The Mouse Takes on Redbox

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urely you’ve heard the cries from the entertainment industry about the bad box office returns and the declining DVD sales, and how they portend a future without huge summer blockbusters. And of course you’ve been told that bad, evil, terrible downloading is the cause of it all. But piracy isn’t the only arrow the industry has in its quiver of scapegoats and bad excuses. DVD rentals are also to blame.

It’s exactly this kind of short-term greed and lack of long-term strategy that has gotten the entertainment industry into the state it’s in now.

Recently, the Walt Disney Company told Redbox and other rental companies that their DVDs would not be available to rental companies until 28 days after their release date. Redbox, with its $1.00 rentals, is cutting into DVD sales, Disney believes.

For its part, Redbox is responding by sending its employees out to pay retail for new Disney releases to stock its boxes with, thereby undermining Disney’s strategy. 

It’s hard to know what the more pathetic aspect of this renewed battle against rentals is (the studios opposed VHS rentals at the dawn of the Blockbuster era, too). Is it the fact that the studios are once again showing that they care more about profits than about making their customers happy? Or is it the fact that they’re spending time fretting over physical media at a time when streaming media is so obviously the wave of the future?

Either way, customers who don’t want to pay top dollar for DVDs or Blu-Ray discs will soon have an additional reason to turn to the internet to download movies for free.

It’s exactly this kind of short-term greed and lack of long-term strategy that has gotten the entertainment industry into the state it’s in now. By ignoring the things that customers clearly want in an attempt to hold onto the profit margins from their outdated business model, movie studios are sure to be the architects of their own demise.