http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-et-dvds26jul26,1,835858.story?coll=la-headlines-technology
Pause and effect in DVD boom
By Chris Lee
Special to The LA Times
July 26, 2005
Hollywood, meet Eric Duquesne. Or better yet, check out his shrinking shelf
space.
On Saturday, the 29-year-old studio musician was at Fry's Electronics, an
airplane hangar-sized superstore in Burbank, considering whether to buy
"The Adventures of Indiana Jones" boxed DVD set. Duquesne said he usually
preferred to watch movies at home on his high-definition TV. But because he
already owns some 500 titles, he said, he has been choosier about recent
purchases.
"I don't have any place to put them all," he said. "I won't buy anything
that looks just halfway decent anymore."
Mike Dunn, president of home entertainment for 20th Century Fox, said that
kind of "consumer fatigue" was a cause for concern in the industry "that
the heavy purchaser who buys 40 DVDs a year has run out of library space."
For years, the DVD has been Hollywood's miracle worker, boosting profits
and sometimes transforming apparent flops into moneymakers. But is the DVD
bubble about to burst?
The first shudder went through Hollywood when DreamWorks and Pixar
Animation disclosed in recent weeks that they had piles of unsold DVDs for
their respective releases, "Shrek 2" and "The Incredibles."
Then last week, reports that consumer purchases of DVDs were slowing down
caused Wall Street analysts to cut their earnings forecasts for stocks
offered by the corporations that own the major movie studios. This added
insult to industry injuries in a year when box-office tallies slumped for
19 consecutive weeks compared with a year ago and admissions are down about
10% from 2004.
Still, out at Fry's on Saturday, Duquesne ended up buying that "Indiana
Jones" boxed set. He and other shoppers interviewed at random over the
weekend seemed to confirm what some home entertainment experts and studio
executives are saying: that reports of the DVD's demise have been greatly
exaggerated.
"We have a huge, fully developed market that is absorbing 11,500 new titles
a year that's an incredible number," said Ralph Tribbey, editor and
publisher of the DVD Release Report. "They're looking at the glass as half
empty when it's really half full."
Even if DVDs are not flying off the shelves in the numbers they did from
1997 to 1998, when the industry experienced 300% growth, DVD buyers clearly
remain avid consumers. But with a wider variety of products available,
often at discounted prices and at stores not necessarily specializing in
home entertainment, DVD buyers have also become sophisticated consumers.
"You can call it a mature market," Tribbey said. "That means you have 70
million-plus household consumers in place that have buying intent and are
out there every single weekend."
At the Costco in Culver City, Ivannia Luna, 36, a homemaker from Glendale,
inspected a DVD set for the television show "Seinfeld." She said she had
not come to the store intending to buy a DVD.
"I probably buy five or six a year," Luna said. "But maybe when I come to
places like this, I'll buy one for a Saturday night because it's cheaper
than taking my family to a movie" theater.
According to Tribbey, compilations of older TV shows are among the hottest
DVD sellers.
"One of the massive gold mines for the studios has been the TV segment," he
said. "Back in the VHS days, you couldn't give this stuff away. Now you're
talking about a $2.5-billion business."
Still, another Costco customer, contractor Alex Costas, said he considered
buying the "National Treasure" DVD but instead decided to rent sometime. He
is a member of Blockbuster's DVD rental service that includes unlimited
rentals for $14.99 a month. Like several others interviewed, Costas said he
found the service less expensive and more convenient than buying DVDs,
which cost about $17 each on average.
For Corrine Stemper, 26, a film student from Belgium who was shopping at
the Virgin Megastore on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood on Saturday,
convenience and availability are important buying considerations but for
precisely the opposite reasons.
"If I can rent this DVD, then I won't buy it," she said, standing in the
store's "cult" section, surrounded by movies such as "Ilsa, She Wolf of the
SS" and "Myra Breckinridge." "I am not interested in such mainstream films."
She said she consulted websites to discover when the titles that interest
her generally foreign and art house films would be available for
preorder. And Stemper, who has been living in the Mid-Wilshire area for
four years, said she was buying more movies now than in the past.
"There are so many more good titles out there than there used to be," she
said. "The more you find out about them, the more you want to buy."
Studio executives and industry observers predicted that phasing in new
high-definition DVD and Blu-ray technologies next year might cause some
cineastes to repurchase all or most of the DVD titles in their libraries.
"The new format will give the market another shot," Dunn said. Whether his
optimism is justified, only the technologically enhanced future can tell.
================================
George Antunes, Political Science Dept
University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204
Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927
antunes at uh dot edu
Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post.
_______________________________________________
MEDIANEWS mailing list
[email protected]
To unsubscribe send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
