Facebook: Renting movies online?

Users are now increasingly keen to use Facebook as a place to watch videos, making the social network soar to the top 10 of U.S. network video carriers. But will they also be renting movies from here?

The question may soon be answered, because Warner Bros. has provided Facebook users with the first movie, The Dark Knight, and offered Low-cost rentals via social networking sites. The movie has been leased for a 30Facebook credit or 3 dollars since it was first reported in Hollywood. The leased user can enjoy a 48-hour view of the movie and can support pause, replay, and Full-screen playback mode. Users can also use the various features of Facebook when they watch movies: Users can "praise", comment and share movies with Facebook's existing apps.

For Warner Bros., the decision to rent the Dark Knight Online is just one of a series of experience films produced in recent weeks. It will make the second movie, "Batman" as an application of the privilege to introduce, put on the iOS platform sales, hope and last "inception" as a sensation. This distribution channel strategy--as an application to distribute movies--is a way to get direct access to movie fans in the marketplace that Apple's itunes movie store cannot.

In many ways, The Dark Knight is an excellent film for this kind of testing. Most of the users have bought the DVD or blu version of the movie, but there are still a lot of fans who want to see it again, even if they can't really own the movie. Renting films at low prices can increase the value of potential untapped markets.

The use of Facebook's credit coin also helps open the leasing market, as is the case with itunes, so that the mature online video library will not exist. As a global network, Facebook gives studios like Warner Bros. a chance to get them directly into the audience, otherwise it may not be tapped.

Based on current developments, we suspect that Facebook will offer a large video rental opportunity to studios. Users who want to see the Dark Knight have to go to Facebook's official homepage to click on a movie lease. In other words, they have to know what they are looking for--using their Facebook credit to pay the rent--to make the most of their bids. A movie with nearly 4 million Facebook fans seems like a tedious process.

At the same time, on the topic of online leasing via non-traditional channels, we see that other big online sites have not been successful in online VOD space. YouTube, for example, has a large audience in the online video, but its rental stores are not very helpful to users.

Even so, YouTube did not get a big hit on the Dark Knight. But without a big, global video site like YouTube to build an online leasing business, we will not see what Facebook is doing today. In other words, even if this does not make a big splash, the Warner Bros. and Facebook attempts will also teach people how to better use social tools to profit from digital distribution of movies.