Quote Originally Posted by Smokey
This just came off the wire:

Looks like Paramount Picture studios going the opposite direction from other studios and has agreed to provide its movies to Redbox on the same day they go on sale without 28 days delay (no word on Blu-ray yet).

Paramount Home Entertainment President Dennis Maguire said that "“Those people who want to rent are going to figure out ways to rent, and us restricting them from renting isn’t going to turn it into a purchase.”

I guess he mean piracy.

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jun...mount-20100616
Actually what he means is that no matter if the studios get that 28 day window to motivate folks to purchase, a renter is going to rent, no matter what. Any delay is not going to change that.

I think that his reasoning is BS. There is this one little tid bid that is kind of glossed over in this transaction - this little detail:

Redbox estimated that it would pay Paramount $575 million over the life of the agreement

$575 million for a 3 year contract. Keep in mind, Paramount (and Universal) are money whores. They would sell out the entire film industry for a buck. The whole format war would have been over after the first year it started if it wasn't for Paramount getting big kickbacks from Toshiba. When they whore out their products like this, they always use flimsy excuses like this to justify their actions. All of the studios know that Redbox hurts DVD sales, which is why all of the studios expect healthy compensation for day and date releases. To say anything less than that is nothing more than a lie.

To give you a little history of how Paramount works(and why I doubt their conclusion seriously). When they switched from supporting both BR and HD DVD to HD DVD alone, they cited their reasons for doing so as "the HD DVD format was easier to work with, had a built in developed infrastructure, and players with a more competitive price. What they didn't tell you is that Toshiba PAID for that exclusive support, and Paramount engineers and marketing staff LOVED the Blu ray format. They were surprised(and from what I could gather) angry as hell that the upper brass sold them out, and lied about it. We found out that it was impossible to include all of the bells and whistles the HD DVD format had, and include a lossless soundtrack as well(See the HD DVD version of King Kong and Transformers, two of the biggest titles). We found out later that(and I knew it at the time) that bandwidth problems dogged the HD DVD format since day one, and the Hollywood authoring houses basically hated the format. They didn't care one bit that they(and Universal) had hurt the industry for prolonging the format war a lot longer than it needed, and now there is nothing to really effectively counter what is happening with the DVD. Had they had stayed the course, the format war would have been over in a year, and there would have been a smoother(not the smoothest) transition to Blu ray.

We provide some of our titles to Redbox day and date, but not all of them. We do have a revenue sharing program with them despite what the article states. Sony has an agreement with them, but it benefits them more than Redbox. I would not have minded if Paramount did sign this agreement, but I just wish they wouldn't lie about it. Sony didn't, and neither did Disney. We made the deals for the compensation we were getting, not because of the flimsy excuse that Paramount states.

You notice they don't say anything about Blu ray?

The bottom line is the studios have written DVD off in favor of Blu ray. They are going to sign any deal they can make on DVD sales and rentals. Don't be surprised if the other studios sign DVD agreements with Redbox in the future. While DVD dies a slow death, they want to make as much as they can from it.