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Tuesday, May 31, 2005

REVENGE OF THE DVD AND TIVO

Hello All,

Matthew Khalil goes to the movies about once a month, down from six or seven times just a few years ago. Khalil, a senior at UCLA, prefers instead to watch old movies and canceled television shows on DVD at home. He also spends about 10 hours a week with friends playing the video game Halo 2. And he still has to study, which means hours on the Internet and reading at least a book a week.

"If I want to watch a movie, I can just rent it on DVD," he said. "I want to do things that conform to my time frame, not someone else's."

Many Americans are changing the way they watch movies -- especially young people, the most avid moviegoers. Year-to-year box-office receipts have been down for 13 weekends in a row, despite the blockbuster opening of the new Star Wars movie. And movie executives are unsure whether the trend will end over the important Memorial Day weekend that officially launches the summer season. Meanwhile, sales of DVDs and other types of new entertainment media continue to surge.

With movie attendance sliding, so far, for the third consecutive year, many in the industry are starting to ask whether the slump is just part of a cyclical swing driven mostly by a crop of weak movies or whether it reflects a much bigger change in the way Americans look to be entertained -- a change that would pose serious new challenges to Hollywood. Studios have made more on DVD sales and licensing products than on theatrical releases for some time. Now, new technologies such as Tivo and video-on-demand are keeping even more people at home, as are advanced home entertainment centers, with their high-definition television images on large flat screens and multi-channel sound systems.

"It is much more chilling if there is a cultural shift in people staying away from movies," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of the Exhibitor Relations Co., which tracks business at the box office. "Quality is a fixable problem."

Last year, Americans spent an average of 78 hours watching videos and DVDs, a 53 percent increase since 2000, according to a study by the Motion Picture Association of America, the film industry's trade group. DVD sales and rentals soared 676.5 percent during the same period, and 60 percent of all homes with a television set now also have a DVD player. DVD sales and rentals alone were about $21 billion, according to the Digital Entertainment Group.

By contrast, movie attendance increased 8.1 percent from 2000 to 2004, according to the association. Many in the movie industry point to that figure as a sign of the overall health of the business. But during those five years, attendance was down in three of them, and the sharp increase in 2002 is attributed to the overwhelming success of Spider-Man and Star Wars: Attack of the Clones.

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Talk to ya soon,

Donnie Hoover

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