According to a research, online film demand is cooling down, thus causing a massive decline. Now Hollywood’s dream to built around movies in digital downloads has been in danger. The film industry has been banking so much on digital distribution, where they hope it would replace the income it generates from sales of DVD’s.
But it just didn’t happen as the past two years saw a massive decline.
This is perhaps due to the culture of movie watchers I believe. They want to spend movie time with families, which apparently watching it on your personal computers could not give. Watching the digital format means lesser fun and lesser of those happy moments munching some popcorns in between. The market seems to be just cooling off, which practically wasn’t caused by any other economic factors. The level of interest just isn’t there any more.
While sales in digital films rose sharply in 2007 and 2008, growth stuttered in 2009 according to a report sent by Screen Digest. The media research company forecasted total online movie sales in US for 2009 at 360 million dollars, based on the sharp growth from the previous two years.
Moreover, the media research company believes consumers have been deterred by an array of competing online platforms that prevented viewers from watching digitally downloaded films comfortably at their own place too. Say for example, a consumer buying a film from Apple’s iTune Store is unable to watch it on their MS Xbox Console.
There are so many restrictions, which is all about viewers cannot do, rather that what they can possibly do. This stirred a problem in Hollywood, which is obviously making ways on how to address the digital distribution issue.
The sad story though is there is no immediate solution to the issue, which would obviously make Hollywood concerned about the issue.