Falling DVD Sales

In this month’s issue of The Deal, way back on page 48, there’s a discussion of how “Disruption has been rearranging the media landscape…” There’s a brief paragraph “…falling DVD sales, insufficiently counterbalanced by … digital sources like Netflix Inc.” Essentially the article is pointing out a number of sub-sectors that are suffering at the increased pace of innovation and disruption. The overall DVD manufacturing industry is projected to decline at about 3% annually for the next 4 years. That’s a net loss of about $1 billion from now until 2016. To me, there’s plenty of room to disrupt in this market – clearly there’s demand for content from consumers and on top of that the medium they’re accustomed to using is slowly disappearing. The streaming video market is an obvious choice, that’s why I started ChannelShift. But what other opportunities exist? Kid’s interactive programming like LeapFrog. Try this – Google ‘cdrom interactive instruction’ and see what comes up. You should get about 12 million results. What we need are companies that help this content get in front of an audience that is accustomed to immediate gratification. With the bandwidth going into homes now there is no reason a consumer has to wait for a shipment of DVD’s. All we need are companies to make it happen.