Surprising and against conventional wisdom: Americans still love to buy DVDs

Interesting article about the sale of DVDs in Silicon Alley Insider:

"Just a reality check on the video download/rental business: There
really isn't one yet. At least not compared to good old-fashioned DVD
sales and rentals." (from "Forget iTunes: Americans still love to buy DVDs")

Interesting article. I wonder, what about music CDs?

Comments

[Jered]

Not at all surprising. This doesn't say anything about demand, necessarily -- the reason people still buy DVDs is because on-line video download is crippled by incompatible DRM with no dominant player.

DRM means that content on my Windows PC can't be viewed on my Mac or TiVo or portable media player. It means that if I upgrade my video card, all my licenses are invalidated. It means that the content I paid for two years ago evaporates when the vendor decides to change business models and turns off their authorization servers. Meanwhile, a DVD will play in any DVD player, on my Mac, on a PC, can be ripped to my iPod, etc.

Apple got away with DRM in iTunes Music Store because they have 90%+ of the market. So what if you can't load iTMS tracks onto your Zune? Nobody has one of those.

Then the music industry came to the horrifying realization that they had just handed Apple a virtual monopoly on digital music distribution, and loosened the reins. Now I buy all my music DRM-free on Amazon. What I can find online seems to indicate that digital album sales exceed CD sales (in number of sales), and are expected to overtake CD sales (in dollars) in the next 2-3 years.

The same thing will have to happen for digital video sales to take off; a monopoly player with broad distribution, or standard formats with no DRM.

I bought a movie ("House of Flying Daggers") on Amazon VOD through my TiVo last weekend because it was convenient -- extremely so. It still made me feel dirty.