The James Bond series. The Pink Panther series. The Rocky series. The Wizard of Oz. Dances With Wolves. Doctor Zhivago. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.The Great Escape. Annie Hall. These are just a few of the 4,100 titles that line the shelves of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's (NYSE: MGM) film library. There's another 10,000 television episodes stuffed in the lion's lair as well.
The venerable feline and his booty were caged last month by rival Sony (NYSE: SNE), which ponied up $300 million as part of a multipartner deal to buy the studio. That means that Sony now has control of this enormous library, and that means good things to come for the communications conglomerate.
The world of home entertainment is evolving rapidly. Yesterday's VHS tapes are being quickly gnawed to pieces by DVD. Today, customers can have Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) deliver DVDs to their mailbox. Tomorrow, they'll download titles to their TiVo (Nasdaq: TIVO) or computer or all manner of other devices. So, he who has the most titles stands to reap the biggest benefits.
Already a big player in the title zoo, Sony can now enter the Serengeti with elephants such as Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) and sprightly gazelles such as Lion's Gate (NYSE: LGF) to play the game of revenue grab. And it's a big game. By the end of the year, consumers will have thrown almost $500 million at MGM's gaping mouth alone, purchasing all manner of the studio's content. That's a good meal for Sony, even if it also assumed $2 billion of MGM debt.
Grabbing the library was also essential for Sony given the coming advancements in home entertainment delivery. What it buys, competitors cannot have. The fewer titles available for the animal hordes to fight over, the more chance Sony will have to thrive.
Sony is also leveraging its position as a consumer electronics giant by establishing a joint venture with buyout partner Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA) to develop new channels together. Sony will also use that fat new library to license movies to Comcast to develop a video-on-demand (VOD) service.
So for anyone who thought that libraries were boring, don't tell that to Sony. It is now well-positioned for the future of entertainment delivery, with the ability to generate some pretty healthy cash flow to boot.
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Fool contributor Lawrence Meyers does not own shares of any companies mentioned herein but has written several episodes of MGM's Outer Limits TV series.
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