Post by Morreion on Mar 28, 2009 14:31:01 GMT -5
2009: The Year Print-on-Demand Goes Mainstream
Warner Brothers is putting their DVD back catalog into a POD service: Warner Bros on Monday became the first studio to open its film vault to "made-to-order" DVDs, as it sought new revenues in a slumping DVD market by making it possible for fans to buy decades-old films.
Warner Bros, owned by Time Warner Inc, made an initial batch of 150 titles available for purchase online at www.WarnerArchive.com, including 1943 comedy-romance "Mr. Lucky" starring Cary Grant and the 1962 release "All Fall Down" with Warren Beatty and Eva Marie Saint.
The on-demand service allows Warner Bros. to avoid the risk of manufacturing too many copies of old or obscure titles and shipping them to retailers because customers directly order only the titles they want to buy.
The Warner Bros film archive has 6,800 titles. Since it entered the DVD market in 1997, the studio has released only around 1,200 of those titles from the vault. By comparison, the company expects by the end of the year to have more than 300 titles available via the DVD-on-demand service.
Warner Bros, owned by Time Warner Inc, made an initial batch of 150 titles available for purchase online at www.WarnerArchive.com, including 1943 comedy-romance "Mr. Lucky" starring Cary Grant and the 1962 release "All Fall Down" with Warren Beatty and Eva Marie Saint.
The on-demand service allows Warner Bros. to avoid the risk of manufacturing too many copies of old or obscure titles and shipping them to retailers because customers directly order only the titles they want to buy.
The Warner Bros film archive has 6,800 titles. Since it entered the DVD market in 1997, the studio has released only around 1,200 of those titles from the vault. By comparison, the company expects by the end of the year to have more than 300 titles available via the DVD-on-demand service.
I completely agree with Warren Ellis (who, full disclosure, is a friend) that 2009 is the year print on demand goes mainstream. It just makes so much sense; why waste warehouse space, shelf space, and limited-investment capital on something nobody's interested in, when it's just as easy to show them the entire menu and let them pick out what they want? All of the elements that we need are lined up and ready to work together: decentralized distribution online, long tail publishing, high-quality on-demand products, and creators who have enough direct contact with their audience to make giving huge portions of their profits and their rights away to publishers totally unnecessary.
