DVDs and big bucks.

Interesting in-depth article on DVDs in the NY Times earlier this week, on how studios are looking to cash in on DVDs, not that this is a real surprise. What came as a surprise to me were the figures for the first 2 1/2 months of the year, where Americans spent $1.78 billion at the box office, going to movies, and $4.8 billion to buy and rent DVDs and videocassettes. And Hollywood is realizing that not only will the sales of DVDs and videocassettes help a movie to turn a profit, but sometimes a movie that was an utter bust at the box office can turn into a successful hit through DVDs (Office Space, for instance, which cost $10 million to make and made only $10 at the box office, has sold over $40 million worth of DVDs).

The one dark cloud on DVD's horizon that the article mentions is the fear that the ability to directly download movies - "in five years when you can download a movie as fast as a song" - will cause the DVD bubble to burst. I'm not so sure that will happen, at least all that soon: I don't see that enough people will have the ability to download material that quickly in five years to make a a difference (isn't that a couple of orders of magnitude faster than DSL or cable?), or that enough of those people will have the ability to transfer it to their video screens of choice (who would prefer to watch the Lord of the Rings movies on their computer monitor instead of their 47-inch flatscreen TVs?), or that the convenience - if any - of being able to download a movie (instead of, say, getting it from Netflix or Blockbuster) outweighs the extra features that most DVDs have.