Warner Brothers to Rent Movies Online Sooner

From the New York Times
There was good news for Apple and Comcast, but bad news for Blockbuster woven into Time Warner’s conference call with investors today. Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner’s chief executive, said that the company’s Warner Brothers studio will now release movies for video-on-demand systems on the same day they are released as DVDs.

Until now, people who wanted to watch movies on cable pay-per-view systems or rental download systems like Apple TV had to wait a few weeks after the same movie was released as a DVD. (And the DVD comes out, of course, four or five months after a film hits the theaters.) Warner Brothers has been experimenting with the new approach for the last few months. It has found that DVD rentals only fell by 3 percent to 5 percent and sales of DVDs actually increased, perhaps because of the increased promotion and fewer used rental discs available for sale.

Mr. Bewkes boasted to investors that the shift from DVDs to digital distribution, on the “day and date” of DVD release, will be better for Warner Brothers because it will eliminate some of the costs of manufacturing and distributing discs.

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