Quoting FilmAlba:

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Quoting Alien Redrum:

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Interesting article regarding last year's trends.

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Last year was the first since 2002 that U.S. consumers spent more money buying movie tickets than buying movies to watch at home, underscoring the changing economics of Hollywood.

According to new data from Adams Media Research, Americans spent $9.87 billion at the box office in 2009, 10% more than in 2008, according to a report Adams plans to release Tuesday. At the same time, sales in the U.S. of feature films on DVD, long a cornerstone of movie studios' business models, plunged 13% to $8.73 billion, including Blu-ray high-definition discs. (Other companies that track box-office receipts include Canada in their North American figures, adding about 7% to the total and pushing the year's gross above $10 billion.)

I certainly don't like where it's heading, as I prefer to own the disc, but it is what it is.

Don't know where that guy get's his figures But Blu-ray is most certainly up. The reason as i see it that cinema sales beat home media was due to 3D.

We've been over this before.  Blu-ray will continue to grow each year and grab a bigger slice of a shrinking pie.  I don't know why this is so hard to understand.  Discs are going away.  People don't want them.  They have bought about all they are going to and the number keeps shrinking every year.  Doesn't matter if they're silver, blue or polka dots, people don't want to keep buying more discs.  If they do buy a new disc, they compensate and dump an old one.  The only people who are still hording discs are people like us, users of disc cataloging software.

You don't have to like this fact and you'll find plenty of support in a disc cataloging forum to tell you discs will always be your friend, but that doesn't alter the reality of things.

Quoting Alien Redrum:

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*sigh*

He does.

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Last year was the first since 2002 that U.S. consumers spent more money buying movie tickets than buying movies to watch at home, underscoring the changing economics of Hollywood.

According to new data from Adams Media Research, Americans spent $9.87 billion at the box office in 2009, 10% more than in 2008, according to a report Adams plans to release Tuesday. At the same time, sales in the U.S. of feature films on DVD, long a cornerstone of movie studios' business models, plunged 13% to $8.73 billion, including Blu-ray high-definition discs. (Other companies that track box-office receipts include Canada in their North American figures, adding about 7% to the total and pushing the year's gross above $10 billion.)

The figures indicate that studios will likely have to continue looking for ways to survive in a marketplace where they can't count on hefty home-entertainment revenue to offset giant production costs. Those costs often more than eat up the studios' half of the box-office receipts, which are split with theaters.

The ongoing decline in home-entertainment revenue has already fundamentally altered the way studios do business, forcing them to place big financial bets on hoped-for mass-market blockbusters at the expense of features that cost less to make but that also have smaller earnings potential.

Hit titles such as "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince" and "Up" were among those that lured large numbers of Americans to the cinema last year.

"Consumers are still in love with movies," said Tom Adams, president of Adams Media. "In this environment, however, they're seeking the biggest bang for their bucks."

For studios, which count on income from home entertainment to underwrite growing production costs, the trend represents a giant headache. In the early 2000s, studios began counting on the cash bonanza generated by consumers' building up libraries of DVDs. Now, they will have to alter budgets to reflect the shrinking DVD income stream.

Hollywood is already offering more ways for consumers to watch movies at home while bolstering studio coffers, including digital delivery, but households aren't embracing them quickly enough to make up for eroding DVD sales.

While Blu-ray disc sales are growing at a rapid rate, they too represent just a fraction of DVD sales. Studios generally get about $17 for each regular DVD sold, as long as the movie is a new release, and $22 for each Blu-ray disc. The biggest retailers often sell them at or below cost.

Instead, consumers are flocking to rentals, which represent considerably smaller profit for the studios, especially given the proliferation of $1-a-night rentals from kiosk operators such as Coinstar Inc.'s Redbox.

While rental transactions rose 5.5% in 2009, rental spending rose less than 1% to $8.15 billion, Adams calculates.

Some studios are trying hard to hold the line on rental revenue, with General Electric Co.'s Universal Pictures, News Corp.'s Twentieth Century Fox, and Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. fighting to keep their newest releases out of cut-price rental kiosks. News Corp. owns The Wall Street Journal.

The brightening box-office picture could bode well for studio home-entertainment divisions down the line. After all, the ticket-buying trend shows Hollywood still excels at appealing to consumer tastes, with the growing number of 3-D movies such as "Avatar" helping to draw fans to movie theaters. (See related article on page B6.) Movies shown in 3-D cost $2 to $5 extra per ticket and offer movie lovers an extra reason to go to the theater.

Studios are working hard on ways to give consumers other incentives to spend more on watching movies at home, too. For example, some studios have struck partnerships that make it easy for consumers to buy movies or rent them through Internet-enabled television sets—at much higher margins for the studios compared to rental kiosks.

They are also heavily promoting Blu-ray discs, which are more profitable than DVDs.

The challenge lies in ramping up these newer distribution media faster. To a large degree, studios are hamstrung by external factors such as the rate at which consumers buy Internet-enabled TVs and Blu-ray players.

Overall, consumers spent $28.38 billion on feature movies last year, Adams calculates, slightly lower than the $28.47 they spent in 2008. That includes $1.27 billion spent on rentals through cable and satellite services, and $361 million spent renting and buying movies online, both categories that grew considerably in 2009.

He's basing Blu-ray revenue being down on the fact that retailers never sold it at the recommended retail price. It's common practice to sell below that with any product. What you also got to remember is with a lot of Blu-rays sold there is a DVD included.

5% to 13% means that ppl are converting to Blu-ray.

Quoting hal9g:

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I really don't think that the fact that DVD/Blu ray sales are down this year is an indication of anything more than the fact hat we are in a global recession.

Will some people move to streaming video, absolutely.  But these are the same people who would have rented those movies before.  Storing movies to hard drive storage will be adopted for some percentage of people, but until the technology to store , recall and play them back is made much simpler, this group of people will remain relatively small.  Eventually, we'll get there, but not for quite some time I'm afraid. 

People who want to own movies and enjoy them whenever and as often as they wish, and have the comfort of a (relatively durable) media that they are confident is not going to be lost through a disk drive failure, then hard media will remain in vogue.  When and if the recession fades, sales will rebound.  Count on it.

Recession and 3D. Blu-ray has vitrualy has helped the studios a lot in this recession. Unlike some thought (cough Sam) 

I suppose we can blame the recession, but falling disc sales has been a trend for the last 3 years.  You people are acting like this just happened over the last year.  Warner is on record as stating that they took note of the trend well before the recession started.  Too many people bought too much junk in the grocery store checkout line only to discover they watched the thing once and then got rid of it.  Go to any hi-def forum and you'll quickly lose count of the number of posts exclaiming that folks will rent first and only purchase the few good titles later.  The heyday of disc hording is over.  Changing the color of the discs won't alter that fact.

I remember back when there were those saying that music downloads wouldn't out sell CDs as most buyers wanted to own the physical disk.

As technology improves and the availability for Movie downloads and streaming, I think we will see the trend to stream movies take over DVD sales and rentals.  Right now at my house we already stream movies that are available via Netflix Watch Now.  The only real problems with Netflix Watch Now is the movie selection and most video downloads cost as much as the DVD if not more

For rentals, yes. I would download them if that was an available option.

For owning films, no. I want an actual copy of the movie in my hands.

As for music, no I would rarely download. I simply don't care for heavily compressed MP3 music that's a step down in audio fidelity. Portability is MP3's main drawing factor.

Alien:

Excuse me but it was the collector's like myself that made DVD the fastest growing electronic film medium in history. That growth has not flattened or predictably taken a bit of a downturn. The Blu-Ray take off was slow largely duue to that particular fact, the Studios have figured out how to rope us in now, that however does not mean that most of us will now tajke verything to BD, in fact, I consider that highly unlikely. My BD growth will now accelerate and DVD growth will slow, but i don't foresee it stopping altogether. Hollywood would have to convince me that many of my old films and TV series would actually benefit from transfer to BD, possible but I haven't been persuaded yet, and I don't believe I am alone in that skepticism. Time will tell. As for downloading, for collecting I still don't see this as an economically viable solution, it would cost an awful lot of money to provide sufficient storage for my collection + backup files, unless I chose to make my discs my backup, not likely as a sole backup. But in this business, who knows what the future holds...certainly not I.

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