IHS iSuppli: Video Retail Business on the Decline

EL SEGUNDO: Sales for physical discs are expected to continue to decline, while electronic sell-through (EST) figures for movies and TV shows increase, though overall purchasing of video content is forecast to dip to $9.9 billion for the year, down 29 percent from its $14.1 billion peak in 2004, according to IHS iSuppli.

Disc sales brought in around $10 billion in 2010, dropping to $9.25 billion in 2011. IHS iSuppli predicts that number will fall to $8.7 billion in 2012, $8.2 billion in 2013, $7.6 billion in 2014 and $7.1 billion in 2015. EST sales for movies brought in $230 million in 2010, increasing to $258.5 million this year. That number is expected to rise to $388.1 million by 2015. For TV shows, EST sales were even higher, $376.7 million in 2010 and $418.2 million in 2011. IHS iSuppli forecasts this to rise to $562.3 million by 2015.

However, the gains in EST do not make up for the declines in disc sales. Overall U.S. consumer purchasing of video content is declining. Unless there’s a change in consumer proposition, revenue is expected to continue to fall in the coming years to $8.1 billion in 2015. However, five of the six major Hollywood studios have joined in the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) consortium with leading physical and electronic retailers and key technology companies to develop UltraViolet. UltraViolet is a system designed to allow a digital copy of a film or TV show (from a physical or electronic source) to be played on any one of 12 devices owned by up to six members of a household, via download or streaming from the cloud. Warner Home Video got things rolling with UltraViolet in October in the U.S. with the release of the first Blu-ray discs enabled with the technology.

"The U.S. video retail business is in decline,” said Tom Adams, principal analyst and director, U.S. media, for IHS. “Although the rate of decrease moderated during the last two years from the double-digit drop in the recessionary year of 2009, we don’t see those declines turning into renewed growth without a fundamental change in the ownership proposition for consumers. UltraViolet delivers that kind of change. In the absence of easy access to all their purchased content across all their proliferating number of screens, consumers have been cutting back on buying discs, while the growing electronic sell-through (EST) market is simply too small to make up the difference."

"We think it’s important that UltraViolet is being launched not so much as a feature of EST files, but as a value-added feature of the digital disc, on which consumers have spent $113 billion since they were introduced in 1997," Adams added. "Even if our projections are correct that annual disc sales in the United States will have declined to some $9.3 billion in 2011, that’s still about 14 times the size of the EST business. So, there are two advantages to a disc-focused strategy. First, tens of millions of the studios’ best customers will be quickly exposed to the UltraViolet pitch in the box. Second, if UltraViolet it sparks just a 7 percent increase in consumer disc buying in the years ahead, it would pay off for studios as much as a doubling of the EST business."