If you’re a Dish Network fan, prepare to be screwed over if you are an AMC TV fan also. Turns out that Dish is looking to drop AMC network, along with IFC, Sundance & WE networks next month.
Dish says that they’re dropping AMC because of the higher fees they’re charging per subscriber since they’ve had mega cable hits like The Walking Dead, Mad Men and Breaking Bad.
AMC claims that Dish is doing this as a retaliation to a lawsuit between an AMC subsidiary and Dish, but Dish replied with their higher fee response.
Between some articles we’ve all seen last year that touched on accusing AMC in not knowing how to handle mega-hits, and the firing of The Walking Dead‘s Frank Darabont… well, I don’t know what to think. Despite their uber-popular series, they do have some of the longest running commercial breaks I’ve ever seen on TV, as they go for at least 6-minute ad runs during their breaks.
But I can see Dish being snippy too, being as how they seem to have people on their staff who head out and spam website comment sections with Dish sales pitches.
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The other day I took notice of the fact that the movie Immortals, starring Henry Cavill, had sold around a million DVD/Blu-ray units. I had not understood the numbers of units that mega hits sell, but to see Immortals sell a million units raised my eyebrows!
And that number comes from a dwindling level of home entertainment sales of DVDs and such. Back when I bought the Iron Man DVD, in one of the extras, Jon Favreau made note of the weakening DVD sales back then. And recently CNN reported that in 2012, more people will be paying to watch streaming movie content than buy movies on DVD/Blu-ray Disc.
For a minute, I thought DVD sales were plummeting. They are, but not as I first thought.
As things stand, Hollywood needs to look towards their future business models of selling movies to the home entertainment sector. Or, in other words, they better start investing in server farms to deliver digital content. More so than they have probably already invested in…
The estimates say that online video transactions will be hitting the 3+ billion mark in 2012, versus the 2+ billion mark for the actual physical disc viewing. The 3.4 billion estimate is roughly 135% over last years parameter and the content delivery systems that account for over 90% of the streaming content is Netflix and Amazon Prime.
But even though the above numbers seem dire, they really aren’t because the revenue estimates for 2012 for physical formats is $11~ billion while online streaming content is estimated at just under $2 billion.
But here’s where the consumer’s eyebrows might go up: It’s the price per movie, per venue.
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