Starz recently announced that it would pull its 2,500 new and old TV and movie titles from Sony Pictures and Disney from the streaming service of Netflix. This comes at a time when the service is increasing the price of its services and when YouTube and Amazon ramp up their streaming service offerings.
“More competition is good for content [distributors],” said the head of the digital division at one major Hollywood studio. “When Netflix first started in this space, there was a lot less scrutiny on the deals that were done with them. Given how big Netflix has become, those arrangements are discussed regularly. We’re looking at pricing and windowing. . . . They need to be competitive in terms of buying content.”
Netflix played down the announcement, saying there’s no change in its content relationships. “If there’s any reevaluation by the studios, it’s ‘How much more money are we going to be able to generate in revenue from Netflix because Netflix is willing to write big checks for content.’ We’ll take the money that we were going to spend on Starz and spend it on other content,” said Netflix spokesperson Steve Swasey, who added, “At $7.99 a month, we can’t be expected to have everything, and we provide an amazing DVD service,” he said. “If you want to see everything, you can subscribe to the DVD service, and you don’t have to subscribe to the streaming service.”
Source: AdWeek.com
