Warner Bros really wants your movie collection to go from the bookshelf to the cloud.
The studio has pioneered a flagship program wherein users will be able to transfer their existing DVD and Blu-ray films to cloud-based digital copies, allowing them to have a much more easily organized movie library.
“We’re leading industry efforts to launch services so consumers can convert libraries easily, safely and at reasonable prices,” the studio was quoted as saying at a recent Morgan Stanley conference in San Francisco.
Actual details of the emerging program were not perfectly clear, but it will be done through in-store promotions that require customers to take in their physical movie discs to have them uploaded and stored in a cloud account.
Then, when users purchase a brand new movie from a digital download service, it will automatically be available right alongside those converted titles. For the first time, the transition to a new medium doesn’t mean all your content on old mediums becomes irrelevant.
Some movie studios still prefer that customers buy their movies in a physical format. But that’s an illogical preference that only exists because studios are afraid of digital content or they’re just too set in their ways. Many studios, though, see that digital distribution is much more favorable.
Studios can still charge $20 or more for a movie that is almost entirely profit. That cost doesn’t take into account the price of a physical disc, packaging and retail materials, shipping to thousands of stores across the country, or the salaries that go to every employee involved in those processes.
