Quick Takes: 10/31/07 - Home Video News Edition
A whole slew of news has hit the Hollywood trades in the last couple of days regarding home video in general and occasionally the fight for next-generation dominance in particular.
- DVD sales slowed in the third quarter, a dip some are attributing to a lack of high-profile titles. While movies like 300 and Knocked Up bowed on disc in Q3 many are hoping the fourth quarter, with titles like Transformers, Spider-Man 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean 3 hitting shelves will prove it was just a glitch and not the sign of something ominous. Studios are also hoping 2007 Q4 is the first one to see next-gen formats really take off.
- Supporters of the Blu-Ray format are holding a two-day troop-rallying festival in Hollywood as it prepares to go up against HD-DVD, which has cheaper players and other factors to its advantage, this Christmas season. Disney execs even accused proponents of HD-DVD of drawing out the format war when, they say, Blu-ray is so clearly the preferred format. That all comes as Forrester Research says 1/4 of HDTV households are waiting to pick a side until a single format is agreed upon.
- A number of big-time Hollywood players and other early adopters are ditching physical discs in favor of digital storage of their home video collection. While price is expected to drop on these systems, the problem of how to get movies onto the hard drive when DVDs assume you’re a criminal if you try to do that remains a problem.
- Which next-gen format independent studios decide to support could, collectively, become a major factor in which one survives. Because of consumer reluctance right now, though, many are making either only tentative moves or ignoring the issue completely.
- The production of DVD extras has turned from something that celebrates notable films into a defined process that is sucking the creativity out of the producers of that bonus content. Still, studios see bonus features as still being a powerful differentiator in the minds of consumers and will continue to crank them out. That being said, producing interesting bonus content for next-gen discs, which have been heralded as having so much possibility, seems to still be sometime in the offing.
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