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.
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