Hollywood sees licensing cash cow in Disney-Netflix deal

By Ronald Grover and Peter Lauria

(Reuters) - Cha-ching!

That's the sound ringing in the ears of Hollywood studio executives after Walt Disney Co landed a rich deal with Netflix to stream its movies to television.

Netflix's arrival as a bidder for the television rights to Hollywood movies means that the studios can now play the company off of traditional pay-TV networks like Time Warner's HBO to extract higher fees in contract renewal talks.

And Netflix couldn't have come along at a better time for the studios, which were being threatened with having their fees slashed by the pay-TV networks who have argued for years that they are better served by investing in original programming than licensing movies.

Netflix isn't the only company to emerge on the scene, either. The streaming video ambitions of Amazon.com Inc