Friday, November 21, 2008

DVDs, Hollywood’s Profit Source, Are Sagging...

According to The New York Times anyway.

Hollywood in their infinite wisdom is banking that Blu-Ray is going to pull profits back up, but I am not as optimistic as they are in this regard. In a slow economy I think this would have been a safe bet, but in today's economy where heads are sitting on financial pikes I think people will go even cheaper with their entertainment. They'll hold onto their DVRs, their internet, their X-Boxes, and their books. They won't purchase relatively new BluRay players.

I hope I'm wrong, but...

There's a lot of problems with DVD right now, not the least of which is everyone's seemingly abandoning it for Blu Ray. Many DVDs just don't look good and don't have real sales value. Of course, that's always been a problem... how do we communicate what this movie is and motivate people to buy it with just one image and a title?

-------------------------

Other stuff of note:

In an interesting bit of business, Image Entertainment has been purchased by Nyx Acquisitions.
A Home Entertainment company purchased by a financier designed to converge the digital.

I have been groin-deep in contracts for something I am hatching that qualifies as "pulp for the new media". In unrelated matters, I have to beat up a few people to get them off their high horse and onto the web with their movies. They have some pulpy movies and other projects sitting on the shelf, and they don't want to serialize them on the web because they haven't closed a DVD deal. I hate to tell them they aren't going to close a deal and they need to move now.

(Shakes head)
Silly creatures these humans.

1 comment:

Andrew Bellware said...

Wow, "high horse" these days is a DVD premiere. Used to be in the olden days the people on their high horses were demanding theatrical. ;-)

You know who makes money with video on demand? IFC of all companies. They pay a couple grand for a picture, make a trailer and then make it available. Apparently, that's where their real money comes from...