See Me, Feel Me

The New York Times steps in to bring a pragmatic view about the ever shifting landscape in film distribution. And far from chasing the disaster prognosticators of "plummeting" box office, disintegrating video windows, VOD invasion and home video standards wars, they rightly point out that there's still a lot of money in the brick and mortar home video world.

That's right, even with Blockbuster suffering losses from the death of its late fee revenue stream and investment in the competitive world of online rentals and Movie Gallery way off target on earnings, "the video rental business last year ranged from $8 billion to $8.9 billion."

"The number of DVD's (and a dwindling number of VHS tapes) rented by the movie-loving public still dwarfs any other form of movie watching. According to Adams Media Research, there were nearly 3.2 billion rental transactions last year. By contrast, box-office admissions were less than half of that number, DVD sales totaled about 1.1 billion and there were fewer than 350,000 purchases of movies through video on demand or pay per view."

The primary points of the piece are that: (a) Blockbuster and Movie Gallery are poor communicators; (b) people like to go to stores and touch stuff; (c) "rationalizing" the video store business with greater product breadth (video games) and services (buy/sell/trade) and lower costs can drive a profitable business; and (d) oh yeah, DVDs are not going to be quickly supplanted by alternative media in the near future.