I would be interested to see what employees make at these tech firms. It’s interesting that these few companies can generate so much revenue. I can’t help but wonder about the larger manufacturing and service based corporations. What does their per employee breakdown look like?

Verizon and Redbox hope to give consumers an option that is a “simple and affordable way to access the video entertainment they crave.”

Speaking about the partnership, Coinstar CEO Pau Davis said:

“Consumers rely on Redbox for the latest new release movies at a great value, and our joint venture with Verizon will enable us to bring them even more value by offering expanded content offerings and greater flexibility for how and when they enjoy entertainment.”

“Together, we are erasing old technology boundaries, freeing people to spontaneously enjoy the entertainment they want, whenever they choose, using the devices and media they prefer, at home or away,” added Bob Mudge, Verizon’s President of Consumer and Mass Business Markets.

Since the unnamed service is very similar to Netflix, a lot of people are wondering what will happen to it once this new venture launches. What’s more, the past several months have been rather rough for Netflix after it dramatically raised its prices last September. Consumers were outraged and some even dropped the service, as Bryan Gonzalez, the Director of Social Entertainment Labs at the Entertainment Technology Center at USC, explained in this video:

WebProNews recently caught up with Gonzalez again to talk about this latest development. According to him, Netflix has to continue to focus on its content in order to effectively compete with Verizon and Redbox’s service.

“For Netflix to really continue competing, I think they’re really gonna need to push hard and try to get as much content up front as possible,” he said.

“As long as Netflix keeps that drum beat of fresh content – new content – to their streaming sector, I think they’ll do fine,” he added.

Should Netflix be worried? What do you think?

Gonzalez went on to raise an interesting point about the deal between Verizon and Redbox. As he explained, Netflix’s actions last year were part of a bigger effort to move away from its DVD service. However, it seems that this new venture focuses on the DVD side, which he believes could be due to accessibility issues that so many Americans face.

“A lot of Americans still don’t have very fast Internet connections, so streaming quality isn’t as great necessarily for everyone as a DVD or a Blu Ray,” Gonzalez pointed out.

Another potential issue he raised was in regards to Verizon’s current FIOS cable TV service. At this point, Verizon’s FIOS program is not national, but one can’t help but wonder what will happen since the new venture seems to contradict it.

These details and others were not disclosed in the announcement but are expected to come as the launch date gets closer. The companies said the new service would be available during the second half of the year.

Announced just a month ago, Lilyhammer is available to watch today. All eight episodes of the first season are being made available at once, meaning the impatient viewers among us can schedule a marathon session.

Lillyhammer sounds interesting enough. It stars Steven Van Zandt, who you might remember from his amazing role of Silvio from The Sopranos. You also might know him from his work with The Boss, as Van Zandt is the guitarist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. Van Zandt stars as Frank Tagliano, a New York mobster that has to go into witness protection in Norway after testifying against a boss.

From the Netflix blog:

This show is different in many ways. First of all, this is surely the most ambitious original show to premiere online in history. The presence of an American star like Van Zandt and the production quality and the length of the episodes position “Lilyhammer” in the class of programing usually only found on premium pay television.

Van Zandt’s character understands Norwegian, but doesn’t speak it well, so the folks he encounters speak mostly in their native tongue with subtitles while Stevie speaks in English in the US and Canada. The episodes will be presented fully subtitled in local languages in Latin America. It is highly unusual for a single programmer to debut shows in multiple territories.

Apparently, the show is already a mega hit in Norway, as a whopping 1.2 million people watch every week (it’s been airing over there for 3 weeks). Since Norway only has about 5 million people, Lilyhammer is the most watched show in the country’s history. And even more important than that, it has The Boss’ approval. Springsteen went the the NY premiere and said he loved it.

Later this year, Netflix will roll out even more orignal content in the form of the Kevin Spacey & David Fincher project House of Cards.

Will you check it out? What do you think about Netflix’s strategy of making the entire first season available at once? Let us know in the comments.

To give you an idea of how old this yummy sandwich-blocking law is, the Video Privacy Protection Act was passed as a reaction to Robert Bork’s video rental records being released to the press back when he was busy getting shut out of his nomination to the Supreme Court. The law states that only so much information related to a person’s video viewing and renting habits can be shared.

And.. that’s it. You can’t have a Netflix app for Facebook all because Robert Bork wasn’t confirmed to the Supreme Court.

Things have changed a lot since Bork’s butthurt complaint about his video rentals being published and, luckily, people in Congress have realized that this law really isn’t so useful anymore. Sen. Al Franken, of Minnesota, is one of them and has been pressing for an update to VPPA. Check out his speech on the issue in the video below:

If that’s too much for you, here’s an excerpt:

If someone wants to share what they watch, I want them to be able to do so. But I want to make sure that consumers have the right to easily control who finds out what they watch—and who doesn’t. The Video Privacy Protection Act guarantees them that right. I want to make sure we protect that right for another quarter of a century.

Let’s all hope that Sen. Franken can push this issue far enough to gather the support needed to make sure that we can all look forward to a future of Netflix-Facebook sandwich smorgasbord of sharing video watching preferences.

Recently, thanks in large part to declining purchases of the tangible content — DVD purchases — Warner Brothers announced they would be doubling their 28-day delay to 56 days, which means rental services like Red Box and Netflix wouldn’t be allowed to offer any Warner Brothers new releases until they’ve been on the market for almost two months.

From Warner Brothers’ perspective, such a drastic and perhaps foolhardy move — cutting off one revenue stream to kick-start another one — would improve the potential for home movie purchases, reinvigorating the DVD market, one that sees consumers largely relying on rentals instead of physical purchases.

Over at Variety, they have Warner Brothers’ misguided approach to the home movie market summed up perfectly with the following quote of hot air nonsense:

“The consumer is best served by a windowing and pricing structure that ensures a healthy film business continuing to deliver quality movies. We hope to continue discussions with Redbox and reach a mutually agreed upon solution to this situation, but we fully intend to do what is best for our business, our consumers and the industry as a whole.” [Emphasis added]

If someone can actually get Warner Brothers to expand on that ridiculous “The consumer is best served by windowing,” with some tangible data, instead of relying on unsubstantiated hyperbole, it would be an amazing day. No, Warner Brothers’ true intentions are revealed in the final sentence that says “we fully intend to do what’s best for our business…”

Warner Brothers does not care about the consumer, they only care about their bottom line. Thankfully, however, one company in particular has taken a stand against Warner Brothers’ inane 56-day window. Red Box, the movie rental kiosk kings, is no longer going to abide by the WB’s delay. Instead, they are going to look for alternate means of supplying their customers with the titles they want. From Slash Film’s perspective, this can only mean one thing:

Red Box, instead of relying on Warner Brothers to supply them with new releases, will turn to the world of retail to acquire the content, which will be made available the same day it is released to the public.

In the world of spineless capitulation to these studios — I’m looking directly at you, Netflix — it’s nice to see Red Box take a stand against the studios, favoring the desires of their customers over Warner Brothers’ bottom line. Granted, their means of content acquisition may result in increased new release rental rates (speculation on my part), but the fact is, they are committed to bringing their customers the content they want, even as Warner Brothers hides behind “we know what’s best for the consumer” edicts.

According to the LA Times, beginning February 1st, Netflix users will not be able to immediately add new Warner Bros releases to their DVD queue. Currently, as soon as a new film jumps into Netflix’s database, users can add it to their queue. Of course, they still have to wait the designated window before the DVD will actually ship, but it serves as a kind of placeholder.

Well, now users will have to wait 28 days after the film is released on DVD before they can even add a new Warner release to their queue.

Earlier this month, Warner Bros and Netflix reached an agreement that extended the new release window from 28 days to 56 days. Once a DVD goes on sale, Netflix will have to wait nearly two months before they can ship the DVD out to customers. This rule also applies to Warner Bros new releases with Blockbuster and Redbox.

So now, a Netflix customer will have to wait 28 days to even add a new release to their queue, and then wait another 28 days before it’s actually shipped.

Apparently, the idea behind this is that any obstacle to lower-cost film viewing is good. Warner Bros believes that the current Netflix policy makes the wait for a new DVD tolerable. If a person adds it to their queue, they know it’s on the way. There’s a clear indication that as soon as it’s available, it will be shipped right out to their house.

But in the mind of Warner Bros, not having the DVD sitting comfortably in your queue will make you more likely to go out and buy the full-priced DVD.

It’s shit like this, Warner Bros. And people wonder why downloading a film seems like such an attractive option to many.

It all starts with your customizable personality profile! How exciting!!!!! I can’t wait. If you’ve ever read any of these profiles, they are almost all the same: loves dogs, loves cats, likes to have a good time, loves honesty….whatever! These things would be more accurate if they were written by a panel of strangers who scrutinized user’s pictures and made-up a personality for them.

According to some guy named Brian Bowman, who used to work for Match.com, there’s a solution to all this B.S. people post about themselves on these dating sites. He uses the word “authenticity” to describe his revolutionary idea about internet dating.

According to Bowman, the concept stems from sites like Amazon.com and Netflix who use preference information to bring valid recommendations to their users. He believes this is the innovation that sites like Match.com lack. His vision is that Facebook pages, Twitter posts, Netflix choices, and other internet preferences will become transparent to prospective mates and that they will see a truer picture of who’s on the other side of the site.

While his ideal version of a dating site may leave some feeling like they’ve had their privacy invaded, Bowman feels that this evolution will become excepted as times change.

At the very least it will cut down on users who regularly misrepresent their identity to take advantage of others. It might also rid people of the tedious task of trying to accurately describe themselves to a stranger. We can only hope.

Ahead of releasing their fourth quarter earnings yesterday afternoon, though, Netflix had given investors plenty of reason to expect unpleasant results. Surprisingly, Netflix announced that they actually exceeded Wall Street’s expectations by nearly $20 million by posting an earning of $875.5 million for the 2011 fiscal year. Netflix shares on the stock market were up to $0.73, higher than the original projection of $0.54.

Tracing back across the four financial quarters of 2011, Netflix never really took a substantial hit after their abysmal public relations adventure from the summer of last year. Incredibly, subscribers were apparently not terribly put off by being charged higher prices for subscribing to both streaming and DVD services because the amount of domestic describers actually increased from the Q3 to Q4.

Netflix also managed to contain the fallout of the price hike over the summer and subsequent snafu regarding Qwikster, or so it appears, because they actually collected 24.3 million subscribers, which is up from 24.3 in Q3 2011 and nearly 25% more subscribers than they had in Q4 2010 when they had 19.5 million subscribers.

Netflix’s net income, however, was substantially lower in the fourth quarter, down from $62.4 million in Q3 to $40.7 million in Q4.

In a Q&A following the release of the financial results, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and Netflix CFO David Welles took some questions regarding the implications of their company’s financial performance in 2011. They discussed their plans to branch out into Latin America, where they launched services in September 2011.

A notable comment from Hastings during the Q&A pertained to the possible addition of video games to Netflix catalog. Addressing whether Netflix would begin to offer a video game subscription service, Hastings was brief in saying, “We have no plans to enter video games.”

So far today, Netflix shares appear to be experiencing quite a bounce this morning following yesterday’s financial release, as shares are now up nearly 20% and valued at approximately $114.

The funny thing is, even with the restrictive approach to streaming and new releases, the studios are still taking a loss, which probably explains the decision to increase the new release delay for rental services even more. Of course, this is something Netflix streaming users have already been aware of — the distinct lack of new releases — but after seeing the upcoming graphic, it’s even more head-shaking than you might suspect.

Thanks to Flowing Data, we now know what such a visualization looks like:

Click for larger image

Even without enlarging, you can see there aren’t many new release movies available for stream, no matter what platform you prefer. So what gives? Is this how the movie industry saves itself? By denying its content to consumers, “forcing” them to purchase it (which most simply ignore until the title until it is available on HBO or Showtime)? Is this smart business?

Considering you’re discussing the same industry that got mad when the Internet went dark in protest of SOPA, is this even surprising the movie industry is so willing to try and ignore — if not outright eliminate — what is quickly becoming the preferred method of home movie distribution?

Unfortunately, that answer is a loud “no.”

Thanks to Roger Ebert for making that awesome book cover, which leads this article.

Long story short, I looked everywhere for this obscure film. Netflix did not have it. Redbox did not have it. My girlfriend was calling every Blockbuster in a ten mile radius and they did not have it! I spent about 45 minutes on this fruitless pursuit.

Eventually, I realized I could probably just download a digital version online. Of course I could! I didn’t even know you could download a movie from Amazon, but you can, and I did. And what a piece of garbage it was (which has nothing to do with this story)!

The point is, resources are getting ever more expensive and physical retailers (in my opinion) have become more and more disappointing (they never have what we’re looking for). Randomly searching for something can waste a lot of gasoline, time, and energy. Why not just turn on the computer, and download what you want.

NPD Group monitors trends in rentals and guess what they found out? That’s right, people don’t like to drive to Blockbuster! In fact, more people rent from Redbox, probably because it’s closer (in most cases) and it’s cheaper (come on folks, $1 versus $5). Less surprising is that even more people simply just download their movies.

Senior vice president and industry analysis for The NPD Group Russ Crupnick had this to say about the trend:

“The movie-rental market is clearly undergoing a sea change, as consumers become better equipped to access on-demand and streamed movies and are more comfortable with available delivery options”

But old habits die hard and the movie rental business has not completely transformed. 37% of rentals go to Redbox, 31% go to digital and streaming formats, and the remainder go to physical retailers (like Blockbuster). I’m sure this will continue to change as consumers become more comfortable renting online.