Ted Sarandos, Chief Content Officer at online entertainment service Netflix, has said that with the company’s foray into original movie production and distribution, it is seeking to accelerate movie choice and availability by going against accepted release windows.

“The current distribution model for movies in the US particularly, but also round the world, is pretty antiquated relative to the on-demand generation that we are trying to serve,” he said during a Media Mastermind Keynote at MIPCOM in Cannes.

“The idea of releasing a movie and then waiting six, eight, ten months before there was any home video exploitation and at least a year before you can get that at home,” that’s not the model people choose. People are choosing Netflix; they don’t want to wait a year, or maybe ten years to get that movie,” he told delegates.

“What we are going to do accelerate the model a little bit by putting our money where our mouth is and say these movies are day and date in theatres and on Netflix,” he declared, adding that the industry was acting under a model for movie distribution that had been in place “almost since the beginning of movies on television in the 70s. Obviously the world is moving much more rapidly than that, so the idea of giving the consumer choice is important … I don’t want to kill windows; I want to restore choice and option.”

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