Telstra's DVD rental sale: DVD's death finally imminent?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 04 July 2011 11:32

Your IT - Entertainment

Although the death of DVD rental stores was predicted long ago and saw bookstores fall and fail in a far more spectacular fashion, Telstra's sale of its BigPond DVD movie rental business may well be the last nail in the DVD's coffin.

RIP, DVD, we hardly knew ye. Challenged by lower quality VCDs, higher quality Blu-ray discs and similar quality downloads of both legal and illegal types, is the DVD now dead or does the digital versatile disc have some health packs and extra lives up its sleeve?

One thing to ask yourself is when was the last time you bought or rented a DVD, especially now with the plethora of online movie rental services now available, let alone a cyber-galactic world wide web of 'unauthorised' content.

Let's not forget the far bigger number of free-to-air channels that we enjoy down under today, either, which deliver many more movies to our various screens.

Of course, the whole reason for a DVD rental service is to get access to the latest post-theatre release movies, with DVD rental stores traditionally the first to get new releases, but even this has now been augmented by same-day legal online downloads.

Still, Quickflix, the Australian version of the US Netflix service, clearly sees value in the DVD rental business, because it has decided to purchase the BigPond Movies DVD service from Telstra to run it itself.

The question is whether you, the end-user, the person that puts life into the business plans of companies by being a paying customer, will do your DVD renting at Quickflix, or whether you'll get your movies in other ways, such as through a legal online rental or download service.

Naturally, the Quickflixers are chuffed, with its chairman, Stephen Langsford, stating to the Australian Stock Exchange that 'We are delighted to enter this agreement with Telstra and look forward to delivering a great service for BigPond Movies DVD customers who choose to continue with DVD rental. As a result of this agreement, we will significantly increase the depth of our library of latest release and catalogue titles, and we'll be servicing the whole of Australia with next day delivery in all major cities.'

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