Recent Stories with tag netflix

Coinstar (CSTR), the parent company of Redbox, had its stock "plunge" 24 percent today, after a preliminary announcement that its Q4 earnings didn't meet expectations. Looking ahead, "Coinstar also has revised its initial outlook for full year 2011 and now expects revenue between $1.70 billion and $1.85 billion, adjusted EBITDA from continuing operations between $325 million and $355 million."

That drop is probably an overly dramatic response, considering "[r]evenue from Redbox rose 38 percent in the fourth quarter, and same-store sales (an important metric for retailers) were up 12.5 percent," as CNNMoney reported. They just didn't meet very rosy expectations: "Coinstar's biggest problem is they suck at guidance, not that their business is bad," analyst Michael Pachter told CNNMoney. Redbox currently has about 28 percent of the rental market, and I wouldn't expect that to dip much, if at all, near-term in response to streaming video access, due to the costs associated with and limitations to broadband access.

As it happens, Coinstar is a Bellevue company, and CEO Paul Davis was at the Met Grill yesterday afternoon, giving a presentation for the Met Grill's "Guess the Dow" stockbroker participants. (More on that in a later post.) Davis spoke a bit about the pressure they'd gotten from major studios not to stock new movies in Redbox's automated DVD rental kiosks the day they go on sale. Eventually, Redbox agreed to a 28-day delay, which effectively removed the 28-day advantage they had over Netflix up to that point. 

As is common practice, Coinstar waited for the market to close to announce the downbeat earnings, so Davis didn't let on at his noon presentation that anything was amiss. (Other than the dog-not-barking sound of not leaking good news just before it's announced publicly.) Particularly disappointing for Redbox, since they traded rental delay for access to Blu-ray titles, was that demand for Blu-ray was not widespread, even at a $1.50 per day rate. (Redbox's standard DVD rate is $1 per day.) ... (more)

So you're sitting at home, and you decide you want to watch something on Netflix. You've got Comcast (excuse me, Xfinity) broadband, streaming is a snap. You pay extra for that bandwidth, but it's worth it and now is one of those times. 

You'd be upset if Comcast looked over your usage and charged you $1 for streaming a movie from Netflix, wouldn't you? You're already paying them for bandwidth. And Comcast knows that.

So that's why they're charging the company that streams Netflix movies instead. Level 3, Inc., operates one of the internet backbones that Netflix uses to stream their content, and Comcast presented them with a "take it or leave it" offer on November 22. If they didn't pay up, Comcast subscribers wouldn't get Netflix, at least, not online.

"With this action, Comcast is preventing competing content from ever being delivered to Comcast’s subscribers at all, unless Comcast’s unilaterally determined toll is paid--even though Comcast’s subscribers requested the content," said Thomas Stortz, Level 3's Chief Legal Officer. 

"Comcast, the largest U.S. cable TV company, has set up an Internet 'toll booth,' charging Level 3 whenever customers request content," sums Bloomberg. It may be a toll booth, but it's a phantom toll booth, at least to Comcast customers. If Level 3's costs go up and they charge Netflix more, and Netflix's costs go up, and they charge you more, that's...well, that's good for Comcast's On-Demand division, isn't it?... (more)

snapshot from a NYT infographic by By Matthew Bloch, Amanda Cox, Jo Craven McGinty, and Kevin Quealy showing nationwide and local Netflix habits.

In a brilliant display of number-crunching and infographics, the New York Times looked at data from Netflix to see how the most popular rentals nationwide fared in a dozen metropolitan areas. Clicking through the city-specific heatmaps of rental popularity provides a fascinating (and time-sucking) glimpse at neighborhood by neighborhood preferences in what people insert into their DVD players.

Shown here is the map for Milk, which ranked 13th nationally, first in Capitol Hill and along the Ship Canal, with queue popularity falling off noticeably along with distance from the city center. In general, looking through the list, the Puget Sound region seems to have pretty decent taste in rentals, for instance, Obsessed didn't crack the top 50 in any ZIP code, Tyler Perry doesn't have many fans in the Northwest, and only Eastlake was renting the latest Underworld.

Browse through the 100 frequently-rented titles, and let us know if you see any other revelatory demographic patterns in movie preferences.