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Media
Information > Media DVD Coverage 
Archive
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| Updated April 26, 2005 DVD
NEWS DIGEST
1 -
The Incredibles (Widescreen) Walt Disney Home Entertainment
While Dynasty and other 1980s TV classics have secured their places in pop culture history, the question now is whether there remains enough interest in them to establish the prime-time soap opera as a permanent genre in the booming TV-on-DVD market. "They all have a core audience but it may take us a while to figure out whether it's commercial or not," said Ralph Tribbey, editor of DVD Release Report, a home-video industry newsletter. Of the current prime-time soaps, the first season of Fox's The O.C. has done well on DVD and Paramount Home Video has had talks about releasing boxed sets of '90s hits Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place later this year. The TV-on-DVD category, with up to 400 titles released each year, accounted for approximately $2.3 billion in sales last year, a jump from $1.4 billion in 2003. Sales figures are projected to increase by about 30 percent each year through 2008, according to the Digital Entertainment Group, an industry trade association. The upcoming release of Dynasty: Season 1 should shed further light on whether these long-running sudsers will also have boxed sets of subsequent seasons available.
According to Parks Associates, approximately 30 mln US households have a broadband connection, 50 mln have either digital cable or direct broadcast satellite (DBS) television service, 18+ mln households have a data networking solution, and 75% of US households have a DVD player.
Laurent Bouzereau is barely known to the world at large. But he has a growing reputation as Stephen Spielberg's personal DVD producer, one of perhaps a dozen people who have mastered the young art of turning the video edition of a film into an event on its own. The Paris-born Bouzereau brings his own crew to film sets and works from a script for the DVD documentary while a filmmaker shoots the feature movie around him, a practice that is gaining in popularity. Bouzereau agrees that a good DVD producer can persuade directors with a large appetite that less is more. "You'll have 10 hours of extra material," he said. "But not all of it needs to be told." Richard Schickel, a film historian and a long-time critic, also produces DVDs. Schickel's job resembles that of someone who adds features to DVD releases of new films - both require copious research and complex negotiations with the studio to include favorite pieces of footage within a given budget - but the older the film, the harder it is. April 3 - Press Trust of India: Israel Seizes 40,000 Chinese DVD Players Israel has confiscated 41,000 dvd players from China after tests found them “dangerous” due to excessive levels of radiation, which could even result in malfunction of pacemakers. “The increase in cheap imports from China has brought about a phenomenon whereby cheap and low-quality appliances are overflowing the israeli market,” general director of standards institution of Israel, Ziva Patir was quoted by Ynetnews as saying. Tens of thousands of substandard and dangerous DVD players are said to have flooded the country from China. Teamwork between the Philippine National Police and the Optical Media Board (OMB) resulted in the seizure of a large number of replicating machines and fake digital video discs (DVDs) and the arrest of 11 Chinese during a raid in Manila. Seized in the raids were eight CD-replicating machines; five CD-loading machines, four CD-printing machines, seven dryers and 293 boxes of blank CDs with an estimated value of several million dollars. Police said the warehouse is considered one of the biggest manufacturing sites of pirated CDs in the country. It can produce thousands of illegal optical discs in an hour. ____________________________________________________ |