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Media
Information > Media DVD Coverage 
Archive
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| Updated September 28, 2004 DVD
NEWS DIGEST
1 -
The Girl Next Door (Unrated Version) FoxVideo
DVD versions of old TV shows will tally more than $2 billion in nationwide sales this year, compared with $1.4 billion last year, according to Video Store magazine. Through the rest of the year, an average of 11 TV-related DVDs will come out each week, according to the Web site TV Shows on DVD, with most Tuesdays bringing at least one major release. Among the most popular are "Columbo", "Lassie", "Magnum, P.I.", "Mork & Mindy" and "The Twilight Zone".
A new video rental company has introduced biometrics to its four DVD rental kiosks. A customer must first register with the service by scanning an identification card into a machine at a kiosk. It will store information like thumbprint and date of birth. Whenever renting a DVD, all the customer needs to do is to scan his thumbprint into the system. The image will then be compared to that on the IC.
A Japanese food company has begun selling a gum attached with a DVD of a familiar foreign movie. There has been a DVD with a TV animated cartoon lasting about 10 minutes, but the new DVD contains a two-hour movie. The gum sells for 315 yen. Movie commentator Haruo Mizuno has selected 10 movies, including Gregory Peck's "Snow on Kilimanjaro" and Vivian Lee's "Anna Karenina." A company official said, "As they are old movies in the 1930s through the 1960s, their usage fees were small."
Slower growth is said to be the result of more consumers switching to models that can record television and other video programs. "Growth will slow to 22 percent in 2004 and to a marginal 2 percent in 2005," ISuppli Corp. analyst Jonathan Cassell said in a report. The report also forecast that in 2006, DVD player shipments will decline by 5 percent, the first annual decrease in the history of the market. Shipments of DVD players rose 85 percent last year to 91 million units, ISuppli said.
For many collectors, owning DVDs is becoming more important than actually watching them. The average DVD buyer has amassed nearly 50 movies but up to 10 percent of those titles have gone unwatched, according to consumer surveys. That’s an average of five movies — at least 10 hours of filmmaking, not counting all those extras — sitting on the shelf, perhaps still in their wrappers. But it’s not just a matter of time. Consumers are so taken with DVDs that they are buying them simply as vanity items, knowing full well that they might never watch them. Having ousted the videocassette as the dominant home video format, DVDs are now upstaging the coffee table book as a reflection of a collector’s personality. Unlike VHS movies, DVDs are priced so that consumers can collect them like CDs and snatch them up as impulse buys at the supermarket and department store. The latest development in that strategy, which is expected to push DVD sales to an expected $22 billion this year, is the growing number of deluxe packaged DVDs that are made to be displayed and can serve as conversation starters.
Zhang Zhigang, a vice minister of commerce, said China seized 2 million compact discs during the first half of the year in raids on 8,000 CD and software dealers around the country, fining violators about $3.6 million. But sidewalk merchants at one of Shanghai's most prominent intersections openly hawked CDs from famous artists for less than $1 and nearby, a music and movie shop overflowed with an eclectic collection of pirated goods, including Spider-Man 2, Annie Hall and Winnie the Pooh DVDs and Britney Spears CDs. The
Motion Picture Association of America estimates that piracy cost
its industry some $178 million in lost sales last year.
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