When we saw that Letterboxd was launching a Video Store, we imagined some retro Blockbuster-type brick-and-mortar stores or sending out physical media DVD envelopes, Netflix-style, with those three colored dots on them. Get your four favorites sent to your door!
But what Letterboxd is really doing, as the social media platform announced on Wednesday, is expanding into the premium video on demand (PVOD) game, launching its own digital rental streaming site to complement the social media platform.
Letterboxd today announced the Letterboxd Video Store, launching early next month. Users will be able to rent movies as a digital streaming rental directly from a film‘s landing page as they’re searching for it or adding it to a watchlist. And you’ll be able to do so without signing up for a subscription service or needing to get past a paywall.
In terms of why you’d want to rent a movie from Letterboxd instead of an established platform like Apple, Amazon, or countless others, the idea is that you’d want to rent something in the moment as you’re looking for it on Letterboxd. If you see a friend has just logged a title, you can click to read their review and then, in theory, be able to watch that movie immediately yourself.
It also hopes to stand out by offering a curated list of titles available for rental, and Letterboxd is basing that evolving list on user-data-driven demand. The site, in its announcement, said the movies that will be licensed could include festival standouts that haven’t even yet been distributed, movies that have largely been unavailable and frequently watchlisted by users, recent restorations of films, and other special, limited-time drops.
The movies Letterboxd will license aren’t just the ones any platform can get its hands on, but are instead driven by what movies its users are actually eager to watch at a given moment. If a movie has strong reviews out of a festival, it could be one Letterboxd targets for rental streaming down the road. We doubt that means “Dogma” will finally see the light of day digitally, but one can dream.
Letterboxd hasn’t yet announced its initial lineup of films, and while you would presume rental rates are comparable to other industry sources, the release says rental prices will vary depending on your region or on the title. We imagine that could be especially true for rare or still undistributed movies. It also didn’t make clear what format movies will be streamed in or how long a movie’s rental period window is, but you will be able to watch on the web, mobile, and most major smart TV apps.
More information will be released when Letterboxd launches its video store in early December.