Netflix’s incredible shrinking DVD business

Netflix’s U.S.-only DVD-by-mail business, DVD.com, has been shrinking by 20% year over year each quarter this year. That’s not surprising in the absence of any marketing spend and consumer preference for the immediacy of streaming video.
In the third quarter, Netflix’s DVD revenue dropped 20% to $35 million. Meanwhile, its streaming revenue rose 6% to $7.89 billion.
I love the Netflix DVD service for its deep catalog of older movies as well as new Hollywood releases. But I’m in a shrinking crowd.
The future of Netflix’s DVD business is in the hands of the major studios and their willingness to support the physical media market. However, with retailers cutting back on space for DVD and Blu-ray Disc sales and Redbox trimming its number of rental kiosks, the prospects for DVD don’t look that good.
Add to that the fact that many new movies are no longer being released on video disc. My saved queue has quite a few movies from the past couple of years that haven’t gotten a DVD release.
Also, older movies are not being reissued. So, when Netflix’s copies of older movies get scratched, broken or degrade, they aren’t being replaced.
My current saved queue on DVD.com has 66 titles that don’t have release dates. It would be longer, but I’ve watched a good number of the unreleased movies on multiple streaming services.
By comparison, my Watch queue of available movies has just 33 titles.

Photo: Netflix Chief Executive Reed Hastings with DVD mailers. (Netflix)

How long before TV Guide Magazine ends its print issue?

TV Guide Magazine printed its first issue in April 1953. But after more than 69 years and multiple recent owners, the publication appears to be struggling.
Its annual Fall Preview issue used to be one of TV Guide’s largest issues. But this year’s edition, the 70th annual Fall Preview issue, had just 72 pages. Last year’s issue was 92 pages.
Magazine publisher NTVB Media bought TV Guide Magazine in 2015. But the online brand is now controlled by Fandom, which bought the digital assets of TV Guide as well as review aggregator Metacritic and other entertainment properties earlier this month. (See Wall Street Journal article.)
If production costs are cheap enough, TV Guide Magazine could limp along for some time. But the future of publications is online not print. It’s only a matter of time before the storied magazine prints its last issue. But I’ve been saying that for years.

Forget ad-supported streaming, Netflix should have focused on pay-per-view

For years, Netflix executives rejected the idea of offering a cheaper, advertising-subsidized service level. But when subscriber growth hit a ceiling and started to decline, they changed their minds.
Wall Street analysts applauded the move, but I think it was a mistake. Netflix should have focused on cost-cutting and finding other ways to lower the cost of its service to consumers. It also is right to crack down on rampant password-sharing on the service.
But an ad-supported service level? No. It should have stayed a commercial-free, premium service like Apple TV+. No one likes ads and offering both ad-supported and ad-free service levels complicates the business and muddies the message for consumers.
Netflix also is wasting money trying to make a large video game service for its subscribers. That never made sense to me.
Netflix is about video content – movies, TV series, documentaries and more. It should stick to its core business.
That said, Netflix is missing an opportunity in the transactional, pay-per-view realm. It has ceded that business mostly to rival Amazon.
When Netflix only ran a DVD-by-mail service, it offered every conceivable movie and TV series. Back then, practically everything Hollywood produced was sold as packaged media and thus available from Netflix. But once streaming took over, the availability of movies splintered across numerous subscription services – Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, HBO Max, Hulu, Paramount+, Peacock and more.
By adding a pay-per-view service, Netflix could return to offering every theatrical movie release available on one platform. Right now, subscribers must switch platforms to do that.
Transactional video rentals isn’t as large an addressable market as advertising, but it doesn’t sully the brand like ads do either.
And as subscription services reduce the size of the content libraries they offer, as HBO Max is now doing, transactional pay-per-view provides a way for consumers to still access those titles.

Photo: Netflix celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2022.

Sexy Halloween costumes 2022: Top Gun costumes are hot this year

The United States of America, the greatest country on Earth, gave the world sexy Halloween costumes. Just take any profession and add sexy to it – sexy nurses, sexy teachers, sexy police officers, you name it.
So, what’s new in sexy Halloween costumes for Halloween 2022?
Sexy Top Gun pilots, that’s what. The hit Tom Cruise movie “Top Gun: Maverick” spawned a wide array of sexy flight suits from Yandy.
And it wouldn’t be a Yandy Halloween without at least one ripped-from-the-headlines costume.
This year’s entry is the Con Heiress costume, a sexy take on Anna Sorokin, a con artist and fraudster who posed as a wealthy German heiress to access the upper echelons of the New York social and art scenes from 2013 to 2017. She was the subject of the 2022 Netflix miniseries “Inventing Anna.”