- Category: Streaming TV News
Review: 'Warner Archive Instant'
I can certainly be wrong about the future success of a media company. I once interviewed Netflix CEO Reed Hastings in 1999 or so, when the company was a little known company with a single warehouse in California. I was already a customer of the company and though it was a brilliant idea. But when the interview was over I was struck by the amount of time he spent talking about the company's future. He was convinced that one day most of the Netflix customer base would be watching movies online and at the time I frankly thought he was nuts.
So maybe my take on the just-launched Warner Archive Instant streaming service is incorrect and someday it will be a wildly successful business. But based on what I've seen so far, I'm not convinced.
Warner Brothers has a massive catalog of movies and TV shows that aren't available for purchase or viewing. They're not popular enough for release on DVD and they are too old to have any real value in the syndication market. So digitizing them and streaming the titles makes sense, but for some reason the company decided that launching a stand-alone streaming service was the best move.
Warner Archive Instant costs $9.99 a month, and that prices it above the subscription costs for streaming rivals Hulu Plus, Netflix or Amazon Prime Instant (if you average the latter's annual subscription over 12 months). And that premium price brings you a very small selection of titles that can often kindly be described as "under-appreciated."
The success of Netflix's streaming service is built in large part on its selection of TV shows. So you might expect that Warner Brothers would have included a beefy selection of classic TV shows, since they have been in the business since its earliest days. Instead, the TV section includes a total of five titles, spread over ten collections. There are season one collections of "Superman," "Cheyenne" and the obscure "Jericho," as well as "Best Of" collections from "Hawaiian Eye" and "77 Sunset Strip." The paucity of the selection is just staggering.
Things are only slightly better in the movie category, which includes about 110 titles. Sure, there are some great titles here: "Bad Day At Black Rock," "The Americanization of Emily" and "A Face In The Crowd." But the majority of the titles are "B" movies along the lines of "The Queen Of Outer Space" and "Tarzan And The Amazons."
I don't have a problem with Warner trying to go its own way in the streaming media market, though you could make a pretty good financial case that cutting a deal with Netflix to sell Warner Archive as a companion option for a couple of bucks a month would be a lot more successful.
My problem with Warner Archive Instant is that it costs nearly $10 a month for the smallest sliver of the programming owned by Warner Brothers. Yes, I understand that they will be rotating content on and off the service to keep the selection fresh. But if the net result of that "freshening" is a service with few selections at any one time, then I suspect it won't be worth it for most people.
I'm a prime market for this idea. I have several subscriptions to streaming services and I've bought multiple titles from the Warner Brothers Archive DVD offerings. But I just don't get the value of this service. I have no crystal ball that will help me predict what the future may hold for this idea, but as things stand now Warner Archive Instant is an interesting idea gone very, very wrong.