By: Arthur Cooper
Submitted: 2011-03-17 22:23:01 | Word Count: 664
Netflix has already taken the media world by storm and has no intention of stopping. Since establishing itself in 1997, Netflix has become a dominant player in the visual entertainment arena. Today Netflix supplies more than 10 million paid subscribers with a large selection of movies and television shows for their viewing pleasure. To fully accommodate their users, Netflix offers disc rentals and internet video streaming. No longer dependent on Blockbuster, people decided that it was easier to have movies delivered to their doorstep than to start up the car and go to a traditional video rental store.
Recently, Netflix did something surprising and unprecedented causing the media world to take note. Netflix involved itself in a bidding war. The prize up for grabs is an original television series called “House of Cards”. Netflix is in the ring with media heavy weights that would normally be up for this kind of purchase. Companies like CBS and AMC are normally the sort of clientele that would be interested in full rights to a television drama series. No one was ready for Netflix to jump into the ring, much less be a viable contender. What people didn™t realize is that Netflix has been aligning itself for visual entertainment platform domination for a while.
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Netflix doesn™t just want to provide their subscribers with access to television shows that have already aired. They want to be the company that airs the show to start with, no doubt as a means of increasing the number of subscribers. This move has been likened to HBO and other television giants. Bravo Netflix! Bravo!
I believe that television companies should have been prepared for this. Right now, in order for Netflix to offer a television show in their video collection, they must first pay the company that has the rights to the show. These prices are extraordinarily high ranging in the millions. So why wouldn™t Netflix decide to cut out the middle man and buy a show in its entirety? Why would consumers settle for anything less than what Netflix is gearing up to offer?
Television companies ought to be nervous. Consumers don™t have to wait until a show reaches Netflix to get their fill. I speculate that non-Netflix television watching will decrease and therefore become a significant financial blow to the media business. Advertisers might lose interest in commercials and totally shift to Netflix based ads. Television could become obsolete. There, I said it. Television watching might become a thing of the past. Television companies already offer video of recently aired shows online so this seems like a natural progression.
As people continue to get more and more of their media from an internet source, the role of television will systematically become irrelevant. We all know what happened to the newspaper business. Newspapers couldn™t provide the news as quickly as people could get it online. TV is probably next. The internet age is here to stay and seems to be at a high point.
