The Sales of 'F.R.I.E.N.D.S' Boost High in DVDs After Being Off Streamers

The streaming hiatus already appears to be paying off for Warner Bros. Home Entertainment:

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It seems Friends just doesn't lose anywhere, does it? Be it during its run-time, its run on streaming services and now on DVDs, the love and madness for the show continues to only grow.

It is no secret that Friends was taken off Netflix earlier this year and till the show comes back on HBO Max soon, the show is only available on DVDs.

The streaming hiatus already appears to be paying off for Warner Bros. Home Entertainment: According to senior vice president of TV marketing Rosemary Markson, sales of both physical and digital copies of “Friends” have “roughly tripled” since it was announced last year that the show would be exiting Netflix.

“At the beginning of the year, it was the top-selling catalog-TV franchise in home entertainment,” Markson says. “We were seeing strong sales across both physical and digital, and we’ve seen a particularly strong uptick in digital. If you think of DVDs as the original bingeing mechanism, it’s a way to collect and adds permanence and repeatability to be able to watch the show.”

“The only way to guarantee evergreen access to content is through ownership, and that message needs to be reinforced to the public,” says Kathi Chandler-Payatt, executive director for the media entertainment practice at The NPD Group. “Although platform-owned titles may or will be held back for exhibition on the distributor’s platform, and audiences may know where to find the content, there’s no guarantee that the content will always be available.”

Warner Bros. Home Entertainment launched a new “Friends” website last year timed to the 25th anniversary of the show, and took part in the cross-promotional push around the show, certain that demand would spike during its streaming hiatus.

Once Friends returns on streaming via HBO Max, Markson says she hopes the company continues to find the right balance between the two platforms. “We do feel transactional and streaming can coexist,” she says.

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