In the first six of this year, consumer purchasing of DVD and Blu-ray discs generated $10.1 billion in sales combined, which remains unchanged over the same 2007 period despite the hard economic times the movie industry is bracing for. The studios give credit to the growing sales of Blu-ray for keeping up the overall sales, with $200 million worth of Blu-ray movie sales in the first 6 months of the year, up 300% over the same period in 2007, according to this Video Business report.
The movie industry is very happy with how well the business is holding up, particularly with consumers facing having more of the spare cash taken away by growing fuel prices. Warner and other studios have already noticed that consumers are moving more and more towards inexpensive catalogue titles, with these sales growing 4.5% in first half of this year. There was even a 0.5% boost in movie rentals, offsetting a 0.5% decline in movie sales. Lionsgate has made significant sales this year with its revenue in the first half of 2008 24% higher than the same period in 2007.
According to 20th Century Fox's president Mike Dunn, Blu-ray sales now accounts for 8% of its overall movie sales. The studio expects this figure to reach between 10% and 12% by the end of the year. He also mentioned that retailers have widened their movie retail space by 5% to cater for Blu-ray discs, without cutting back on their existing DVD retail space either. The Sony president, David Bishop also commented on the growing Blu-ray sections in major retail stores.
While Sony is aiming to push BD Live, Fox has had some success with its trial of another Blu-ray feature, copy-embedded titles. When it released "Live Free or Die Hard", 30,000 consumers made use of the feature. A copy-embedded title allows one to create a low resolution copy that compatible with the Apple iPod. Of the six titles Fox released with the copy-embedded feature, consumers have so far made a total of 350,000 copies between the movies.
