Roger Erik Tinch (art & online director at CineVegas) pens a few thoughts on the future of how we will consume films in the next year and how they'll be delivered to us. Most interesting to me were his thoughts on physical media:
Most recently THE DARK KNIGHT, selling 10 million units, and MAMMA MIA! THE MOVIE, selling 2 million units in it’s first day, have done huge blockbuster sales amidst a grim economic backdrop. The fact that these films exist in HD on iTunes hasn’t slowed down their plastic disc counterparts. Now I’m not saying online distribution won’t succeed, I’m just saying it will succeed, but only in the rental realm. Instead of popping on down to your local Blockbuster you’ll instead power up your Xbox or TiVo and order something while in your pajamas.
While this makes sense from a certain perspective, I have become completely disenchanted with the idea of owning a DVD library. Maybe it's just the fact that this panoply of DVDs overwhelms my smallish living space or that being a new parent has made movie-watching time a rare and precious thing, but I'm looking forward to the day when these shiny plastic discs can be housed completely on a vast (and cheap) hard disk or, better yet, hosted in "the cloud" for quick and easy retrieval on command.
Read Distribution and Consumption in 2009 on the CineVegas Blog.
BTW, that's not Roger in the picture, that's my former college roommate Scott -- but the fact that movies were once stored on laserdiscs bigger than the human head always makes me laugh.
