People are rapidly discovering new ways of watching films at home that pose a grave threat to the most profitable part of the film business. In America, by far the biggest home-entertainment market, spending on videotapes and discs has dropped by 29% since 2004... The big reason is the rise of cheap, convenient rental outfits like Redbox, which runs kiosks, and Netflix, which streams some films and sends others through the post.
Like music, newspapers and books before it, the film business has been disrupted by innovative, fast-moving distributors whose products have caught on with the public. Tinseltown’s attempts so far to see off the threat have fallen flat, partly because the studios have failed to co-ordinate their efforts.
Led by Sony, a consortium of studios, technology firms and retailers are working on a new way of distributing digital copies of films. The idea is that consumers will be able to buy the rights to films stored “in the cloud” and stream them to any device.
Read more at The Economist
