Warner Bros on Tuesday started testing a service that offers select movies for purchase or rental through the public pages of these movies on the world’s largest online social network.
Starting on Tuesday, Facebook users who visit the official page of Batman: The Dark Knight can click a “watch” icon and pay 30 Facebook credits, or US$3, to watch the movie. The movie is streamed through a Facebook application.
Renters have access to a movie for 48 hours and can replay it as many times as they like. Warner Bros said it would add other movies in coming months, but did not say what those would be.
The page had nearly 4 million “likes” as of Tuesday afternoon.
Another page, called simply Dark Knight, had about 2 million — but this is not the official Warner Bros page and the movie isn’t available through it.
Warner Bros didn’t say how much it would cost to buy movies.
“Making our films available through Facebook is a natural extension of our digital distribution efforts,” said Thomas Gewecke, president of Warner Bros Digital Distribution, in a statement.
The offering is only open to people in the US.
“While officially dubbed a test, we expect to see more studios get behind the effort given the large platform and higher price point,” wrote Jefferies analyst Youssef Squali in a note to investors.
He added that he sees the Facebook-Warner Bros deal as “yet another caution sign” against movie rental company Netflix Inc’s high stock value.
Netflix lost US$11.95, or 5.8 percent, to close at US$195.45. Time Warner Inc, which owns Warner Bros, fell US$0.35 to close at US$36.43.
“With Facebook’s entry, the competitive playing field is getting crowded,” Squali said. “We expect this competition to curtail Netflix’s subscriber growth and drive higher content costs, impacting revenue growth and margins over time.”
Netflix had no comment.
Separately, some of Sony Corp’s movies sold through Apple Inc’s iTunes store are now available with extra features that enable people to search scenes for actors and bits of dialogue by typing terms into a computer.
Other features allow viewers to choose clips to share on Facebook and Twitter and check where songs from a soundtrack appear. A link to the iTunes store makes music purchases easy.
All three features are available now on Burlesque and The Others Guys. The non-music features are available on Salt and Resident Evil: Afterlife and will be available on The Tourist, when it is released on March 22.
Studio senior vice president Rich Berger said in a statement that adding the features boosts the value of Sony’s digital movies and makes them more collectable.
‘SWASTICAR’: Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s close association with Donald Trump has prompted opponents to brand him a ‘Nazi’ and resulted in a dramatic drop in sales Demonstrators descended on Tesla Inc dealerships across the US, and in Europe and Canada on Saturday to protest company chief Elon Musk, who has amassed extraordinary power as a top adviser to US President Donald Trump. Waving signs with messages such as “Musk is stealing our money” and “Reclaim our country,” the protests largely took place peacefully following fiery episodes of vandalism on Tesla vehicles, dealerships and other facilities in recent weeks that US officials have denounced as terrorism. Hundreds rallied on Saturday outside the Tesla dealership in Manhattan. Some blasted Musk, the world’s richest man, while others demanded the shuttering of his
ADVERSARIES: The new list includes 11 entities in China and one in Taiwan, which is a local branch of Chinese cloud computing firm Inspur Group The US added dozens of entities to a trade blacklist on Tuesday, the US Department of Commerce said, in part to disrupt Beijing’s artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced computing capabilities. The action affects 80 entities from countries including China, the United Arab Emirates and Iran, with the commerce department citing their “activities contrary to US national security and foreign policy.” Those added to the “entity list” are restricted from obtaining US items and technologies without government authorization. “We will not allow adversaries to exploit American technology to bolster their own militaries and threaten American lives,” US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said. The entities
Minister of Finance Chuang Tsui-yun (莊翠雲) yesterday told lawmakers that she “would not speculate,” but a “response plan” has been prepared in case Taiwan is targeted by US President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, which are to be announced on Wednesday next week. The Trump administration, including US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, has said that much of the proposed reciprocal tariffs would focus on the 15 countries that have the highest trade surpluses with the US. Bessent has referred to those countries as the “dirty 15,” but has not named them. Last year, Taiwan’s US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US
Prices of gasoline and diesel products at domestic gas stations are to fall NT$0.2 and NT$0.1 per liter respectively this week, even though international crude oil prices rose last week, CPC Corp, Taiwan (台灣中油) and Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) said yesterday. International crude oil prices continued rising last week, as the US Energy Information Administration reported a larger-than-expected drop in US commercial crude oil inventories, CPC said in a statement. Based on the company’s floating oil price formula, the cost of crude oil rose 2.38 percent last week from a week earlier, it said. News that US President Donald Trump plans a “secondary
RSS