• Los Angeles Times, Friday, January 27, 2012 12:09 PM

Making life a little harder for Netflix, Warner Bros. has reportedly decided to make subscribers wait 28 days after DVDs go on sale before they can rent them. Company Town says the move is obviously part of Warner's “continuing effort to boost its DVD, Blu-ray, and video-on-demand business.” Starting February 1, when the new agreement is expected to go into effect, Netflix customers won't be able to add Warner movies to their queues until four weeks after the DVDs go on sale, sources tell Company Town.

Under the companies' previous agreement, users could add discs to their queues even before they went on sale. Yet, “Warner executives apparently believed that policy made it easier for consumers to wait, confident that the discs would arrive eventually,” Company Town surmises. Rather than rent movies through Netflix or other streaming services, Warner Bros. has been leading the change among movie studios to encourage consumers to buy DVDs and Blu-ray discs, or at least rent movies via video-on-demand. It’s no secret that such transactions are considerably more profitable for the studios than rentals via Netflix or Redbox.

Read the whole story at Los Angeles Times »