On-Demand Revenue Grows While DVD and Blu-ray Slips

On March 17th, 2011 the Hollywood Reporter published a very informative article about the choices consumers have for receiving their motion pictures at home (including a thorough comparison of current and newly-launched movie streaming services - if you're considering a switch away from DVDs).

Here's are some excerpts from the reporting done by Paul Bond and Tim Appelo for the Hollywood Reporter: "[A]ccording to a March [2011] study from PricewaterhouseCoopers... the Netflix model of mailing DVDs is No. 1 with consumers, with 43 percent of Americans doing it, while the subscription streaming service where Netflix also is dominant is No. 2 at 32 percent. Third is a la carte streaming, fourth is renting a DVD from a kiosk, and fifth is renting from a video store."

According to Bond and Appelo in the Hollywood Reporter, the trend is away from physical media (but I just bought a Blu-ray player!) and toward streaming: "The Digital Entertainment Group recently said that while sales and rentals of DVD and Blu-ray discs in the U.S. dipped 6 percent to $16.3 billion in 2010, digital sales and rentals rose 19 percent to $2.5 billion."

And it isn't just movies or entire TV episodes that are generating revenue online: "Sharing clips is becoming a business unto itself, in fact. A company called AnyClip recently inked a deal with Universal whereby many of the studio’s movies will be reduced to a series of short clips for Internet users to share and post on their blogs and Facebook pages."