Netflix played down the significance of losing some content...
Netflix played down the significance of losing some content for streaming after the four-year contract it had with Starz came to an end. Netflix stopped making several movies available to its streaming subscribers once the deal ended Tuesday. But Netflix…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
spokesman Steve Swasey told us Thursday that Starz new release movies it had “accounted for only about 2 percent of Netflix viewing.” They included 15 Disney titles offered under a pay TV release window, “many of which,” including Toy Story 2, would “leave Starz in the coming weeks and months anyway,” he said. “The rest of Starz” content “either came off Netflix eight months ago, or were replaceable catalog movies,” he said. Netflix members are getting access to “an increasing flow” of titles under a similar pay release window under deals with Epix, Relativity, Film District, Open Road, The Weinstein Co. and other companies, he said. Those titles will, over “the next few months,” include Oscar winners The Artist, Hugo and Rango, as well as The Adventures of Tin Tin, Thor, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Captain America, Super 8 and The Immortals, he said. Separately, Netflix said on its blog that it reached its “captioning goal” on streaming content for 2011 in “mid December.” At that point, “more than 80 percent of the hours streamed” by it in the U.S. were for content with captions or subtitles available, it said. That represented “significant” progress from the 40 percent in June and 60 percent in September, it said. Netflix said it continued to require captions or subtitles from providers for all new content where available, and it continued to “author captions or subtitles for significant new content where it is missing.” The company’s “goal is to provide more and more content with captions,” but it warned that subscribers “should expect the gap on the last 20 percent to narrow more slowly than in 2011, since it includes a large number of titles that are rarely watched, so each hour of captioning added adds less and less to the overall metric.” Netflix said “we welcome the FCC rulemaking on captions and subtitles, since it helps align the industry on making captions and subtitles more available from the content suppliers, which can only help us all move forward in this important area.” In the U.S., nearly 90 percent of streaming viewing is done using a player capable of displaying captions or subtitles, it said. Some older Blu-ray players, TVs, and set-top boxes, however, aren’t capable and their firmware can’t be upgraded, Netflix said. Nearly all Netflix-ready devices in distribution can render captions, it said. Those devices include all three home videogame consoles, smartphones and tablets, TVs, Blu-ray players, and Apple TV and Roku set-top boxes.