Perception vs. reality
July 25, 2008

A front page story in Variety asked "Why are media slamming the B.O.?"

Its point was that major news outlets like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal continue to report that there is a box-office slump even though year-to-date box-office grosses are in fact even with 2007, thanks to a boffo opening for Warner’s The Dark Knight. This sort of reporting “galls studio execs,” according to Variety (a sister publication to VB), and, presumably, the Variety scribes themselves, who have a much more nuanced understanding of Hollywood economics than many of their consumer media counterparts.

As distasteful as it is to question the work of other journalists, I can sympathize. I’m “galled” myself every time I read a story about packaged media being on its last legs because consumers are all downloading and streaming directly from the Internet. Of course, this is no more true than saying movie studios are having a bad summer.

Like the $5.5 billion box office, home entertainment revenue at $10 billion-plus is dead on with last year, which in both cases is really saying something given the state of the economy in general. In fact, both movies and DVD look to be benefiting from consumers’ hesitance to spend on bigger items.

Many media outlets find more interesting, however, stories like the survey released last week by CinemaNow. The Internet
movie delivery service “informally” asked its own users if they thought renting DVDs will someday become a thing of the past. (No stacked deck there.)

More than half of people said, “Yes. For me it’s already true—I do rent/purchase movies and TV shows online.” Another third said DVD rental will soon become a thing of the past. Since the respondents were CinemaNow users, I’d think closer to 100% than 55% have paid to rent and purchase movies online. I wonder how satisfied they are, however.

When asked their reasons for wanting to purchase and watch movies online, between 40% and 50% of respondents said it was very important to get a good selection of titles, be able to easily transfer the download to the TV, have unlimited ability to move the title among devices and be able to watch in high-def. All are easily achievable with DVD or Blu-ray—not so easy online.

Posted by Marcy Magiera on July 25, 2008 | Comments (0)