DVD Magazine failures (1 Viewer)

[Freddie A]

I'm a DVD freak like everybody else here. I love anything DVD, cool for DVD, DVDs for video games. It's pretty obvious Americans are in love with DVDs. But why not Magazines with DVDs? Why did Total Movie magazine fail, twice?!!! :frowning:

Do you think somebody should try to do the DVD magazine again?

 

[Malcolm R]

With the quantity of comprehensive, up-to-the-minute information on DVD's and Home Theater available on-line, who wants to waste money on hard-copy magazines?

 

[Jason Seaver]

First, most people who own DVD players are tech-savvy enough to find out what they want on-line. Second, I don't think there's ever been many magazines that focused on home video; it's just old news. Both of these are exacerbated by the relatively long lead-time a print magazine has.

Then, what do you put on the DVD? Trailers, mostly; maybe some special features lifted from upcoming DVDs. Shooting new material could be costly enough to make the price of the magazine unappealing except to a specialty audience (like that Visual FX DVD-zine), and licensing short/independent films can get just as expensive once royalties are figured in.

 

[streeter]

Total Movie failed because it thought it could be the next Maxim. They tried to make it appeal to that same crowd, but the DVDs really just interested movie-philes.
They also wanted to have x00,000 subscribers right off the bat, instead of slowly building it up.

 

[Jesse Skeen]

I couldn't care less about a printed magazine but I'd love to see a monthly DVD with trailers at least, but done correctly. The quality of the Total Movie DVDs was awful.

 

[Jeff Kleist]

I got the first few issues of TM, I thought the shorts they chose were great

 

[JulianK]

It's odd. The UK market supports about half a dozen DVD magazines that are widely available in every town. Most of them feature cover discs, featuring sample episodes of various TV series, trailers and bits and pieces from the bonus features on high-profile titles. Unfortunately a lot of them use VCD discs rather than proper DVD discs, so it's pretty pointless.

I'm a big fan of DVD, and I buy a lot of magazines every month, but I rarely buy any of the UK magazines, because their content is so poor (especially for anyone who owns a multi-standard player). The magazines rely on advertising, and advertisers don't like their potential customers being told that a version of a disc from another region might be better than the UK version. Reading reviews of inferior Region 2 product that doesn't tell the consumer that a better version is available makes my blood boil!

The UK magazine market is very different from the US one, though. Subscriptions account for a very small part of a magazine's sales in the UK, whereas they're the bread and butter of the US market.

 

[Gary->dee]

I've also got the first issue & disc of Total Movie along with a few follow ups. It was an interesting concept, but I think in regards to home entertainment the magazine format is essentially dead. Perhaps it was also simply too expensive to provide what they did over a long period of time with the numbers they were selling. For the most part everything is available online at a much faster rate than waiting to read something in a magazine.

 

[JulianK]

Oh, I forgot. There was a pretty good movie magazine launched in the UK a few months ago called Widescreen. It had a proper DVD cover disc. The first one had a bunch of Treasure Planet bonus material on, the second featured Spiderman. Unfortunately there wasn't a third issue, but it was great while it lasted!

 

[Andrew Chong]

For anime fans, Newtype which was Japan-exclusive is also an English publication in the US and Canada.

Every issue includes a DVD. The disc contains a single though complete episode from an anime series. They aren't all anamorphic and 5.1 though, perhaps due to the fact that the proper release wasn't.