Updated February 21, 2005

DVD NEWS DIGEST
(February 7, 2005)

Feb. 5 issue - Billboard: Top 10 DVD Sellers in US

1 - The Village (Widescreen) Touchstone Home Video
2 - The Village (Pan & Scan) Touchstone Home Video
3 - Without A Paddle (Pan & Scan Collector's Edition) Paramount Home Entertainment
4 - Troy (2 Disc Widescreen Edition) Warner Home Video
5 - Napoleon Dynamite FoxVideo
6 - Troy (2 Disc Pan & Scan Edition) Warner Home Video
7 - Without A Paddle (Widscreen Collector's Edition) Paramount Home Entertainment
8 - Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle (Unrated Extended Edition) New Line Home Ent.
9 - Paparazzi FoxVideo
10 - The Fifth Element (Ultimate 2 Disc Edition) Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment

Feb. 3 - Honolulu Star-Bulletin: Ease, Cost Drive Growth of Online DVD Rentals

A popular online DVD rental service does not have due dates or charge late fees.

"It's so fast, compared to driving to the video store, waiting in line and all of that," said a customer.

After signing up with the service's Web site, members have access to about 30,000 movies in more than 250 categories.

Once members finish watching a movie, they place the DVD back in the postage-paid envelope it arrived in and drop it in any mailbox. When the service receives the DVD, it sends the next one listed in the member's queue on its Web site.

Feb. 3 - Cambridge News [UK]: Illegal DVD Traders Threaten Businesses

One pirate dealer arrested recently was found with 20,000 illegal Bollywood films, but plenty more dealers are still operating.

Some illegal traders sell DVDs out of bin bags to passers-by, while others venture into pubs, shops and businesses to do deals.
Most of the DVDs are poor copies of cinema blockbusters and horrof films. Instead of the normal quality you would expect from a DVD, this is a grainy version which has been copied with a camcorder at one of the screenings.

Jan. 31 - New York Times: Hollywood Banks on Foreign DVD Bonanza

For the past two years, the Motion Picture Association of America, the lobbying group for the studios, has claimed that Hollywood loses $3.5 billion every year, almost all of it overseas, to the sale of illegally copied films, mainly on bootleg DVDs and their cheaper Asian equivalent, Video Compact Discs (VCDs).

But revenues from international home video sales are the fastest-growing part of Hollywood's business. The most reliable estimate comes from Screen Digest, a British data company, which calculated that the home video divisions of the U.S. studios garnered $11.4 billion in wholesale revenues from the $24.6 billion that overseas consumers spent buying and renting home video products in 2004.

Historically, the sale of DVD players tends to stimulate greater spending on movies and boxed sets of television series. On average, a U.S. television household with a VHS tape player increases its spending on home video products by more than $100 annually when a DVD player is brought into the household, according to Adams Media Research.

If foreign consumers continue to bring home DVD players and start buying DVDs at the rate U.S. consumers did earlier this decade, the international video sales numbers could rise dramatically.

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