I was thinking the other day, (Which is code for: This is an Opinion piece from Brusimm) that for some folk, I bet you’d be surprised how often you end up paying for access to the same content. I’m not talking having to swap out movie collections from VHS to DVD to Blu-ray and whatever comes next. That’s just a given that we’ll be paying and repaying for the newest media version of our favorite movies. So no, your dollars are already part of the estimated profit margins from studios for that repeated tech hurdle.
What I’m talking about is, in this example, a movie and how many times someone might actually pay, in one round-a-bout way or another, for that same movie.
For some of us, we head out and watch a movie in the movie theaters. Then later, if we saw it alone, we’d probably want the spouse to watch it so we might pay for it again on VoD (Video on Demand).
But then if you pay for a movie channel, part of your fee goes to the cable company to pay for rights to air that movie you’ve already paid for twice. (If you subscribe to the right channel that gets it.)
And then there’s the cable bill you pay to be able to access the network your cable company distributes. Because sooner or later that movie will be on the “free” version of TV.
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The other day I took notice of the fact that the movie Immortals, starring Henry Cavill, had sold around a million DVD/Blu-ray units. I had not understood the numbers of units that mega hits sell, but to see Immortals sell a million units raised my eyebrows!
And that number comes from a dwindling level of home entertainment sales of DVDs and such. Back when I bought the Iron Man DVD, in one of the extras, Jon Favreau made note of the weakening DVD sales back then. And recently CNN reported that in 2012, more people will be paying to watch streaming movie content than buy movies on DVD/Blu-ray Disc.
For a minute, I thought DVD sales were plummeting. They are, but not as I first thought.
As things stand, Hollywood needs to look towards their future business models of selling movies to the home entertainment sector. Or, in other words, they better start investing in server farms to deliver digital content. More so than they have probably already invested in…
The estimates say that online video transactions will be hitting the 3+ billion mark in 2012, versus the 2+ billion mark for the actual physical disc viewing. The 3.4 billion estimate is roughly 135% over last years parameter and the content delivery systems that account for over 90% of the streaming content is Netflix and Amazon Prime.
But even though the above numbers seem dire, they really aren’t because the revenue estimates for 2012 for physical formats is $11~ billion while online streaming content is estimated at just under $2 billion.
But here’s where the consumer’s eyebrows might go up: It’s the price per movie, per venue.
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