Drew Turney
Another week, another new VOD service on the market. This time it’s the AT&T-backed Fullscreen, a service that promises to appeal to millennials with 800 hours of original and licensed shows and movies.
It makes one wonder; how much is too much? Only a few short years ago we had Netflix. Now it seems every major online video provider (YouTube, Vimeo), online TV provider (Hulu, Amazon), mobile and internet providers and traditional media companies (Stan, co-owned by Channel Nine Australia and Fairfax Media) has a VOD offering.
There’s another one coming from online movie resource Fandango called FandangoNow, so it seems any online brand worth its salt has to have an online TV and movie streaming service.
We know kids and teens swap between screens and services at an ADHD-addled rate, but are there really enough consumers around for all the stuff being pumped out of studios and sent to every possible device?
Analysts and projections tend to think so – or at least that there’s money to be made in VOD growth. Remember the day in around 2001 when DVD sales outstripped VHS for the first time? Now that DVD sales have been flat or declining in Hollywood for years, we might face a similar red-letter day this year. According to predictions, VOD will outperform physical disc sales for the first time in 2016.
Coming up on VOD soon, a small action comedy thriller with a big cast you might not have heard of called Term Life. Starring Vince Vaughn, Hailee Steinfeld, Bill Paxton, Jonathan Banks, Mike Epps, Jon Favreau, Taraji P Henson and Terrence Howard, everyone wants Nick (Vince Vaughn) dead after a heist gone wrong. Desperate, Nick takes out a life insurance policy on himself, payable to his estranged daughter (Hailee Steinfeld), but it doesn’t effect for 21 days and he might not live that long.
Out now, star Jennifer Lawrence’s third outing with director David O Russell in Joy, the story of a seemingly everyday woman who displays amazing reserves of strength and perseverance to become her own business empire.
Also coming up, A Royal Night Out, which imagines a night at the end of WWII when Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret leave the confines of Buckingham Palace to venture out into London for a whirlwind adventure and see another side of life they never imagined.
And with an intriguing premise, Paradox is also out very soon. A group of young scientists are working on a secret project that may allow them to travel ahead in time. They test it by sending one of their own ahead one hour and he returns pleading with them to shut it down, explaining that within that hour, they will all die.
