The New York Times (free registration required) has an article up on the difficulties facing independant DVD labels:
- DVD sales are stalled
- Retail is flooded with titles
- Retail space is shrinking (big box stores are cutting back, while independents and record chains are going out of business)
- Shelf space that might be dedicated to less mainstream titles is instead allocated to HD-DVD and Blu-ray
The most important point? Overall DVD sales are stalled. I suspect that sales will start to fall next year as collectors have built their libraries and the market is saturated: anyone who doesn’t already own a DVD player simply doesn’t want one (my supermarket sells DVD players for $20, so it certainly isn’t an affordability hurdle).
High def discs will not make up the slack, even if a miracle occurs and the format war ends tomorrow, because half the people with HDTVs are perfectly satisfied with upsampled broadcast TV (480i at best), never mind DVDs (anamorphic 480p).
-avi
