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Media
Information > Media DVD Coverage 
Archive
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| Updated December 14, 2005 DVD
NEWS DIGEST
1 -
Star Wars Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (Widescreen) FoxVideo
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger returned to his entertainment roots, joining his longtime friend, fellow action star Jackie Chan, to promote a public service campaign combating film piracy in China. The governor and Chan unveiled a 30-second anti-pirating public service announcement at a luncheon of Hong Kong's American Chamber of Commerce. "Who wants to really create or invent new technologies ... if we cannot safeguard the outcome of the final product?" Schwarzenegger told the gathering. "Entertainment is a $30 billion industry in California and Hong Kong, of course, is the movie capital of Asia. We have a lot at stake."
More than half of the U.K.'s video rental transactions and rental spending will be delivered via Netflix-style online services by 2009, according to a new report from analysts Screen Digest. The report -- "The Outlook for Online DVD Rental" -- predicts that a similar pattern will emerge across Europe, with more than 40% of transactions in Germany taking place online in the same time frame. By comparison, Screen Digest suggested that slightly more than 25% of U.S. rentals would come from online services by 2009. Screen Digest said the online DVD rental market currently has nearly 5.5 million subscribers in the U.S. and 0.85 million in Europe, where the U.K. is the dominant market and accounts for almost 40% of European subscribers.
The world's largest retailer has held discussions with Hollywood studios about installing kiosks in its stores from which consumers could use digital technology to download films on to discs. The plan for new DVD kiosks mimics a programme being tested in certain Wal-Mart stores in which the retailer downloads songs to discs for customers. The talks come at a crucial time for Hollywood. DVD sales generate more money for the studios than box office, yet after growing at double-digit rates for the past few years, some analysts have predicted that DVD sales could be flat or decline by 2007.
At many movie premiers, clandestine video-camera operators make copies of the film at those early showings and send it to disc factories nearby. By the next morning, vendors will be selling pirated DVD's on the street, even as a digital version is zipped off via the Internet to brethren who operate bigger factories in Southeast Asia or Eastern Europe. The DVD release of a film is all-important because it is truly profitable, and studios have thus far been largely successful in keeping these profits to themselves. A typical studio movie costs nearly $100 million: an average of $63.6 million to make and $34.4 million to market. Since few movies earn that much at the box office, the studios have increasingly relied on the home-video market, where the equation is much more in their favor, to help recover losses and make a profit. For example, a DVD costs about $2 to manufacture and $2 to market. It is then sold wholesale to retailers at $16 a unit, amounting to a $12 profit. Since manufacturers' suggested retail prices are usually $20 to $30 a DVD (typically discounted by 20 percent), a DVD can return tens of millions of dollars in profit to the studio.
The growth of TV DVD is outpacing growth in the overall DVD market threefold while DVD unit sales show signs of slowing to single-digit growth this year, about 5.3% over last year. TV DVD unit sales are up more than 17% year over year, according to figures presented by Judith McCourt of Home Media Retailing magazine. Nobody knows yet whether the exploding DVD aftermarket for TV shows will hurt the syndication market, said a producer. Nov. 8 - The Auto Channel: DVD Emerges as In-Vehicle Media Standard Seven Million DVD components were shipped for in-vehicle multimedia systems across North America, Europe and Japan in 2004, with the market set to increase to 22 Million units by 2011, according to the new Strategy Analytics market study, "In-vehicle DVD Components Market Forecast 2004-2011." The key factors driving automotive DVD growth are the demand for display-based entertainment for passengers together with high-end multi-featured systems that include navigation, video entertainment and a dashboard display for driver information interface. A rising number of car makers are starting to incorporate full color displays across their model ranges. In 2004, 57 percent of DVD components were DVD-ROM based (for navigation only), yet by 2011 over 70 percent of DVD components shipped to the automotive market will have both ROM and video capabilities.
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