gut;692807 wrote:But you can get pretty much any DVD under the sun through mailing. On the Blockbuster program, you can exchange a mailing for any new release in the store, including blu ray, while you wait for your next mailing. So pretty silly that they don't stream all titles - if they restricted you to one such "premium" rental a week there would be effectively no difference from the current mailing and exchange programs out there.
It's not rocket science - you can make the whole pie bigger (i.e. many people might only rent 1-2 movies a month, but many of them might be willing to pay $20 a month if they can stream whatever on demand). We've seen this play out again and again where content providers are slow to embrace technology and struggle to figure out how to best monetize their intellectual property.
First, you were wrong about getting new releases through Netflix. New releases are delayed a month on Netflix.
Other than that, this post is correct. Since the online streaming feature is still relatively new, the studios don't want to put all of their best titles on there until they see how best to make money from it. Until you launch it and test it for a while you really don't know how many people will subscribe, how often those people will use the service, or how successful it will be. Once they've had some time to test things out they'll figure out how best to make money from it and then add premium titles.
Likely what will happen is you will either have to pay an extra fee to watch premium content (i.e. new releases, classic movies, new TV episodes) either per episode or per month. They could also do a system where you pay one amount for DVDs, unlimited streaming, and one premium title a month, pay more for two a month, pay more for unlimited. It's probably better for them to do it this way than to release new releases streaming and lose a lot of money right now, then charge for it later and start making money again.
