Commentary
Fade Out For Theaters? Apple Angles For Quick Trip To iTunes
- by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, December 8, 2016
Apple wants movie studios to shrink the window between theatrical releases and the time movies are available for home viewing. Right now, that gap is 90 days. Apple would like to rent movies via its iTune stores in just two weeks.
If iTunes reached some exclusive ability for the sped-up releases, and tied into Apple TV units, it would be a game changer for the company.
One impediment to changing the current arrangement is that nobody wants to say shortening the window would put the knife into theater chains, which are already hurting. They'd fight. Maybe even cities would fight, fearing the prospect of big, empty hard-to-reuse auditoriums.
Most movies do a key part of their business in the first two weeks, but if consumers get hip to the idea that the movie they want to see will be available for rent in two weeks rather than three months, they might be inclined to wait.
While “live” video is a real thing, so is delayed viewing.
Cord cutters and cord nevers implicitly acknowledge they are willing to wait to see scheduled TV shows, if they choose to watch them at all. There are so many viewing options now, being a little late is an acceptable limitation for millions of content consumers.
But up-to-date matters and increasingly, consumers expect access to all entertainment, when and how they want it. “Going to the movies” seems to be an odd phrase in an era where goods and services come to you, not the other way around.
(For contemporary comparison, movie theaters are an even more primitive version of Blockbuster, and look what happened to those blue-and-gold storefronts.)
The iTunes idea was first reported by Bloomberg and Business Insider. Observers of existing movie business apple carts are afraid of The Screening Room, another proposed movie rental service that would offer consumers the chance to see movies while they are still playing in theaters, for $50 a pop and the cost of a $150 set top box.
Supposedly, The Screening Room, co-founded by Sean Parker, one of Facebook’s early dreamers, would then pay theater operators a fairly large portion of that $50 fee.
Oh, that would work, I wrote as if to say, that won’t work.
It seems, if anything, it classes up Netflix by conveying the notion it’s a bona-fide movie studio, not just an SVOD service. But there are only 15 iPic cinemas out there.
Something will happen; it just smells imminently inevitable.
Some movie window re-adjustment change viewership patterns, and maybe that won’t be so great for established content providers, online and elsewhere. One of the irritating things about going to the cinema is the act of going.
But when you can stay home to watch new releases, some other entertainment source will take a hit.
pj@mediapost.com
P.J. Bednarski has written for MediaPost since 2012 on media and marketing topics. He can be reached at pj@mediapost.com
It really would be a tragedy if the theatrical experience were lost because of convenience. But I think you are correct. Something will happen, and it is inevitable. Whatever it is, those cinema multiplexes won't exist as we now know them.
Historically, 90% of Box Office occurs withing the first 14 days of theatrical release. This makes sense for both Apple and the Studios.
I think shortening the window might make sense, but "two weeks?" I don't think that would ever, ever happen. It would reduce revenues up and down the line, needlessly, and change the value of blockbusters to that of a YouTube cat video. I suspect the two-week window is simply a bargaining position, but as it seems too extreme, that proposed window is just as likely to shut down any discussions before they happen ...Unless piracy is a much, much bigger deal than I realize.