cit­i­zens that live in ‘rural’ areas, then stream­ing num­bers might change.  For many, liv­ing in an area that has no decent ser­vice because it’s ‘too expen­sive to run the wire that extra mile’, those indi­vid­u­als have no options but to con­tinue with DVDs.  And, the pop­u­la­tion that is not prop­erly ser­viced is still quite large in this coun­try.  We rank lower than a lot of other coun­tries in what type of inter­net ser­vice is pro­vided to all citizens.

  • Gb

    If the ISPs (cable, dsl, wireless, satellite) and the gov ever get their act together and actu­ally get decent, afford­able inter­net ser­vice (with fair, rea­son­able or no caps) to the pop­u­la­tion of cit­i­zens that live in ‘rural’ areas, then stream­ing num­bers might change.  For many, liv­ing in an area that has no decent ser­vice because it’s ‘too expen­sive to run the wire that extra mile’, those indi­vid­u­als have no options but to con­tinue with DVDs.  And, the pop­u­la­tion that is not prop­erly ser­viced is still quite large in this coun­try.  We rank lower than a lot of other coun­tries in what type of inter­net ser­vice is pro­vided to all citizens.

  • Gb

    If the ISPs (cable, dsl, wireless, satellite) and the gov ever get their act together and actu­ally get decent, afford­able inter­net ser­vice (with fair, rea­son­able or no caps) to the pop­u­la­tion of cit­i­zens that live in ‘rural’ areas, then stream­ing num­bers might change.  For many, liv­ing in an area that has no decent ser­vice because it’s ‘too expen­sive to run the wire that extra mile’, those indi­vid­u­als have no options but to con­tinue with DVDs.  And, the pop­u­la­tion that is not prop­erly ser­viced is still quite large in this coun­try.  We rank lower than a lot of other coun­tries in what type of inter­net ser­vice is pro­vided to all citizens.

  • Kevin

    Can you add the Zune cat­a­log on XBox 360? Believe it or not, that’s the eas­i­est way I’ve found to stream pop­u­lar stuff in HD.

  • Dc18

    Stu­dios aren’t going to let you stream new releases for an all you can eat price on Net­flix. For stream­ing Net­flix gets movies in the pre­mium pay tv win­dow about 9 months to a year after the­atri­cal release. For Net­flix, the bet­ter com­par­i­son would there­fore be against HBO Go or Showtime’s on demand prod­uct. It would prob­a­bly also be more use­ful to look at 2010s top 100 movies and see­ing how ose ser­vices com­pare. You will notice the movies on your chart on Net­flix are the ones from the first few months of 2011. Is just not real­is­tic to exopect the movies that are brand new on Net­filx at the cur­rent price.

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

      You are cor­rect that a look at the 2010 top 100 movies would be some­thing good and it is some­thing I have sched­ule for the 3rd part of this series. It should be com­ing out week­end after next.

      How­ever, all this still begs the ques­tion of why would online get a dif­fer­ent release win­dow than DVD?

      • Dc18

        Online doesnt get a dif­fer­ent win­dow from DVD. You can typ­i­cally buy or rent PPV online day and date of the DVD release.

        What you can’t do is get those as part of an all you can eat sub­scrip­tion. This is how it has always been– brand new movies have never been on HBO or Starz, they show up about 6 months after the DVD release. Same for Netflix

        Thats why it makes the most sense to com­pare Net­flix to HBO or Show­time and not to Amaxon or iTunes. You pay a fixed amount per month to get access to a cat­a­log of series and non new release movies. Com­par­ing Net­flix to iTunes is like com­par­ing HBO to what you an get on Com­cast PPV.

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

        If there isn’t a dif­fer­ent win­dow for DVD releases and online releases, could you please explain why 74 of this year’s hits are avail­able on DVD while less than 50 are avail­able even on pay-per-view streams. The data seems to point that there must be a dif­fer­ent release win­dow for online than there is for inter­net PPV.

      • Dc18

        With­out going through all the movies, I can’t speak for every one of them but I believe that most of them that are on DVD and not avail­able for PPV are in the pre­mium pay TV win­dow. When HBO or Starz gets the rights to the movie 9 months out, you can­not dig­i­tally rent them any longer. The only online option through iTunes or Ama­zon is to pur­chase the movie.

        I think that is what you will find for most of the movies over 6 months. Exam­ples– all of the ones on Net­flix which come through Starz and Epix, The Dilemma and oth­ers on HBO right now

  • @Cardinalrose

    Net­flix = sub­scrip­tion stream­ing of old cat­a­log movies and tv shows and a few recent releases from EPIX for a low price of $7.99 month.  Hulu Plus = sub­scrip­tion stream­ing of this season’s and pre­vi­ous season’s TV shows for $8.99 per month.  HBOGo = sub­scrip­tion stream­ing of HBO orig­i­nal series plus some­what recent releases from 50% of the movie stu­dios for $14.99 per month (you need to include HBOGo in your analy­sis).  Amazon/iTunes/Vudu = pur­chases of the lat­est movies — they fill the gap that the sub­scrip­tion ser­vices can’t pro­vide.  Sub­scribe to MLB, NBA, NHL, and NFL pack­ages and you can cut the cord.   

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

      HBOGo is still to new to include in my analy­sis (maybe next year). And the rea­son for Amazon/iTunes/Vudu was that last year, the selec­tion was dif­fer­ent from those ser­vices. Since then, there seems to have been an align­ment in what the stu­dios give to those 3 (let’s see what hap­pens next year.

      IF old cat­a­log movies are on Net­flix, you have data I don’t have access to. Last year, when I did research on avail­abil­ity of top 10 box office win­ners for the pre­vi­ous 5 years (see http://www.tnl.net/blog/2011/02/03/where-the-hits-are-streaming-historical-view/ ), Net­flix had a grand total of 3/50 movies.

      In a cou­ple of weeks, I’ll have more details on how movies that were in the 2010 box office fared (come back then to see the results :) )

  • http://twitter.com/NapMan Michael Napier

    I heard about this story on This Week in Tech on Sun­day.  I assume this is the arti­cle Leo Laporte was talk­ing about.
    This is very inter­est­ing to me.  I knew Net­flix was lack­ing in new movies avail­able for stream­ing but I had no idea how much.
    Also inter­est­ing is that most of the movies that are on Net­flix stream­ing are not avail­able for rental from other providers.  They are for pur­chase only.

  • Anon/B/

    This com­par­i­son is way off.  Most of the things you com­pared are PPV (3.99+ a movie), while Net­flix is a sub­scriber sys­tem (8 bucks a month).  Then you toss in DVDs on the side?  If you have DVDs in that list, shouldn’t you also include Net­flix DVDs in your list?  I think you have a good list here, but you are com­par­ing apples to oranges to pears.

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

      The DVD avail­abil­ity actu­ally comes from Netflix.

      Appar­ently, you seem to be miss­ing the point of the research, which is to assess how sub­scrip­tion vs. online PPV vs. DVD are doing. And so far, DVD wins, PPV comes in sec­ond, and it looks like the subscription-based model is broken.

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

      Maybe you’re miss­ing the point. The goal of this research was to assess sub­scrip­tion vs. online PPV vs. DVD (the DVD data actu­ally comes from Netflix).

      It is not apples to oranges are those are 3 dif­fer­ent busi­ness mod­els to deliver movies. So far, DVD (the legacy model) con­tin­ues to be the strongest one, with online PPV gain­ing and the all-you-can-eat sub­scrip­tion model seem­ingly broken.

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  • vagal

    it’s ridicu­lous to com­pare net­flix to any of these ser­vices because they are COMPLETELY dif­fer­ent things. apples and oranges.

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

      As a stand-in for sub­scrip­tion vs. PPV vs. DVD, it’s not a bad com­par­i­son, methinks.…

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  • Mike

    Instead of com­par­ing by “pop­u­lar­ity”, it seems to me that your com­par­ing by “avail­abil­ity rel­a­tive to release date”, which Net­flix is noto­ri­ously hand­i­capped by their con­tracts and is well-documented every­where. Have you con­sid­ered recre­at­ing your list from 2010 to see how these ser­vices com­pare in stream­ing pop­u­lar movies 1 year later?

    Also, you don’t address cost in your com­par­i­son. If you watched all 100 movies over the course of the year, you’d be pay­ing sev­eral hun­dred dol­lars more by renting/purchasing them indi­vid­u­ally from the “on demand” ser­vices com­pared to Netflix’s sub­scrip­tion model in exchange for hav­ing to wait 1–2 months. That’s a value propo­si­tion I can def­i­nitely live with.

  • David

    Hi Tris­tan,

    Although there legit­i­mate points for con­sid­er­a­tion that some com­menters have brought up, you’ve one a great job here so thanks!

    David