@vikinghead: Not exactly. Shout Factory “is doing more for” Shout Factory. Once the collector era is finished, boutiques will be out of business. Hollywood wants complete control over their properties, something they can never have with tangible media. As such, studios are not interested in growing the collector market; they’re interested in killing it, with the assumption that collectors will invest as much on unspecified and eventually temporary access only, as we have spent for the past 30 or so years on real, collectible formats the courts have affirmed we have legal ownership of. They can already make more profit selling or even renting a movie digitally for $5 than they can selling it physically for at least twice as much and it’s a lot less hassle estimating demand, fixing defects, negotiating with distributors… But they expect they’ll be able to rent at closer to $20-$30 once physical is no longer an option. Just like video game developers, studios have always hated that we can sell our movies, but they could tolerate it until the courts ruled that the rental market (namely Blockbuster) could sell their rental surplus too, which dramatically cut into their profits for new copies, forcing them to be more and more competitive, since rental windows had long been ended. Obviously, studios don’t appreciate retailers like amazon trying to use its market power to cut into their profits any more than they did Blockbuster. But amazon is far too big and deals in too many types of commodities for studios to kill off like they did Blockbuster by aiding Redbox to overtake the physical rental market and using Netflix to grow digital rentals. But revenues are still too high for hollywood to cut us off completely; they can’t justify that to their investors yet. Instead, for over a decade, they’ve been doing everything they can to make physical less desirable than digital, telling everyone naive enough to believe them that digital is better, manipulating sells figures and inexperienced online journalists, telling retailers that they’re phasing out physical so they should adjust your plans accordingly, delayed release, fewer features, higher prices, lesser visibility in stores and advertising; licensing expectedly lower selling titles to private labels, if profit margins aren’t substantial enough to keep them in house is just another part of it. What’s surprising is that after so many years of such aggressive, heavy-handed market manipulation, physical still isn’t dead yet. But Shout hasn’t earned any credit for that, whatsoever.
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