Inc.com [via Hacking Netflix] recently asked five entrepreneurs what they would suggest to help Netflix win their on-going battle against Blockbuster once and for all. Let’s ignore, for a minute, the fact that it seems really weird to ask a handful of confirmed capitalists what they would do to help a single corporation to secure a market monopoly. I think Withoutabox’s David Strauss is right on the proverbial money with his suggestion that Netflix should seek out niche audiences and put a greater push behind indie films:

Netflix should distribute more obscure films. It started down this path last year when it helped to distribute The Puffy Chair, which got raves at Sundance. Targeted niche outreach of this kind is harder to do than mass outreach, but if you develop a lot of loyal little audiences over time, in the way that eBay did, you often end up with a larger audience than if you go after the mainstream.

It wasn’t that long ago that Netflix seemed to be on the forefront of this. But at this point, I’m not sure they have any interest.

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Blockbuster supporters (and stockholders) who got all excited about yesterday’s announcement that the video chain has purchased movie download site Movielink might want to wait before opening that bottle of champers. In a blog post titled “Video Downloads … Suck,” Om Malik*** points to a study by Parks Associates, which was (apparently coincidentally) released yesterday. Only 16 percent of those surveyed said they were happy with the selection of movies and TV shows available for download online, and only 13 percent agreed that those videos are sold for a reasonable price. “In other words,” says Malik, “The majority think downloads are too expensive and they suck.”

With all the “downloads are gonna save the industry” talk that seems to be going around, this would seem to be a study worth paying attention to, but I do wonder about the demographics of those surveyed. And the terms used in the press release also seem dangerously vague. Parks acknowleges that they’re lumping together products obtained from both legal, paid services like iTunes, and illegal P2P networks, which is already problematic, but it would seem that the term “video downloads” would be subject to even further confusion. Are we talking about studio movies, or “user-generated” videos, or both? What about streaming? What about YouTube? What about porn?

The findings of the Parks study certainly seem to stand in contrast to those expressed by Chuck Tryon, in his recent article in Flow. Tryon describes the experience of using Netflix’s Watch Now streaming service as a positive one, not least because it allows him to escape the “bright red envelope collecting dust” syndrome common to so many Netflix users. As Tryon puts it,

The Watch Now option feeds the desire for immediacy or spontaneity associated with trips to the video store. Audiences are not forced to wait the 2-3 days for that little red envelope to show up in the mail…Instead, as I’ve watched online, I’ve found myself watching movies more frequently than at any time in the recent past, while being more willing to take chances on certain movies, based in part on the perception that I’m making a relatively spontaneous decision, one that won’t result in a movie sitting on my shelf for several weeks at a time.

Tryon notes that one potential downside of the Watch Now system is that you’re stuck watching a movie on a computer, which tends to transform the idea of renting a video from a potentially communal to an almost necessarily solitary experience. But with Netflix rumored to have a set-top box in the works, that problem may be temporary. I’ve long been of the opinion that once we get to a point where there’s a more feasible way to connect files from the computer to the TV, downloading will explode. But then again, that theoretically should have been accomplished by the AppleTV, and in my three months as an AppleTV owner, I’ve yet to find a film for sale on the internet that I both want to watch, and can watch through all the Apple DRM.

If I took part in that survey, I’d have to concur that the current selection of movies available for download is not ideal–but if the Apple Store were to stock the movies I want to see, I’d be downloading left and right.

***Full disclosure: I write a weekly column for Om Malik’s NewTeeVee.

Word hit the web late last night that Blockbuster has acquired Movielink, an online movies-on-demand service that, despite having the backing of some of Hollywood’s key content providers (ie: studios like Warner Brothers and MGM) has struggled to reach critical mass. In the deal, Blockbuster acquires Movielink’s technology, plus the rights to distribute their library, which, if made available through Blockbuster today, would instantly skyrocket their VOD service miles ahead of the content-poor Watch Now program over at Netflix.

So is this a genius move in the big blue giant’s ongoing battle with their red envelope competitors? Or is it a sign that the former king of video rental is now so weak that it has to outsource innovation? Opinion is split:

Desperate!!!
“It’s a desperate move to shore up Blockbuster’s online failures…[the deal] gives Blockbuster merely a place at the online-video table, not the ability to eat everyone else’s lunch.” — Owen Thomas, Valleywag

“[S]ignals more than a little desperation on the part of Blockbuster … Blockbuster is pretty much admitting they’ve been unable (unwilling?) to develop a home-grown service and so shelled out a bunch of cash (which they don’t have) to buy their way into the game.” — Chris Thilk, Movie Marketing Madness

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The big movie/little movie dichotomy at extremes. Kevin calls in the biggest Simpsons fan he knows–his big brother–to talk about The Simpsons movie. We interview Ronald Bronstein about his movie, Frownland, a super low budget movie that completely polarizes audiences wherever it has the fortune to be screened.

Download FilmCouch #31 or subscribe in the iTunes store (search for “filmcouch” or click here to launch iTunes) and a new free episode will download every Friday. Join the FilmCouch group

***David Geffen and Steven Spielberg, apparently unhappy with the role Dreamworks has played within the Viacom empire since Paramount’s late-2005 acquisition of the vanity label, are threatening to walk away from their contracts with the mega studio. According to a fascinating piece on the subject by former Paramount employee Peter Bart, Geffen and Spielberg may be able to jump ship with the Dreamworks name in tow, but they’d likely have to leave their staff, existing deals and film negatives behind.

***Netflix is lowering the price of their two most popular subscription plans by $1 each, in an attempt to beat out Blockbuster once and for all. It’s the second price slash from Netflix this year, and it could cost the company millions of dollars.

***Disney has found a director for their remake of the kiddie classic Escape to Witch Mountain. Also, if you were wondering what happened to Ike Eisenmann, in 2002 he wrote, directed and starred in a Witch Mountain/Blair Witch spoof called — wait for it — The Blair Witch Mountain.

***The Hollywood Reporter’s Barry Garron offers a summary of the state of Paris Hiton’s post-jail career. “Paris Hilton told Larry King that she has two films lined up for the summer. It is absolutely inconceivable that she will perform in either of them any better than she did while dodging King’s mostly superficial questions on Wednesday night.”

***Ready for a boldfaced onslaught? Ryan Gosling will join Rachel Weisz in Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. The casting, according to THR, is “a coup for Jackson and Dreamworks,” because Gosling takes only a fraction of the many roles he’s offered.

***Blockbuster and Netflix have settled their mutual lawsuits. Netflix had sued Blockbuster for stealing their rental-by-mail patent; the ailing brick-and-mortar giant had counter-sued, claiming Netflix was attempting to establish a monopoly over the paper-envelope market. All is well now…at least for Netflix, whose stock is worth roughly five times that of their blue-and-yellow rivals.

Live Free or Die Hard opens today, and while Bruce Willis waits with bated breath to see if a truncated bus ad can buy him another ten years as an action star, our friends at Slate and the Guardian are contemplating what it all means.

Last week, Joe Queenan published a looong consideration (incidentally, why does the Guardian’s film section still post 2,300 word essays in one long column? Would it be grossly capitalist for them lay a story out across two pages?) of the collateral damage left by Willis’ John McLane throughout the course of the franchise:

How much is it going to cost you? Well, in addition to all the high-rise buildings, bridges, highways and subway stations that are going to have to be replaced, there is the niggling subject of lawsuits both against the police department and against John McClane himself. Recently I reviewed the Die Hard carnage tally, and determined that McClane could easily be tied up in court for decades due to his madcap, unauthorised escapades. In the original Die Hard, either he or his employer would be on the hook for the deliberate destruction of the skyscraper in which Rickman’s terrorist cabal is holed up. And because McClane, a Manhattan cop, was operating without any authority whatsoever on the Los Angeles police department’s turf, the bill for the calamitous devastation would not be sent to the LAPD, but to the headquarters of New York’s Finest. This being the case, it’s hard to see how McClane would ever be in a position to affect the course of events in Die Hard 2. He would long since have been forced to take early retirement.

I love geeking out over the real-world implications left ignored by action fantasies; I crave a Law & Order spin-off dealing only with the legal problems of the great action heroes. There were a couple of throwaway lines in Ghostbusters 2 about the gang going bankrupt after having been sued by the city for the havoc wrecked in the first film–wouldn’t that trial have been more fun to watch than all that nonsense with Peter McNichol and Sigourney Weaver’s horrible baby? But Queenan isn’t offering his 2,300 words in the name of parallel universe hypotheticals–the ultimate goal here is to point the finger at us idiot Americans for allowing McClane to continue his fiscally irresponsible rampage across four films:

Backed into a corner, most audiences would admit that John McClane is a major head case, a Grade A loony, the living, breathing apotheosis of overzealous policing, and exactly the opposite of what most of us want in our lawmen. Why then are the Die Hard films so popular? [...] Though I am always loath to suggest that a movie produced by Joel Silver possesses a deeper meaning, in this case the underlying message of the Die Hard movies comes through loud and clear: American society is so prosperous that it can not only survive inflation and recession and the dotcom meltdown and the current collapse of the housing market and Donald Rumsfeld, but it can even survive John McClane’s latest madcap escapade. In a society with this much money, money is never going to be much of an issue.

After all that scolding, Eric Lichtenfeld’s celebration of “yippie kai yay motherfucker” as the “greatest one-liner in movie history” should be refreshing. But ultimately, Lichtenfeld doesn’t beat Queenan’s argument so much as play into it:

When terrorist-slash-exceptional thief Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) taunts hero John McClane (Bruce Willis), “Who are you? Just another American who saw too many movies as a child?” and asks this “Mr. Cowboy” if he really thinks he stands a chance, McClane’s answer

If you’re not up to date on the current status of the HD DVD format war, trust me — you’re not alone. In 2005, when Engadget’s Ryan Block wrote this definitive side-by-side comparison of the two formats, it seemed like I might actually have to pick a side. But now that I have an AppleTV, the whole idea of a DVD format war seems completely meaningless. With more studios and filmmakers embracing online distribution every day, I seems like the HD DVD is destined to become the laserdisc of the late 00s. If you don’t believe me, compare Block’s piece from two years ago with this Engadget story from this weekend, through which we learn that customers are complaining that Sony’s high definition Blu-Ray disks have a tendency to grow some kind of mold which ultimately renders them useless.

So imagine my surprise when, moments after reading the rotting disk story, I scrolled down on my RSS reader and learned that Blockbuster–and, I swear, I’m not making this up–has announced that they will exclusively support Blu-Ray over Toshiba’s competing HD-DVD format in most of its stores. And yes, I triple-checked the date on the story–this decision was announced today. Tack on your own joke about the decaying state of brick-and-mortar, tangible product movie rental right … about … here.

Image of happy family enjoying a surely rot-free home entertainment experience courtesy of Blockbuster.com.

Paul and Kevin navigate the gauntlet of trying to watch movies at home. Stu Vanairsdale, The Reeler, reviews a lost gem from 1976, the newly restored and released film, Killer of Sheep. Kevin drops his two-cents on Will Ferrell’s Blades of Glory.

Download FilmCouch #14 or subscribe in the iTunes store (search for “filmcouch” or click here to launch iTunes) and a new free episode will download every Friday.