DVD

There was an article in my local newspaper — The Sacramento Bee — today about rental kiosks as a part of the overall market of DVD rentals and sales and while it reminded readers that kiosks are a small part of the market due to poor selection (surprise!), I wanted to pass along the final few lines from the piece:

“Video on demand has always been the business that is going to be worth $10 billion in 10 years and always will be,” he [Tom Adams, president of Adams Media Research] says. Pay-per-view on cable and Internet downloads to home computers are two methods that thus far have failed to catch on with consumers.

Still, Adams believes new technologies such as Apple TV, which connects TVs to the Internet, is a “market that will eventually develop.”

But, he adds, DVD sales and rentals will remain vital, because “humans like to finger the merchandise, even if they’re just renting.”

I’ve heard this tendency to want a tangible copy of consumable media from music buyers (higher fidelity and DRM-less), video game players (resale value and portability), and movie buffs (extra features) and I guess I consider myself a part of that group in some cases. However, the majority of people will want to just consume the main content and I think more of them will shift toward renting movies through digital devices like Apple TV or a Netflix-enabled box as their primary method of seeing films after their theatrical release as bandwidth and HDTV penetration increase, digital catalogs expand, and certain video stores eventually fold.

Finally, I found it a bit odd that Mr. Adams chose to use the word ‘humans’ instead of ‘people’, as if he were anticipating robots or animals thinking of watching movies and TV shows with similar critical discretion that people engage in when deciding what to watch. It may not sound as strange in the future, though, when we have sentient artificial beings that would have no use for disc media.