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Media
Information > Media DVD Coverage 
Archive
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| Updated September 21, 2004 DVD
NEWS DIGEST
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Hellboy Special Edition Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment Americans' love affair with DVDs continues to grow as people spend more time and money on them, a new report shows. DVD should propel Hollywood to another record home-video revenue mark this year. Purchases and rentals are expected to hit $37.9 billion, up from $33 billion in 2003. DVD is expected to trend upward for the next five years, which is good news for Hollywood. Says Benjamin Feingold of Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment: "The revenue from DVD sales has helped stabilize the revenue base of many studios." Among the survey's findings: • People spent about 70 hours in 2003 watching pre-recorded home videos (primarily DVDs), up 8 percent over 2002. This year, viewers will watch an estimated 78 hours and increase to 103 hours by 2007. "Newer entertainment forms like DVD and video games do seem to be cutting into things like music spending," Jupiter Research analyst David Card says.
DVD players - the fastest-ever consumer electronics device to catch on - are getting a rebirth with the advent of DVD recorders. Informa Media Group forecasts that in another six years, 334 million homes around the world will have a device that both plays and records DVDs, what it called "extraordinary growth" considering that the number was only five million at the end of 2003. The major reason for the expected boom is the same one that was behind the phenomenal adoption of the DVD player itself, according to Informa analyst Simon Murray: low retail prices. About 25 percent of the world's households already own a DVD player, with some developed markets at more than 50 percent. For DVD recorders, Informa predicts a 31 percent penetration rate by 2010, compared to 46 percent for play-only DVD machines. The Asia-Pacific region leads in the number of DVD players, followed by Europe, North America and Latin America, according to Informa.
TV producer Philip Tanner says the power of DVD technology has made board games more attractive. Unlike the linear-based storytelling format dictated by videotape, DVD allows more than 300 storylines and responses, so no game truly plays the same way twice. And there are the booming benefits of 5.1-channel surround sound. Toys 'R' Us chief John Reddenbach has no doubt the convergence of DVD and traditional board games will have a big impact. "I predict that over the next couple of years, DVD board games will make up about 20 per cent of the market," he says. "Board games have always been popular and we have been able to combine new technology with a system that's very easy to use." Total video spending increased by 13.8 percent to reach $33.1 billion last year, with total DVD spending — rental and sellthrough combined — increasing by 45.3 percent, according to a recent report. Overall filmed entertainment will grow at a compound annual rate of 8.2 percent to reach $105 billion by 2008, the report projects. DVD spending (sales and rentals) is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 17.3 percent — more than double that of the filmed entertainment market as a whole — to reach $50.7 billion by 2008. Overall, the video market is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 10.8 percent from 2003 to 2008, and DVD spending will “continue to more than offset losses in the VHS market,” according to the report. Sales of both formats will surpass rentals, the report projected.
Double-layer DVD's provide nearly twice the space for data and are already the industry standard for manufactured DVD movies. Invisible to the eye, the two layers are made possible by a DVD player's highly focused laser, which reads out to the edge of one layer, then refocuses to read back from the edge of the next layer. Because a double-layer DVD provides 8.5 gigabytes of storage instead of the typical 4.7 gigabytes, you can either fit twice the amount of viewable film or store a video at twice the quality. But there are reasons that someone who is not recording two hours of high-quality video or archiving six hours of old analog video should stay away from double-layer DVD for now. A marketing manager for storage products says the greatest demand for double-layer DVD recording was from DVD producers. "Before this, producers would have to send a tape and wait a week" for a production center to send back a DVD, he said. "Now they can burn proofs on the desktop and be ready in an hour. For them, $15 a disc is no problem."
When a local historical library began collecting oral histories six years ago, little did they realize their efforts would lead to a professionally produced DVD that includes numerous old photos, film footage, and music, interspersed with interviews in a format made popular in the PBS series on the Civil War. The local archives have a database of some 8,000 photos. Those, combined with oral interviews, and early film footage will go to help create new DVDs that would focus on specific local towns, time periods and historic figures.
Exports of domestically branded DVD players have been stalled because of huge patent fees. The China Chamber of Commerce for Import and Export of Machinery and Electronic Products says exports of DVD players with Chinese brands have suffered a severe decline this year. Exports to the European Union by a major local DVD player producer amounted to 17,911 units in the first five months, 95 per cent down from that in the same period of last year. Its exports to the United States plunged to zero. Exports by SVA stood at a mere 16 units to the EU and three units to the United States. Changhong, China's home electronics giant, saw its exports to the EU fall 60 per cent to 1,800 units in the first five months. The secretary of the branch of the audio and video products of the chamber said the charge of patent fees, which weakened the products' export competitiveness and eroded their profit margin, led to the decrease. China has become the world's biggest DVD production and export base. In 2003, DVD players manufactured by Chinese enterprises accounted for 70 per cent of the world's total production volume of about 100 million sets. Nevertheless, since the first DVD player was produced in the 1990s, with all the core technologies introduced from abroad, domestic DVD players have only a narrow competitive edge and little room for further development, a local official said. end
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