Warner Brothers and Netflix

I just read a story online that Netflix and Warner Brothers have reached a new deal whereby Netflix will be allowed to rent out new Warner Brothers releases 28 days after they become available for sale. DVD sales are down, and the thinking is that more people will buy the DVD's rather than waiting the 28 days to rent them. Since Netflix did this, I'm assuming that other video rental places like Blockbuster will follow suit.

This is an absolutely dumb strategy. I can't think of single movie that I have EVER rented that I would have purchased instead if it had been available for purchase a month before. I'm not saying I would never purchase a DVD. If I saw a movie in the theaters, absolutely LOVED it, and knew I'd watch it over and over again, I'd buy it when it came out on DVD. I just purchased two movies for my children for Christmas, both of which met those criteria. Whether they were available for rent had nothing to do with me buying them.

And if it's a movie I haven't seen but really want to see, I don't mind waiting 28 days to rent it. I mean, if time was of the essence, I could have watched it in the theaters months ago. Waiting 28 more days isn't a big deal to me.

The opposite strategy, by the way, has been tried before, too. When my family first got a VCR back in 1985, movies used to be available for rent for months before they were available for sale. Well, I guess you COULD purchase the movie, but you'd have to pay the approximately $150 a movie that the rental stores were being charged. After a few months, once the distributors had sufficiently fleeced the rental stores, the prices dropped to the $20-$30 range.

But then it became apparent that some people really wanted to OWN the movie, not just rent it, so the sale prices for VHS movies, especially big ticket movies, began to premiere in that $20 to $30 range. And eventually all movies dropped into that range.

Blah blah blah. Here's my point: For now and for ever, some movies will be movies we'll want to own, and some will be "renters." And I don't see how this new policy is going to do anything but tick people off. I just don't understand the logic here.

Another Sweasy on the Internet

As I watched this video, I was struck by three things:

1) Why in the world would someone marry into the name "Sweasy," get divorced, but KEEP the married name? How bad must her maiden name have been?

2) What's up with the people on the sides of the video? This is one in a series of videos, and they're in ALL of them!

3) I've written before that maybe this blog gives away too much private information about my family. I'm pretty sure this video gives up WAAAY too much.




(I can't see the video.)

2010

Happy New Year to everyone! No matter what your 2009 was like, I hope your 2010 is even better!

This is the time of year when people make resolutions, and I'm making them, too. One of my resolutions centers around the fact that I've been feeling overworked and overstressed lately. As a result, I've decided to look for ways that I can cut back on extraneous activities that take up precious time. I've decided that writing this blog on a daily basis in one of those activities.

I haven't missed a day since October 9, 2008 (I didn't miss ANY days in 2009, and in fact on a couple of days published TWO posts, meaning that I wrote 367 posts in 2009) and I've really enjoyed writing this blog, but I've also found at time that it's become tedious, almost an extra daily job rather than something I was enjoying doing. Thus, I'm going to cut back. I'm going to continue to write it, but maybe only post twice a week or something like that.

In any event, Happy New Year!