Sony offers revenue-sharing deals to promote Blu-ray
As if there wasn't enough shameless Blu-ray promoting going on of late, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is now adding fuel to the fire by offering "revenue sharing on Blu-ray Disc releases through Rentrak Corporation." Starting this September, Sony will reportedly make "all of its new releases and select catalog titles on Blu-ray available under the agreement, which expands the studio's DVD revenue-sharing deal with Rentrak." Interestingly, neither firm has been willing to disclose the terms just yet, but SPHE president David Bishop did note that he felt it was important to "make sure that the rental component of the Blu-ray launch was covered." Now, the big question seems to hover around whether or not this move is anti-competitive or not, and as we all know, that's certainly not foreign territory for BD.[Via AfterDawn]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
SimbaDogg @ Jul 22nd 2007 4:03PM
didn't know what significance the article was, because i had no idea who the hell rentrak was...this should help others:
The Rentrak Corporation, (NASDAQ: RENT) founded in 1984, is an entertainment industry information management company that provides services to movie studios and video rental shops. It is based in Portland, Oregon.
The company was founded by Ron Berger as National Video to promote a profit-sharing video rental program (PPT, or Pay Per Transaction) for smaller video retailers in order to compete with larger rental chains such as Blockbuster Video. As of 2003, 84% of their revenue still came from PPT.
The PPT requirements with major movie studios required Rentrak to develop secure and accurate data tracking for rental information. The company began to make the shift to an information management company by acting as a clearinghouse for data from their competitors, such as Blockbuster Video and Hollywood Video, to report to the studios.
In 2003, Rentrak began to develop products under the Entertainment Essentials trademark. They currently are collecting and reporting data to movie studios about the current sales of up-to-the-minute, 24/7, movie box office sales. Their competitor in this market is ACNielsen's sister company, Nielsen Media Research. Rentrak is hoping to expand into other markets, such as video game purchase data tracking, but NMR has recently blocked the expansion by such moves as paying $1 million US to acquire Best Buy's video game sales data.
source: Wikipedia
Yuki @ Jul 23rd 2007 8:43AM
Tre revenue sharing is a model where the upfront rental cost associated with a product is replaced by a business where the videoclub and the Studio "share" the rental revenues.
Let's say that one rental copy of film AAA costs 100 $. With the traditional rental model, if a video store wanted to order 500 copies, they would need to pay 50,000 $ upfront, which is a lot of money.
With the revenue sharing model, the upfront cost of each copy goes -- say -- from 100$ to 5$. In exchange, the video store splits with the Studio the revenues from renting their 500 copies of the film.
The bottom line is that the revenue sharing allows the rental chains to order large quantities for each movie, without having to commit huge amounts of money.
Revenue sharing is typically associated to large companies like Blockbuster. Rentrak enables this program to the little guys and the indie outlets, even if they order much smaller quantities.
Steve Jr. @ Jul 23rd 2007 9:16AM
TOO FUNNY... not this story... but the square sized ad directly above this story showing SEE WHAT INTEL AND TOSHIBA ARE COOKING UP... and it shows the movie RATATOUILLE... so I clicked on it and it takes you to Circuit City site showing various laptops with this movie on it HD-DVD drives and if you haven't figured it out by now this movie is a DISNEY/PIXAR flick... anyone who claims to be "into HD" should realize what I'm saying by now and knows the punch line. Is that not too funny or what? For those that don't here's the punch line... DISNEY is TRUE BLU right now... period.
sycks @ Jul 23rd 2007 9:59AM
Indeed truly the best ad I've seen in awhile.
Xyzzy @ Jul 23rd 2007 4:24PM
@3: "For those that don't here's the punch line... DISNEY is TRUE BLU right now... period."
If the roles were reversed (Universal movie on a Sony laptop commercial), someone at EngadgetHD would be writing an article about how Universal is rumored to be switching to BD. Why doesn't the same thing happen with BD rumors of switching to neutrality? Who knows...
Xyzzy @ Jul 23rd 2007 4:31PM
Speaking of Universal, it doesn't sound like the EngadgetHD rumors of them switching are true:
http://hddvd.highdefdigest.com/news/show/Web-Enabled_Features/Industry_Trends/Universal/Universal_Pledges_Web-Enabled_Features_on_All_New_HD_DVD_Titles/786
"Pointing out that Blu-ray players "dont have the consistency in their machines to be able to handle this," Graffeo's remarks came as attendees at the Home Media Expo got the very first peek at scenes and features from the highly anticipated 'Heroes' HD DVD release."