Boston Globe Story Features GreenCine

ENTERTAINMENT 2.0

Netflix spawns a mailbox full of imitators

Excerpts below:

"GreenCine focuses on 'auteurist and experimental filmmakers' such as Hal Hartley, Caveh Zahedi, and Craig Baldwin, according to the company's head of business development, Jonathan Marlow. 'We have over 10,000 films that Netflix doesn't carry,' says Marlow. That includes a selection of adult movies offered by a subsidiary service called, appropriately, BlueCine."

"Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings has long assumed that the future of media delivery will be digital, but the company hasn't yet unveiled a digital downloading service. In contrast, many of the smaller disc-by-mail companies, like Simply Audiobooks and GreenCine, have started experimenting with download services.

"'The rent-by-mail model is not the model of the future,' says GreenCine's Marlow. His company has made a few thousand movies available for digital rental (with a 10-day rental period ) or permanent ownership in digital form."