JUNE 16 | Most of the industry discussion—and the most heated industry discussion—about DVD and the Internet today focuses on distribution. It’s about traditionally-produced content—films and TV series, for the most part—and the sequence in which it is distributed, with DVD until very recently getting an earlier window than the Internet on this content. The Internet achieving some parity with DVD in the windows sequence is, of course, the focal point of most of the discussion.
A couple of recent product announcements, however, bring a completely different focus to the DVD-Internet discussion, one that’s as much about content creation as distribution.
Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment in August will release popular Internet series Broken Saints as its first Web-originated DVD box set. The studio will bundle 24 Flash-animated episodes into a four-disc collector’s set with commentaries and behind-the-scenes featurettes—the full DVD treatment—and price the set at $50. To demonstrate the retail appeal of the title, Fox has also signed an exclusive promotional deal with Trans World to provide the retailer a comic book in the package.
Then, in the fourth quarter, Elite Entertainment will release The Horror Channel’s original Internet series, Shadow Falls, which begins its online run this summer as what the cable net says is the first online horror series.
These two releases are great examples of the increasingly blurred lines between old and new media.
While old (traditionally-created) media like films and TV shows are finding new audiences on the Internet, new (created for the Web) media programs are finding new, potentially much broader audiences on old media DVD.
About 5 million visitors regularly tuned in to Broken Saints online, making its audience roughly the same size as that for a moderately successful movie or TV show. With the right marketing, those mid-levels movies or TV shows can find much larger audiences on DVD, and Fox is betting the same thing will happen for Broken Saints.
One need only look at the numbers of people watching original video on the Internet to know this is just the beginning of a trend. The Horror Channel Web site draws 600,000 unique visitors per month.
The populist YouTube, arguably the hottest new channel in any media, serves up 50 million videos a day, most of them short and amateur-made clips, featuring kid tricks, sports wipeouts and everyday stuff that probably wouldn’t make it on America’s Funniest Home Videos. But there’s also a lot of originality and creativity on display. It’s only a matter of time before some of it shows up on DVD.
It’s time to stop looking at the Internet just as a competitive/complementary distribution channel to DVD but rather as a creative breeding ground for the disc format.
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