06 01 10 - 23:19
Netflix to delay new Warner Bros. movie rentals 4 weeks
Netflix Inc. reached a new agreement with Time Warner Inc.’s Warner Bros., giving the studio 28 days to sell new releases before customers can check out DVDs. In exchange, Netflix rights to Warner's movies for its Watch Instantly streaming feature and should see the movie catalog expand significantly beyond its current levels.
The movie rental firm interprets the move as a "win-win" partly because it addresses problems the company has had with supply of new release titles in the past as well as lowering the bulk price it pays to get new movies.
The agreement can be a model for deals with studios facing a drop in DVD sales, Netflix said. By agreeing to the sale-only window, the company gets lower prices for DVDs and has more to spend on material that can be streamed digitally to computers, Web-connected TVs and game consoles, the company said.
Links: ... (more)06 01 10 - 22:44
Movie info site Flixster buys RottenTomatoes
Online movie information firm Flixster Inc. on Monday said that it has acquired pioneering film review aggregation site RottenTomatoes.com in an all-stock swap with a subsidiary of media giant News Corp.
Flixster said the two sites will continue to be available to Web-goers as individual properties. Combined, Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes reach an estimated 30 million monthly visitors worldwide across several Web platforms --their sites, other social-networking sites and applications for mobile devices.
According to report by the Wall Street Journal, they will have a database of more than 250,000 movies, 2.3 billion user reviews, half a million critic reviews and more than 20,000 trailers and videos.
"Rotten Tomatoes has built a fantastically well-known brand that moviegoers trust when making their decisions. Combined with Flixster's social networking and word-of-mouth, we're creating the leading movie destination on the Internet," said Flixster President and Chief ...
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