This is good news for Netflix, which needed some, and bad news for cable television and outlets like HBO. Streaming is the future and Dreamworks knows it:
Netflix Inc has won a deal to pipe Dreamworks Animation movies starting in 2013, the first time a major Hollywood studio has chosen Internet streaming over traditional pay TV, The New York Times reported on Sunday.
Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg told the newspaper the deal, worth $30 million per picture to Dreamworks over a number of years, was “game-changing” and represented a bet that viewers would soon no longer make distinctions between content streamed on the Internet or through cable.
The Netflix deal means Dreamworks — the studio behind family friendly fare from “Shrek” to “Kung Fu Panda” — is eschewing premium pay-TV operator HBO in favor of online streaming, the Times reported. HBO is a unit of Time Warner Inc. “We are really starting to see a long-term road map of where the industry is headed,” Katzenberg was cited as saying to the newspaper in an interview.
The content agreement comes days after Netflix, which has seen its share price decline sharply after a series of missteps, sealed an agreement to broadcast TV shows from Discovery Communications Inc.
Netflix needs to add more content to its streaming service to keep drawing in new customers and fend off competition from the likes of Amazon.com, Google Inc and Apple Inc.
Other streaming providers are going to jump in the race and the losers will be anyone who still believes in appointment television.
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