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Home Video Spending Up 2.5% In Q1 To $4.45B; Subscription Streaming Soars

By DAVID LIEBERMAN, Executive Editor | Sunday April 29, 2012 @ 11:41am PDTTags: DEG, DVD Rentals, DVD Sales, iTunes, Netflix

The data out today from DEG: The Digital Entertainment Group may suggest that the period of steep declines in home video spending — largely driven by the collapse of the DVD market — is over. But it also may just reflect the fact that the quarter had more popular movies: Films available on home video in the quarter did 12.5% better at the box office than did comparable releases last year. Whatever the reason, total sales of DVD and Blu-ray discs fell just 0.6% in Q1 to $2.06B; DEG says that Blu-ray now accounts for about a quarter of all disc sales. Throw in the $165M spent to buy digital files of movies and TV shows, and the sell-through market was up 0.5%. Digital vendors really showed their muscle in rentals. Spending on subscription streaming services such as Netflix was up 545.4% to $548.6M while digital VOD from providers including Apple’s iTunes was up 6.8% to $505.3M. Meanwhile, the rash of store closings at Blockbuster contributed to a 29.4% decline in rentals at bricks-and-mortar stores to $305M. And Netflix’s struggles with its DVD business helped to drive a 48.1% slide in subscription disc rentals to $348M. Bricks-and-mortar and subscription DVD rental services now individually do less business than pay TV’s VOD which was up 6.8% to $505.3M. Another winner: kiosk services led by Redbox. Their rocketed 30.1% to $523M. DEG says that consumers opened 2M UltraViolet accounts, enabling them to use mobile devices to stream the home videos they buy.

Related: Home Video Biz Still In Trouble Despite Industry Hype: Analyst

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U.S. Disc Rentals -3.4% In 2011: Rentrak

By DAVID LIEBERMAN, Executive Editor | Monday March 26, 2012 @ 4:40am PDTTags: Blu-ray Disc, DVD Rentals

Consumers spent $5.65B renting DVDs and Blu-ray discs in 2011, Rentrak says this morning citing data from its Home Video Essentials tracking service. That’s down 3.4% from 2010. But consumer defections from disc rentals appear to be accelerating. In the last three … Read More »

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Did Movies On Demand Marketing Pay Off?

By DAVID LIEBERMAN, Executive Editor | Wednesday December 14, 2011 @ 4:11pm PSTTags: Cable, DVD Rentals, VOD

EXCLUSIVE: Backers are ready to take a victory lap for their two-year Movies On Demand marketing campaign for cable built around the slogan: ”The Video Store Just Moved In.”  But the evidence that they’re starting to circulate fails to demonstrate that they attracted lots of new rentals following their TV, print, and online sales pitches, which began last year with a $30M commitment. They point to figures from Rentrak that show cable subs viewed VOD more than 6.4B times in the first 10 months of this year, up 10.3% vs the same period last year. The problem? That figure isn’t just movie rentals — it also includes movies shown for free as well as TV shows. They also note that newcomers to VOD movies — people who hadn’t ordered one in at least three months — paid an average of $7.71 a week this past summer. That’s up 67% from the spring, and it’s “a massive increase since early 2010, when they weren’t spending at all” for VOD movies, says Char Beales, who oversees the Movies on Demand campaign. While she’s probably right, it doesn’t mean much because the group doesn’t tell us Read More »

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Home Video Spending Up 4.9% In 3Q

By DAVID LIEBERMAN, Executive Editor | Monday October 31, 2011 @ 11:36am PDTTags: Blu-ray Disc, DEG, Digital Entertainment Market, DVD Rentals, DVD Sales, Netflix

The industry’s Digital Entertainment Group credits a 58% gain in spending on Blu-ray discs vs last year’s 3Q and a 12.8% pickup in electronic sell-though (to $135.9M) for much of the gain in 3Q consumer spending, to $3.93B. The … Read More »

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Netflix 2010 4th-Quarter Profit Jumps 52%

By NIKKI FINKE, Editor in Chief | Wednesday January 26, 2011 @ 2:46pm PSTTags: DVD Rentals, DVDs, Netfix Profits, Netflix, Netflix Online Streaming, Online Movies

The online DVD and streaming rental provider which keeps announcing Big Media deal after deal also announced today that it now has 20 million subscribers and expects to have perhaps as many as 23 million by the end of 2011′s … Read More »

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Blockbuster Bankruptcy Shows Danger of Being Inflexible In Digital Age

By MIKE FLEMING JR | Thursday September 23, 2010 @ 8:18am PDTTags: Blockbuster, Blockbuster Bankruptcy, DVD Rentals, DVDs, Movies, Netflix, Redbox, VOD
Mike Fleming

Blockbuster made it official today, filing its long expected Chapter 11 bankruptcy, with a line of creditors that includes its product suppliers like Fox, Sony, Universal, Warner Bros and Disney. It seems unfathomable that given Blockbuster’s supremacy at one time–think of all the mom and pop video stores that went … Read More »

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