Warner Home Video said that it will include two down-loadable digital files on it's December 11 release of Harry Potter and the Order Of The Phoenix. It will allow the buyers to download the movie to a PC or a portable device, this makes Warner the first to marry physical media and downloads. The studio first offered a download of Superman Returns to consumers that bought at Wal-Mart.
In Tuesday's DVD Forum Jim Wuthrich, Warner senior VP of digital distribution, said this is a growing trend as consumers demand more digital content. "You can buy the DVD and have the option of the digital copy, this future proofs the format for consumers."
Wuthrich and other DVD Forum top brass cited the recent approval of CSS copyright protection for disc manufacturing-on-demand as proof that the future is really on its way. Major studios are expected to license their movie libraries for such DVD burning now that they are assured they can manage their content.
The numbers look so good to the studios that they're jumping in their pants, Wuthrich cited numbers that can make any studio salivate, according to his data, "Consumer Digital spending will total $300 million in 2007, in 2008 it's forecast to be $600 million, which includes $12 million in MOD (manufacturing-on-demand) spending. 2009 brings $900 million total with $81 million in MOD and in 2010 $1.55 billion with a share of $278 million in MOD."
Studios are eager to push MOD as a way to get more controlled digital content into consumer's hands, they cite efficiency and the ability to get obscure TV shows and films to niche markets while keeping the prices down on low number runs, something cost prohibitive with regular DVD production, this way the studio can limit production costs to consumer demand. Warner's library has 6,600 titles of which only 25% have been released, they've only released 10% of available TV shows, they still have 45,000 left to go. This can be made possible with MOD.
It is estimated that MOD will yield 20% of DVD distribution within the next 5 years, in addition MOD can be offered directly to consumer's PC and eventually on Web-connected hardware such as high-definition players. See Clint's article on the "Internet and the format war," it's the calling card of the near term future for media content management and it will affect you wether you think so or not.
