Home Media Magazine - March 23-29, 2008 - (Page 30)

NEWS Boxes Bridge Digital Gap to the Television Continued from page 1 www.homemediamagazine.com movie, which is its biggest draw- the movie downloading business. back, Doherty said. Four companies have offered dedicated set-top boxes that cater to the movie downloading experience. Whether or not any of them will replace physical media remains to be seen. TiVo What originally was a tool for digital video recording has become a player in movie downloading, thanks to TiVo’s deal with Amazon Unbox, which brings Amazon movie content directly to the TiVo box. TiVo also announced that, like Apple TV, users can access YouTube and other Web content on their TV. Movies are cheap, running for $3 in many cases, and nearly 5,000 movies are available. But download times are long, nothing is available in high-def, and the 24-hour rental period once the movie has started can be problematic. “What if I need to put the kid to bed after we started his movie?” Doherty said. TiVo does have an advantage over its competitors: It already has a subscriber base of 9 million. It could be a digital movie delivery monster down the line. “Slow and steady wins the race for them,” Doherty said. However, Bullwinkle said, TiVo offers the worst quality of any of the movie downloading options he’s tried, and the number of TiVo owners who download movies is small. Xbox 360 Downloading movies from the gaming system has its problems, analysts agree. Movie downloads weren’t a service owners had in mind when they bought one. “The Xbox 360 and even the PlayStation 3 are trying to join the game,” said Rob Enderle, media analyst with The Enderle Group in San Jose, Calif. “But those are gaming systems first and don’t appeal to everyone.” Fewer than 500 movies are available for download through Xbox 360. Users have to buy the movies through a point system, and can’t just enter their credit card. And even though many movies are available in high-def, the quality isn’t so hot. “The audio is over-compressed, the bandwidth isn’t there, the video comes with all sorts of digital artifacts,” said Home Theater Forum’s Gregorich. “I want to look at the best picture possible and hear the best sound possible. With all these download boxes, it isn’t there yet.” Blair Westlake, corporate VP of Microsoft’s Media & Entertainment Group, admitted recently that “America loves its optical disc.” And while Xbox 360 is offering high-def downloads, it can take four to six hours to download one, depending on the speed of the connection. But apparently Xbox 360 owners aren’t letting the wait get in the way: 40% of all downloads are high-def, Westlake said. Xbox 360’s movie rental model limits users to 14 days to start their Apple TV Vudu Vudu comes loaded with about 5,000 movies, and users can start watching immediately after they’ve ordered one. It can store 500 standard-definition movies, and Bullwinkle said Vudu has the best interface of the four. “It’s amazingly intuitive,” he said. Enderle said Vudu has very little marketing behind it. “They have a good product, but an ungodly amount of movies you don’t want to see,” he said. Additionally movies that were available one day may not be available the next. Movies can be rented for as little as $1 and viewed for a 24-hour period and purchased to own for $5. “Vudu can certainly crow about its quick success right now,” Doherty said. “But Apple TV will catch up.” Bullwinkle said that if Vudu can evolve to do everything that Apple TV can do, such as playing media on computers, it won’t be an also-ran in Steve Jobs’ pet project is the movie box making the most waves. Now that it can connect directly to the iTunes store with no computer needed, the little set-top box can store downloads directly to its own hard drive. Tom Adams, president of Adams Media Research, during a recent conference called Apple TV a potential Trojan horse that could one day render optical discs useless. Apple TV can operate wirelessly, standard-def downloads start playing quickly and the box can act as an entertainment server. Bullwinkle said Apple TV delivers the best high-def picture of the four. However, Apple TV hard drives are small, and less than 1,000 movies are available. Apple is willing to admit its box won’t kill Blu-ray, especially since its best HD picture is 720p, he said. Forrester Research Inc. estimated in a February report fewer than 1 million Apple TV devices will be sold by the end of this year. Book Stores Good DVD Niche Continued from page 1 of titles carried by big-box retailers and the differences in the consumer demographics of book stores versus other DVD retailers as reasons the segment continues to be a focus. “The book chain market has become, and continues to become, more and more important to us,” said Gary Baddeley, president and CEO of The Disinformation Co., an alternative media source with publishing, television and home video divisions. Disinformation’s home videos, distributed through Ryko and owned by Warner Music Group, include documentary fare such as Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price and The Da Vinci Code Decoded. Those titles featured tie-ins to books (unofficially, for The Da Vinci Code), making them perfect for book stores looking to maximize profits by cross promoting products. But, Baddeley said, the release date for a book matters, as it saw with its 2004 documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, which was released before its accompanying book (also published by Disinformation). “We thought that the gap hurt us on that,” Baddeley said. Another smaller company focusing on documentaries, Cinema Libre Studio, focuses on book stores for its DVD product as it has documentaries and other titles based on books and authors, such as its “Speaking Freely” series, in which an author is asked to speak at length about a particular topic. “It’s a perfect match,” Martin Mair, Cinema Libre’s VP of home entertainment, said on marrying his studio’s product to book store clientele. “The trend in book stores is similar to what’s happening with video — it’s becoming more niche,” said Emily Santos, VP of sales for New Video Group, which distributes documentaries from its label Docurama. Santos said book stores probably account for 5% to 6% of New Video’s video business, while Cinema Libre’s Mair estimated the percentage of his company’s video business generated by book stores to be 25% to 30%. Just who is shopping at book stores is open to debate, but Kolleen O’Meara, a spokesperson for one of the biggest book retailers in the United States, Borders, said their average customer tends to be older (age 45+) and is more often female — a far cry from the consumer targeted by big-box retailers with such product as Paramount Home Entertainment’s Transformers, for example. Research from The NPD Group shows that in 2007, 68% of electronics store customers were under the age of 45, compared to 56% for book stores. Book stores had slightly more female customers than male, while electronics stores were 63% male to 37% female. These demographics show up in sales: Borders’ top 10 DVDs at the end of February were Sony Pictures Home Entertainment’s Across the Universe, Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment’s Becoming Jane (a biopic of sorts on beloved author Jane Austen), BBC Video’s Planet Earth, Warner Home Video’s No Reservations, Disney’s Gone Baby Gone, Universal’s Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Warner’s The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford, Disney’s Snow Buddies, TS Production’s The Secret (based on the bestselling self-help novel by Rhonda Byrne), and Sony Pictures’ We Own the Night. By and large the titles are critical favorites, with one documentary, one book-based film and one author biopic. Additionally, a representative from Nielsen said children’s nontheatrical titles and family titles tend to underperform in the specialty retail channel, which includes book stores. A look at Borders’ top 10 also reveals sales are rounded out with big studio pictures. Warner, for example, has product that, while not tailor-made for the book store channel, is a natural fit. In celebration of its 85th anniversary, the studio is releasing more than 50 remastered classics, some of which will appear in lavish collector’s editions. “From a qualitative point of view, the book channel is extremely important,” said Jeff Baker, SVP and GM for theatrical catalog for Warner. “They carry a tremendous breadth of assortment, part in product that has a literary background, but also with classic films.” Baker said classics such as Casa- blanca and Ben-Hur typically performed well in the book store environment, as well as more current, book-based films such as The Notebook, The Polar Express and the “Harry Potter” films. Holiday titles (when consumers are looking to give gifts) and boxed sets of actors such as Bette Davis, Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day also do well for Warner in book stores, Baker said. “If you want to buy a copy of There Will Be Blood, you can buy that anywhere,” said Dennis Hedlund, chairman and founder of art-house label Kultur Films. “But if you want an unusual title, a book store’s a good place to go for that.” ‘Steep’ Release (L-R): Fox’s “Best Damn Sports Show Period’s” Charissa Thompson and Brian De Cloux, Staci Griesbach of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, and pro skier Andrew McLean (who is in the film) in Snowbird, Utah, taping a segment for the show to promote Sony’s release of Steep on DVD (March 18) and Blu-ray (March 25). HOME MEDIA MAGAZINE (ISSN 1934-9882) is published weekly 51 times per year (weekly except for one week at the end of December) by Questex Media Group, Inc., 306 West Michigan Street, Suite 200, Duluth, MN 55802. Subscription rates: $49.99 for one year in the United States and Possessions; $79.99 for one year in Canada and Mexico; all other countries $99.99 for one year (by surface mail). Add $75 annually for air-expedited service. Single copies (prepaid only): $6.99 in the United Stat http://www.homemediamagazine.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Home Media Magazine - March 23-29, 2008

Home Media Magazine - March 23-29, 2008 Contents News TV DVD Reviews Pipeline Research Top 20 DVD Sellers Top 20 Rentals and Top 10 Charts Just Announced

Home Media Magazine - March 23-29, 2008

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