And more...
Oct. 6th, 2004 08:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewduckerPrevious article actually gets a lot more interesting as it goes along. It talks about the fact that while physical shops can only afford to carry the best-selling records/films, the new services like NetFlix and Napster can carry absolutely everything - for the same profit margins. And they're finding that actually, over half of their profits come from th less popular things, because someone, somewhere wants a copy of it.
An example:
Fascinating stuff.
An example:
If you love documentaries, Blockbuster is not for you. Nor is any other video store - there are too many documentaries, and they sell too poorly to justify stocking more than a few dozen of them on physical shelves. Instead, you'll want to join Netflix, which offers more than a thousand documentaries - because it can. Such profligacy is giving a boost to the documentary business; last year, Netflix accounted for half of all US rental revenue for Capturing the Friedmans, a documentary about a family destroyed by allegations of pedophilia.
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who's something of a documentary buff, took this newfound clout to PBS, which had produced Daughter From Danang, a documentary about the children of US soldiers and Vietnamese women. In 2002, the film was nominated for an Oscar and was named best documentary at Sundance, but PBS had no plans to release it on DVD. Hastings offered to handle the manufacturing and distribution if PBS would make it available as a Netflix exclusive. Now Daughter From Danang consistently ranks in the top 15 on Netflix documentary charts. That amounts to a market of tens of thousands of documentary renters that did not otherwise exist.
Fascinating stuff.
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Date: 2004-10-06 12:36 am (UTC)Has anybody actually looked at the profit margin issue regards eDelivery? There was a bunch of fuss recently about how little the original artists were receiving from iTunes, but what's the story in general? I would have thought that with overheads and manufacturing costs virtually (sorry) trivialized, you're be looking at a massive increase in profit margins...
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Date: 2004-10-06 01:40 am (UTC)no subject
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