On March 8, Warner Bros. announced itself as the first Hollywood studio to offer movies directly on Facebook. The entertainment organization put up Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight as the first of many promised offerings, giving Facebook users the opportunity to rent the 152-minute flick for 48 hours for 30 Facebook credits or $3.
Netflix took a hit on the news. On the same day Warner Bros. made the above announcement, the stock of the flat rate online video rental and streaming service dipped 6%. Investors were worried of Facebook – with its 500+ million users – getting into the video rental game.
Today, Warner Bros. made a similar announcement. Expanding upon its Facebook rental initiative, the studio will now offer five additional titles on the social networking site. Those include Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Inception, Life As We Know It, and Yogi Bear.
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So, what happened to Netflix stock when Warner Bros. broke the news? It went up 4% today contributing to a 15% increase for all of March.
Of course the jump has almost everything to do with Netflix signing a slew of new content deals, including one with Paramount for distribution in Canada and a reportedly imminent agreement with Mirimax over the right to stream the studio’s titles for the next five years. But the stock increase also goes to show investors aren’t nearly as concerned with the idea of Facebook as a Netfilx competitor as they used to be. If the world’s largest social networking site is ever going to call into question Netflix’s status as the go-to pay destination for streaming movies, it’s not going to happen anytime soon.
