Nothing gets music and movie fans going more than when they see their favorite artists and actors win awards for their performances.  This is why award ceremonies like the Grammys and the Academy Awards are such a hit.  Thanks to Netflix, movie buffs can now set up a list of movies that they want to see next in a queue delivered to their door step.  The Oscars.

Apparently the Oscars really got Netflix customers going because they added 2 million movies to their queue during the three hour program.  Slumdog Millionaire was the top added movie out of all of them, but 56,000 different titles were also added.  At Netflix’s low price of starting at $4.99 and their free trial, its hard to go wrong.  You spend more on one cup of coffee than your whole monthly movie subscription after all.

[via Hacking Netflix]

This year, ads on the Super Bowl costed about $2.6 million for a 30-second spot.  Getting an ad on the Oscars costs about $1 million less at between $1.4-$1.7 million.  NBC hosted the Superbowl and ABC hosts the Academy Awards.  Both media companies had to slash rates quite a bit after finding there was unsold inventory.

Last year, ABC sold commercial time for about $1.8 million.  In advertising revenue, about $68 million is expected to be brought in for ABC.  That is about a 16% decline from last year.  Last year about $81 million in revenue was made.

Peter Sealy, marketing professor at Claremont Graduate University and former movie industry executive believes that the ad revenue slow down for the Oscars is because the show is just too long.  He also said that the films this year are not spectacular.

I have to agree with Sealy here.  The Oscars this year just doesn’t seem fun as they used to be.  I think in terms of movies made this year, Slumdog Millionaire and Tropic Thunder helped save the industry.

[via LAT]