Should you STILL Release your Indie Film on DVD?
We’ve all heard about how Physical media is dead. However, for a long time, there was still a significant amount of money in DVD and physical media. In fact, DVD impulse buys are and large rental orders are a lot of what allowed the independent film industry to exist at all. TVOD (Transactional Video on Demand) has not risen to replace the revenues lost from Physical Media, so it only makes sense to try to get revenue for your film from as many sources as possible to try and cobble together an ROI from all the different pieces.
But in order to truly understand the problem, it helps to understand the history behind it. So I’ve decided to make this into a 2-part series. The first of which (this one) gives background and context for how physical media came to prominence and why the fall of physical media spells trouble for the industry, and the second examines the real question of does Physical Media still make sense as part of the planned revenue mix for indie films. However, in order to properly utilize the practical advice, it helps to have a thorough background of how these things came to be and as a result which tactics are most likely to succeed.
This part is about the history of physical media in the film industry. Check out this blog for a more practical guide to making money from it.
Blu-Rays vs DVDs
Prior to VHS (god that makes me feel old) the primary way people would see movies is either when they aired on TV, or when they toured through the local cinema. This meant there were both huge gatekeepers and huge costs associated with distributing a film, as you needed a 35mm print for every theater you were going to be in, and there wasn’t much else that you could do to get your work seen. When VHS came along, a lot of that changed.
The VHS market largely defined the independent film scene starting in the 80s. But VHS tapes were expensive to manufacture. This led to fewer gatekeepers holding more power. VHS tapes started out exceedingly expensive, and it was only when Top Gun made you watch a full-Trailer length Pepsi commercial that the price of VHS dropped low enough that most consumers could afford it.
When DVD entered the scene, there were some initial wins from people with DVD Replicates printing lots of recently public domain films to bolster their catalogs, then using the revenue to bu up old catalogs and grow their revenue even further. So even though more people had access to the technology, the Lower price point and manufacturing costs expanded the markets
When Blu-Ray entered the market, many expected that it would largely act as DVD had. That was not the case. Around the same time Blu-Ray dropped, TVOD became viable. While the 2.99 movie rentals from iTunes worked very well at first, it wasn’t long before Netflix launched the first public iteration of its Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD) platform. Once people could stream a huge array of movies over the internet any time they wanted for free, many consumers didn’t see the need to buy physical media or pay for content the same way they had in the past.
Also, with the glut of content that was beginning to be created by the wide availability of cheap HD cameras and other lowered equipment costs, the price SVOD and PayTV platforms were willing to pay for content took a nose dive. This is among the biggest challenges that are facing the current indie film industry. How do we break out from the white noise, and create enough revenue to pay our investors back?
I’m not going to pretend to have all the answers, but it’s a lot of what I work towards as an entrepreneur, If you want more of what I’ve learned from my decades in the business, grab my resource pack to get an e-book with exclusive content and a whole bunch of other goodies like a whitepaper, templates. and a blog digest.
Thanks for reading. Check out this blog for the practical portion.
