Warner Bros. is doubling the amount of time that it asks DVD rental firms to wait between the day that DVD and Blu-Ray discs go on sale to the general public. Now those companies, which include Netflix, Redbox and Blockbuster are faced with a choice: They can wait eight weeks and purchase discs at a steep discount from the studio itself, or they can find alternative sources for those discs and pay considerably more to have them available on the same day and date that DVDs can be purchased by consumers.
The reaction from the industry follows a change around working with studios to provide content that can be rented out to consumers. Originally, video rental outlets operated by purchasing VHS cassettes - and later DVDs - from wholesale suppliers and then making them available for a nightly fee to their customers. But over the years, as the industry matured, both the studios and the rental chains themselves determined they could operate more profitably by cutting out the middle man and sourcing copies directly from the source.