Holtzbrinck Online

NetFlix Watch Now Program

Netflix recently unveiled their "Watch Now" program that is available to some subscribers already and should be available to all subscribers within six months.   

The details?   It's pretty simple - you get one hour per month of online video watching for each dollar of your subscription plan.   So if you have the $17.99 / month plan you get 18 hours of online video watching.   It is currently limited to people running Windows XP and only streams from a browser - so you are unable to burn it to a DVD or put it on your iPod.  With a good enough connection quality can approach that of a DVD.  The service currently encompasses only about 1,000 movies and TV shows (out of Netflix's collection of 70,000), but that will grow over time.

What is beautiful about the program is that it does not limit how many videos you watch, only the amount of time you spend watching them.   So in addition to watching a full length video you can use this service to sample movies you are thinking about renting, or catch the last few minutes of something you just didn't have time to finish last week.

The New York Times article about the Watch Now program is rather gloomy, pointing out that Netflix is in a crowded marketplace and that their most likely competitor, Blockbuster, has finally rolled out a working subscription plan that seems to offer everything Netflix does plus the ability to exchange movies in-store rather than waiting for them by mail.

Despite pessimism from the Times, I can not help but feel that this program is a grand-slam for Netflix.  It provides an electronic content model that offers an unbelievable amount of flexibility for users, the content scales with current plans so that there is incentive to increase to a better plan without  users feeling like they are being forced into paying more money for an additional service.  And most importantly of all, it paves the way for Netflix to change business models once the infrastructure and demand for digital distribution of movies is firmly in place.   

The result?  A somewhat limited but still very useful addition to an already popular service, and in the background Netflix can work on the legal and technical difficulties behind removing those limitations so that they can eventually offer truly unfettered digital downloads.  That sounds pretty good to me.

Article in the New York Observer: "The YouTube Devolution"

The New York Observer has an kind of interesting essay about video sites such as YouTube; whereas most of the recent articles concerning these wildly popular sites have praised them, the Observer seeks more to bury them. And while the writer has a certain point that television moments used to be fleeting but now they're omnipresent (reminds me of a line on the Simpsons where Homer said, "Everything looks bad if you remember it"), what's he's really angry about isn't YouTube but is instead the betrayal of his own reactions. Who hasn't had a movie they loved as a kid not hold up to their adult expectations? Or who hasn't listened to a band they liked as a teenager or early adult or been horrified (for me it's Beat Happening; cringe)? If our estimation of something later in life is changed when we're reacquainted with it (whether it's books or movies or music), that's called maturity (or at the very least reappraisal). So if YouTube makes you confront something from twenty years ago, and you realize it wasn't what you thought it was, it's not really YouTube's fault. And who's to say you are (or were) any worse off for liking it way back when? As they say, ignorance is bliss...

Excerpt: "Video had always been more elusive. It defeated secondhand reports; a critic might describe a scene, but the moving image was unquotable. There was no way to share that passing experience. All you could do was write about it or talk about it. The original moment was transformed by the telling into something else—probably something funnier or more original or more shocking."

You can read the article here.

USA Today article on video "madness"

USA Today's tech columnist wrote an article about the latest Internet craze, video; the article touches upon all of the major players in the field, as well as how marketers (like us, and others) are looking make use of it.

Excerpt: "Big players are crashing the party. In January, Google put up Google Video. Yahoo is all over video. AOL has had video. But on Monday, it will announce new video search capabilities and a site that pulls together both free video and video you can buy all over the Web."

You can read the whole article here.