Almost a month after Netflix announced that it failed to re-up their deal with Starz Entertainment, comes news that they inked a deal to be the exclusive content distributor for Dreamworks Pictures. The announcement comes as a much needed win for a company that’s been beleaguered with PR problems stemming first for their announcement of a price hike and then splitting their company in two.
PC Magazine reports that the deal is estimated at $30M and will bring all of its 2013 feature film line up to the streaming movie service and will eventually include previous Dreamworks titles like Kung-Fu Panda, Madagascar 2, Chicken Run, and Antz. Jefferey Katzenberg, CEO of Dreamworks Animation, said of the arrangement, “[it] allows us to get more value for our content while giving us a greater degree of flexibility in how we distribute it across multiple platforms in today’s evolving digital world.” It can be inferred that we can expect to see titles available the same day of the DVD/Blu-ray release – a great bit of news for those that have stuck around.
If there was any doubt that Qwikster is just an in-between for shedding the DVD business altogether, partnerships like this one are just a preview of where we can expect Netflix to be in a couple of years (assuming subscribers don’t bail). Hopefully as Netflix begins to train its focus on their streaming business, more and more partnerships can be created that would benefit consumers and rid us once and for all of physical media clutter.
Source: PC Magazine
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