Studios Allegedly Pull All Whitney Houston Titles from Netflix to 'Make More Money off the DVD Sales' (Updated)
Want to watch The Bodyguard? No worries; it's one of Netflix's streaming titles. Or it was — until the studios removed it, and all of Whitney Houston's movies, from the streaming video site after the singer's death, allegedly to goose DVD sales. (Update: This appears to be wrong.)
Update: McDermott writes that while he quoted the Netflix rep correctly, the rep was wrong.
Google Plus Week host Dan McDermott noticed that The Bodyguard had been pulled from Netflix streaming right after Houston's death (as testified by several angry and disappointed "reviews").
So I called Netflx and the rep confirmed what I suspected:
Netflix rep: "Okay Dan, I just went and talked to my main supervisor as to why the movie had been pulled and the reason it was pulled was the production company pulled the streaming rights from us because all the publicity after Whitney Houston's passing there was an opportunity to make really a very large amount of money on the DVD sales of her movies. So they're going to pull all the streaming titles we have of Whitney Houston so they can make more money off the DVD sales of her movies."
Well — it makes business sense, I suppose. (Sony did something similar last weekend, raising the prices of her records.)