Blockbuster Reveals ‘Movie Pass’, $10/Month Netflix Streaming Competitor.
Netflix has fallen into mud fucking quickly. Shitty pricing plans. Splitting the physical side of the service into the laughably named Qwikster. Perhaps this is the moment Blockbuster has been waiting for, revealing their unambitiously named ‘Movie Pass’ service.
Blockbuster and parent company Dish Network today announced a new streaming service intended as a rival to Netflix. The timing seems perfect, as the public image of Netflix has taken a serious beating in the past six months thanks to price increases, splitting DVD and streaming services, and the choice of ‘Quixster’ as the name for the new Netflix DVD-by-mail service.
So will the new Blockbuster streaming service, dubbed Blockbuster Movie Pass, be able to quickly move in an execute a Mortal Kombat-style fatality on Netflix? Probably not, because the Movie Pass service will only be available to Dish subscribers for the time being.
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Movie Pass launches on October 1 as a $10 supplement to Dish Network subscribers. It features DVD-by-mail and streaming services, with more than 100,000 movies and TV shows and 3,000 games available on disc, and 4,000 movies to stream. Variety‘s report says “more than 20 premium movie channels are also part of the service,” and we’ll update with details of whether that includes streaming options.
But making this available to Dish subscribers only basically makes Movie Pass one gigantic beta test. That’s probably useful for the companies, as the limited rollout can be used to feed specific PR to subscribers and test the workability on a small group. But for the rest of us, it means this is a pretty minor deal.
I don’t have/plan on getting Dish TV, but I’m interested to see what sort of impact this will have on a wider scale.
Thoughts?