When Rolls-Royce sells a car, they want the user to have the highest level experience.
For this reason, no matter how old a Rolls Royce is, if it breaks down – the  owner can count on Rolls to turn up to get the car off the side of the road. After all, that’s the Rolls Royce reputation being sullied.
But then Rolls Royce has an industry advantage. Each one of their handcrafted machines have been designed to last – for a long time and most owners reward this quality with careful maintenance and TLC.

For those of us that use the same TLC with our DVD’s and CD’s, we own a product that will most probably outlive us.
An acetate polymer disc will take approximatley 189 years to breakdown to its original constituent particles.  Unlike VHS tapes which suffer from wear and tear and magnetic particle adhesion failure and film breakdown within 15-20 years.

So there is the underlying problem.

Records – wore out.
Reel to reel tapes wore out
Eight track cartridges wore out
Cassette tapes wore out
VHS tapes wore out
Even Ipods wear out (10,000 or 15,000 hours live per SSD disk or Hard disk).

But CD’s and DVD’s? Provided they are handled without fingerprints all over the medium (acid, salt, and other chemical residues)  and kept in their cases (dust and airborne contaminants free environment) – they should last between 5 and 15 generations.

That’s the Problem.
Why would anyone hold onto a DVD that they and every family member had watched – at least three times in the last two years. (Especially if you've just been laid off and are looking around the apartment for items to Pawn.)
The numbers are starting to show that they don’t.
They sell them, via EBay, Cashconverters and garage sales.
Indications from EBay are that there is a solid aftermarket trade in used DVD’s. As high as 14000 titles per month and from Cashconverters, that 33% of all items (Australia wide, an estimated 150,000 titles per month) that walk out of their sales franchises are secondhand DVD’s. (Thats nearly two million titles per annum – just from Ebay and Cash Converters). 
“This is however a relatively new segment of our business,” according to a Cashconverters spokesperson. “We only started to notice the growth in about October last year”.

This then adds a whole new dimension to the Industry sales figures.

Normal Movie Sales consist of :
Cinema Release, DVD Release,  Airline and Cable Release, Free to Air Network Release.
Each release spaced at approximate three month intervals to ensure maximum market penetration for each product.

With a few exceptions e.g.: The Star wars Trilogy and digital remasters, movies are then forgotten about and relegated to back catalogues to be written off as non-movers – and then impossible to obtain except through P2P or the evolving secondary CD/DVD market..

The problem is – the content industry doesn’t currently have the foresight of its forefathers;  here I refer to the purchase of the GTV9 Australian Television Broadcasting license by Hoyt’s, Greater Union Theatres, J.C. Williamson’s Theatres, 3XY, 3UZ, 3KZ and Cinesound Productions in 1957.


It doesn’t own shares in what appears to be the two fastest growing segments of the content industry – Used CD and DVD content and P2P content.

And the indications are that both have a longer lifespan than all the previous Medias.

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Posted in Economics Main Page by Tom Koltai No Comments Yet