HDTV Almanac - Netflix is Not Seeing Starz

[alfredpoor]

Bombshell: Starz has ended talks with Netflix about renewing a licensing agreement for movie content on the streaming video service. The current agreement — which expires on February 28, 2012 – reportedly is estimated to be worth about $30 million, and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings had stated that he expected the renewal to cost around [...]

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[ccclvib]

Do you mean Netflix in general, or just the streaming part? As long as a large portion of the Internet using population is still using less-than-adequate speed to do what they do, streaming will still be only a part of the product for Netflix. And as long as that's true, Netflix will still have a lot of money. They'll surely want to do something with that money, and I believe that will mean they will always be around in the streaming business as well. A good possibility would be purchase - possibly in partnership with another streaming operation - of one of the content providers (a movie studio? Why not? The latest on in-house attendance is not the best news the studios have seen.) That would mean they would have control over all the output and archives for that studio, and put them in severe competition with other providers. It might mean the other providers would be convinced to allow for some distribution of their own content by Netflix as well. Who knows?

Whatever happens I doubt this process will happen very fast. Lots of egos and lots of money will be bent in unexpected ways before it's done.