Warner Bros signs historic deal making it easier for consumers to ignore their movies

It's not often that two companies sign a deal which is not only ludicrous and annoying to consumers, but seemingly bad for both parties.  

If a movie studio wasn't involved, I wouldn't believe it.

Netflix signed a deal with Warner Brothers today, which gives them cheaper discs and more streaming access to Warner's library.  But it comes with one of the dumbest caveats I've ever heard come out of the entertainment industry -- Netflix can't rent Warner's new releases for 28 days.

The historic deal gives consumers like me and you 28 days' time to forget Warner Brothers is releasing new DVDs at all.  That's gotta be good for your bottom line.

The intent of the deal -- and of the boneheaded DVD embargo on Redbox by Warner, Fox and Universal -- is to prevent cheap rentals of movies from undercutting their new DVD sales.  After all, we all know how inclined we are to go buy movies we've never seen in the worst economy since the Great Depression.  I, for one, don't know how I managed to suppress my obvious enthusiasm to shell out $25 for my very own Blu-ray copy of Four Christmases.  Oh, wait.  I remember.  I saw the stupid thing.

Maybe that's the greater point.  Warner Brothers and these other studios know how cruddy their movies are, so they're gambling away their rental profits on the off-chance that we'll trick ourselves into just going out and buying every new disc we can't rent outside of Blockbuster Video.  I guess that's how stupid they take us for.

I remember fondly the olden days of VHS, when you couldn't rent movies by mail, see them on your computer, and new release movies cost nearly $100 for the first four or five months of release.  After that, it would quietly come to stores at prices people could afford.  That model quickly went away after the advent of DVDs, and my best guess is that the studios are trying to swing things back into that direction.

Meanwhile, all this deal and the Redbox embargoes will accomplish is to make me forget about their new movies altogether.  I am a rabid street date new release follower, and routinely reserve new movies on Tuesdays at my local Redbox.  Though each rental is a dollar, I find myself now renting more movies on the whole than I did back in the days when brick-and-mortar video stores were the norm.  With studios playing monopolistic practices like this, all they're doing is making it easier for me to rent from their competition and harder for me to pad their pockets.

Maybe the only winner in this deal is aspirin manufacturers, because the more I think about this deal, the bigger my headache becomes.