Home Theater Forum - View Single Post - If not DVD, why not on-demand?

Joseph DeMartino · 04-22-2008, 04:01 PM

Everybody talks as if pressing and distributing the physical discs were some kind of huge cost or a major factor in deciding what does and doesn't get released and this simply isn't the case. Replicating DVDs costs, quite literally, pennies per copy. Even at the birth of the format, DVDs were much cheaper to mass-produce than VHS tapes.

What makes DVDs expensive is what is on them. The shows themselves, the cost of digitizing and often cleaning up older titles, the cost of assembling extras, designing and programming menus, prepping 5.1 remixes and alternate sound tracks and subtitles and a million and one other things. Finally there are new contracts to be negotiated with various contributors and rights holders. Depending on the terms of all the original contracts (which varied enormously from studio to studio, year to year and even show to show) the studio could end up holding all rights for home video or very few. Contracts often contain strange loopholes, sometimes the result of errors, that mean a piece of music that was cleared for use in broadcast or even on videotape has to be paid for all over on disc.

This is the stuff that makes up at least 95% of the cost in producing a DVD set, and this is what determines how many sets at what price and what margin have to sell for the studio to make a reasonable profit. I doubt that there has been a single series that was so perfectly balanced "on the bubble" that releasing it via on-demand would have saved enough to make it profitable when a DVD release wouldn't have.

Then there's the fact that the market that can get on-demand downloads is a fraction of the market for DVDs. Here in the enthusiast's echo chamber we sometimes forget that not everybody in the world has high-speed internet access, digital cable or satellite and/or hundreds of gigabytes of storage on a fast computer to enjoy all this downloadable content. (And many people don't see the point of watching jittery video on a postage-stamp-sized cell phone or iPod screen - many more don't own a web & video enabled cell phone or iPod-like device.) So whatever theorectical savings a studio would realize would likely be wiped out by lower sales, which makes it less, not more, likely that a given release would turn a profit.

Regards,

Joe

04-22-2008, 04:01 PM	#4 of 10
Joseph DeMartino Member Join Date: Dec 1969 Local Time: 02:01 AM Local Date: 10-13-2008 Posts: 7,308	Re: If not DVD, why not on-demand? Everybody talks as if pressing and distributing the physical discs were some kind of huge cost or a major factor in deciding what does and doesn't get released and this simply isn't the case. Replicating DVDs costs, quite literally, pennies per copy. Even at the birth of the format, DVDs were much cheaper to mass-produce than VHS tapes. What makes DVDs expensive is what is on them. The shows themselves, the cost of digitizing and often cleaning up older titles, the cost of assembling extras, designing and programming menus, prepping 5.1 remixes and alternate sound tracks and subtitles and a million and one other things. Finally there are new contracts to be negotiated with various contributors and rights holders. Depending on the terms of all the original contracts (which varied enormously from studio to studio, year to year and even show to show) the studio could end up holding all rights for home video or very few. Contracts often contain strange loopholes, sometimes the result of errors, that mean a piece of music that was cleared for use in broadcast or even on videotape has to be paid for all over on disc. This is the stuff that makes up at least 95% of the cost in producing a DVD set, and this is what determines how many sets at what price and what margin have to sell for the studio to make a reasonable profit. I doubt that there has been a single series that was so perfectly balanced "on the bubble" that releasing it via on-demand would have saved enough to make it profitable when a DVD release wouldn't have. Then there's the fact that the market that can get on-demand downloads is a fraction of the market for DVDs. Here in the enthusiast's echo chamber we sometimes forget that not everybody in the world has high-speed internet access, digital cable or satellite and/or hundreds of gigabytes of storage on a fast computer to enjoy all this downloadable content. (And many people don't see the point of watching jittery video on a postage-stamp-sized cell phone or iPod screen - many more don't own a web & video enabled cell phone or iPod-like device.) So whatever theorectical savings a studio would realize would likely be wiped out by lower sales, which makes it less, not more, likely that a given release would turn a profit. Regards, Joe My Home Theater My DVD Collection Last edited by Joseph DeMartino : 04-22-2008 at 08:46 PM.