Movie Studios Add Another Window: The $30 Dollar Rental

btr1701 points us to a report from Thursday's (not April Fool's Day) Variety, which claims that the movie studios are getting ready to offer $30 dollar per movie Video On Demand (VOD) offerings. This is a classically short-sighted Hollywood-type of solution. Over the past few years, the big movie studios have become even more enamored than ever with the concept of release "windows," in which they offer movies on different platforms/formats at different times. Rather than moving in the other direction, towards so-called "day and date" releases that offer up movies on all platforms at once, they're trying to make the whole thing more frustrating and annoying for customers by spreading things out and offering more windows.

This explains the recent efforts to delay various movie rental releases and the whole plan to break your DVR/TV so that you can't actually record certain VOD showings. Now that they have these in place, apparently they think the answer is to offer this new window, between theater showings and when you can rent from Netflix or your video store of choice, in which they somehow think people will be okay paying $30 per movie.

It kind of makes me wonder what they're pumping into the air down in Hollywood.

I'm sure their argument is that since a "whole family" or a group of folks can watch the film, it's more cost reasonable, and they'll argue that the release -- closer to the theater release -- makes it worth the extra money. This, however, assumes that consumers are stupid, and I think Hollywood may quickly discover that consumers aren't quite as stupid as the studio execs think. Of course, even more amusing is that the theater owners -- who have always fought any attempt to do releases close to the theatrical release, are freaking out about this. I doubt they have much to worry about.

The report notes that Paramount has chosen not to join in this scheme, suggesting that it's worried about how this might increase piracy. I'm not sure if that's true. After all, Paramount is the one studio that has publicly said that those 28 day rental delays didn't make any sense and that it didn't drive customers to buy DVDs. So maybe the folks at Paramount actually realize that consumers don't want more windows and more ridiculous price points...

Of course, at the very same time that Hollywood is going down this ridiculous path, others are urging them to go in the other direction. TorrentFreak has a post about a UK movie reviewer's simple and clear explanation for why the studios should offer day and date releases:

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