The DVD format is celebrating its 25th Anniversary.
For the rest of the month of March will be taking a look back at those 25 years of home entertainment packaged media in the digital age.
Also 25 years-ago, the DVD Release Report was born. There wasn’t much to do in the beginning except document what was being released and trying to piece-together what would be statistically important — yours truly was actually consulting for both Orion Pictures and Cabin Fever Entertainment at the time.
At that moment, it appeared that this new format was going to be a game-changer, and the best way to actually track what was going on with it would be to think in terms of a carrousel or merry-go-round. When such a machine is stopped; when the horses are at rest, it is easy to get on, pick a horse, or unicorn, or whatever and go for a ride. As the carrousel picks up pace, it becomes more and more difficult, so a decision was made to begin tracking the releases, a process that has continued for 25 years.
On March 19, 1997 (a Wednesday), upstart Sling Shot Entertainment crashed the party with a six-day jump on Warner Bros., New Line and MGM with a quartet of DVD releases. The format was born.
The following street-date Tuesday, Mar. 25, the aforementioned studios kicked in with a 34-title blitz, all theatrical catalog releases. That was the “official” launch.
Of the other “Hollywood” studios, Sony Pictures (aka: Columbia) arrived with four titles on Apr. 29; Universal Pictures came on board on Nov. 18 with four titles as well; Walt Disney Studios chipped-in eight films on Dec. 9. Paramount, Trimark (now Lionsgate) and 20th Century-Fox stayed on the sidelines in 1997 and Orion Pictures used Image Entertainment to the test waters with two films on Oct. 3 — RoboCop and Silence of the Lambs.
This was different; this format would be different. No massive industrial buildings full of endless rows of VHS slave machines, cranking out VHS copies in real time. This would be a manufacturing process similar to CD music production, and indeed, the millions and millions of CD discs already stamped-out and in circulation would play on the new DVD players.
Another big difference, price. No rental pricing, but sell-thru pricing from the get-go. Backwards-compatibility and price … plus two more big factors that were not at first so obvious, weight and size.
A DVD disc, even with packaging, weighted less than an equivalent VHS copy of the same title (for distribution, that was a cost-saving bonus). It was more compact, especially when it came to television series programming, which was never a big factor in the VHS world — you’d need two men and a boy to haul around a full season of a TV series on VHS, not so with DVD.
The TV-factor didn’t kick for a while as conventional “VHS-thinking” was dominate during the early days — household penetration needed to be built.
In January of 1999, Image Entertainment put out five-volumes of the Twilight Zone (4 episodes per disc) for the bargain price of $24.95 per SKU. In March of the same year, A&E chipped in with double-disc collections of The Avengers (only $44.95 per SKU). Paramount jumped in with single-disc, two-episode volumes of Star Trek in August of 1999. Still, just toes in the water, checking it out.
In November of 1999, Pioneer put out the “massive,” four-disc set collection of The Judy Garland Show, and it was only $119.98 for the set! And then came X-Files: The Complete Season One on May 9, 2000 — a seven-disc set priced at $149.98!! Sex and the City and The Sopranos (full seasons) followed from HBO and suddenly things you couldn’t sell on VHS were viable on DVD.
The other “big thing” that had to be worked-out from the studio’s POV was the “window” for new theatrical releases. To monitor this, the DVD Release Report made an executive decision and decided to break theatrical releases into catalog/library releases and new theatrical product offerings. This way, the window for new theatrical releases heading to the DVD marketplace could be tracked.
Continued in next week’s edition.
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