That flood of demand for high-definition digital titles may be a little farther off than some studios and content providers had hoped.
Movie-download service Vudu said this week that it will let customers renew high-definition movie titles for $1.99. The company, which offers standard-definition renewals for 99 cents, charges $3.99 to $5.99 for first-time rentals of HD titles.
“In this age of $4-a-gallon gas and ‘staycations,’ we felt that Vudu customers deserved a break,” said Patrick Cosson, the company’s vice president of marketing. Of Vudu’s 6,500 titles, about 200 are available in HD.
With studios such as Lionsgate forecasting U.S. consumers will spend about $1.5 billion on digital downloads and streaming this year, and Blu-ray revenue expected to account for about 4% of the $25 billion home entertainment market, digital delivery of HD films may jump from a negligible number to more than $60 million this year.
Already, Blu-ray revenue has jumped fourfold to more than $200 million this year, despite home entertainment spending being nearly flat at about $10.1 billion, according to data compiled by Video Business and Rentrak.
Meanwhile, Lionsgate said in an earnings call this week that revenue from digital delivery would more than double to about $3.5 billion within the next five years while the continued rise in high-definition TV sales suggests that HD titles will account for a progressively larger share of that total.
Still, the promotion by Vudu, which doesn’t disclose sales or rental figures, suggests that between bandwidth limitations that lengthen the time it takes to download or stream HD titles, the disparate components used to bring digital titles directly to televisions and the general cutback in consumer spending, it may yet be a while before digital delivery of HD titles becomes the norm.
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Comments (3)
Nonsense! With my exclusive access to new, proprietary 12x real-time lossless video compression, wherein the next best is 3.1x, making same lossy will mean a drastic cut in HD bandwith costs . . . I expect my phone will ring off the hook real soon!
Posted by Shelly Jacobs | August 14, 2008 11:58 AM
Streaming, VOD, PPV may never reach potential sales for the simple reason many consumers have had it with the hollywood greed scene and studio's lack of market perception.
The general public wants control over what they watch and when. They've gotten used to being able to stop and resume, whether for minutes or hours, days or weeks. They've totally embraced the DVR mindset and they're not about to give that up without a fight.
They want personal libraries of favorites that they can access instantly and will rent the rest. They will purchase Blu-Ray titles of new releases if reasonably priced but they love the idea of HD movies stored on a HDD.
The public is finally getting educated enough to realize that DRM is trying to take all that away and they'll end up with less freedom than they had with their old VCR.
Posted by Walt | August 14, 2008 2:32 PM
IMHO, the two biggest barriers to HD adoption are:
1) Blu-Ray players are still products for the technologically cutting-edge. It's rare that a new "big release" isn't accompanied by a corresponding firmware update required for the title to play properly or it will crash your player. Not since the first year of release has that been a problem with DVD, and most people aren't technologically savvy enough to go to the website of their player's manufacturer and burn an update CD or DVD each time they buy a major new release title - nor should they have to be.
2) Lack of content. Really, the selection on BD has been getting better (Mad Men is absolutely stunning on BD), but where are the catalog titles people want to see? Great, you can see Click on Blu-Ray, but anything Hitchcock? Scorsese other than Goodfellas? Most anything Universal since the HD DVD war ended?
For viewers with cable or satellite, a day spent with HDNet Movies and Encore HD is frustrating as it's usually several hours of titles most people would snap up in an instant on BD - but they're not available. :(
Posted by Bill | August 15, 2008 7:34 AM