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Media
Information > Media DVD Coverage 
Archive
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| Updated April 10, 2005 DVD
NEWS DIGEST
1 -
Ladder 49 (Widescreen) Touchstone Home Video
The demand for DVD recorders in the Taiwan retail market this year will reach 80,000 to 100,000 units, jumping 100%-150% from the 40,000 recorders sold in 2004, Pioneer High Fidelity Taiwan forecasts. The large growth is due to the availability of more brands and more models at lower prices than last year. Local brands will dominate the market sector of entry-level DVD recorders, models without HDDs, while international brands like Pioneer will be more competitive in the HDD DVD recorder sector, Pioneer Taiwan said. Last year, HDD DVD recorders accounted for 80% of the total sales volume of all DVD recorder models in Japan and only 20% in Taiwan, Pioneer Taiwan noted, adding that the proportion for Taiwan will rise significantly this year.
The Motion Picture Association of America estimates that piracy costs Hollywood $3.5 billion a year in lost ticket sales and home video rentals. Currently, 20 states have laws against the practice, a felony in most states. Theater owners are feeling the threat as well. "You'll show your movie on opening weekend, and you'll see it out on DVD the next week," says Robert Beall, owner of Weatherford Cinema 10 in Weatherford, Texas. "You can have your projectionists looking for people with cameras. But what are we going to do? Send everybody through metal detectors?" Though some piracy occurs in the labs and production houses, most pirated films, an executive says, are "from people sitting in the back of the theater with camcorders."
Who could have predicted, when the first season of "The X-Files" was released on DVD nearly five years ago, that selling TV shows on DVD would turn into a $2.3-billion-a-year business? You don't necessarily have to be a cult fave or a brilliant-but-canceled series to see the future on DVD. "We have extra scenes because so many episodes came in long. And that's going to be fun for the audience, because we have a couple of plots that are going to make much more sense once you see what we've cut out," promises a producer. Another producer said, "There's a lot more demand that we're hearing about from fans and from retailers - for outtakes, alternative endings, deleted scenes, a little bit more of that seems to be the new demand out of people rather than just the traditional... great featurette."
At the end of 2004, Screen Digest research indicates that DVD video player/recorder penetration had reached 50.5% of TV households in Western Europe. The format has achieved this level of penetration just six years after its official European launch in 1998. By comparison, the VCR achieved a similar level of European penetration shortly before the end of 1990. Screen Digest, which has been tracking European VCR sales since 1976, notes that it took the technology 14 years to reach a similar level of penetration (52.2%) at the European level and even in the UK it took 11 years.
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