Singin' in the Rain lampooned a more fundamental technology shift.
Hey, speaking of Netflix and similar streaming video services . . . .
Rich McCormick writes a piece for The Verge about a new report from PricewaterhouseCoopers that predicts that streaming video services will make up 43% of the American film industry, at least from the perspective of revenue generated.
PwC's analysts say the money earned from on-demand video will rise by $10 billion in five years.
...
That stratospheric rise will come as the money made by physical home videos falls rapidly. The revenue generated by physical media — DVD and Blu-Ray rentals and sales — dropped by $3 billion between 2009 and 2013. PwC says it will drop by a further $4 billion between 2013 and 2018, from $12.22 billion to $8.72 billion.
Despite the huge success of streaming video services, the report doesn't suggest that the meteoric rise of Netflix and its peers will contribute to a drop in box office takings. Movie ticket sales have been slowly and steadily increasing the amount of revenue earned for the US film industry every year, and that trend will continue, albeit at a slower rate than the revenue increase of streaming services.
As one of those sad individuals who amassed a "respectable" collection of DVDs in the early 2000s, I did not see the death of physical media happening quite so rapidly. Granted, the only movies I buy these days are movies for my kids (have you seen the direct-to-video Tinkerbell series? not bad), but I do buy the physical Blu-Ray copy of each film . . . with the iTunes digital copy included. On the one hand, having the disc means having access to the extras that haven't quite made the transition to iTunes. The convenience of those digital copies right there on the set without having to fish the disc off the shelf, however -- that's all my kids have ever really known.
