Hi folks,

I've been thinking about this for a while.

Since the death of the Home Video Rental place around the corner - it's actually quite frustrating that the newcomer - the streaming services like Netflix - are viewed by the studios as a secondary Pay-TV market. This has meant that they have toi cough up massive rights fees up-front in order to offer material legally. Meaning that they can't act as a library in the same way as the old ones did, as they enter this tendering war for rights...

Out of interest - how *did* the old video libraries work when it came to funnelling royalties back? Did they do something similar to the Public Lending Rights system as actioned by book libraries, likewise done by the PRS?

Could a PLR/PRS model mean that there was less need for upfront tendering for exclusive access, and therefore be the nucleus of the digital rights wholesale market many of us are screaming for?

Could this model work for streaming libraries? So they COULD have everything available, and could win a march on the pirates? And not hack off the paying customer?

Thoughts?

I worked in a video rental shop in the 90s (in the days of VHS) and my understanding was the royalties were included in the purchase cost of the tape - some tapes cost as much as £60+ each (for bigger films) down to around £30 according to the receipts I saw from new deliveries.

That sounds about right. I had in my possession until recently a tape of Robocop which was labelled RRP £75 - which at around £1 per rental average in those days seems almost impossible to make any profit so guess the Video stores got some big volume discounts off RRP.

I think for older films that will be the way it eventually goes. It's the newer films that attract a premium and whilst the exclusive rights for a territory can be sold to an online provider for big money, I guess it will remain this way for good while.