Welcome to the Geek Choice Blog

Social Networking: About to become a bit more profitable?

March 9th, 2011 by Joseph Ruthaford

Remember when everyone had a myspace account and it was the cool thing to have? Then all of a sudden Facebook come to be and crushed myspace to oblivion. Then you have twitter which seems to be living in harmony with Facebook, although some of my friends feel more comfortable on Twitter then on facebook but still have a Facebook account. Me personally I didn’t jump on the Twitter bandwagon but I might start. Now the reason I brought up these social networking platforms is because one of them is starting to evolve. It may even evolve into a bigger enterprise then it already is. It has been announced that they are testing renting movies through Facebook. Today the Warner Bros. movie The Dark Knight will be on rental through Facebook. This is just a test says Warner Bros. and Facebook really has commented on anything specific about the whole rentals thing. Plus you have to question why they are testing it with a movie that is about three years old. Now granted it was an instant classic in my book but don’t you think Warner Bros. would have tried it with a movie that is just coming out to DVD to try and make a splash?

The one thing that seems to be brought up in all of this talk is that this could affect Netflix but I think it really won’t. Netflix is a subscription service and this Facebook rental thing is more of an ondemand type thing. Now maybe if this catches on it could affect digital rentals from place like itunes and Amazon but anyone saying this could affect Netflix I think is barking up the wrong tree. I have tons and tons of movies and TV shows at my disposal from Netflix for less than 10 bucks a month and that is hard to beat. Although I can’t blame Facebook for trying to do such a move, I mean Apple had $1.1 billion worth of virtual goods through Apple’s iTunes store last quarter. So maybe it is companies like that they should worry about.

Related posts:

1. New movies to rent on Facebook
2. Facebook entering a new market rivaling groupon and Living Social
3. Netflix apologizes
4. People angry at Netflix plan changes
5. Netflix not renting DVDs on Qwikster