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The Warner Archive films Ron ordered came in these attractive DVD boxes. |
of TheColumnists.com
While nobody was looking, a revolutionary new marketing strategy has slipped into the already wavering home video market, threatening to change it forever.
This month Warner Home Video has begun to sell DVD's directly from the Warner studio archives to the public. This is the beginning of what amounts to the "on demand" concept coming to the home video sales market.
I made two purchases by going to the Warner Bros. "store" website, clicking on "Warner Archive," shopping through a list of 150 films never before on home video and choosing two I wanted for my collection. First was MGM's "Ice Follies of 1939" with Joan Crawford, James Stewart and Lew Ayres, which includes that Technicolor finish featuring the actual stars of the Shipstad & Johnson International Ice Follies. Then I chose RKO's "The Bamboo Blonde" with Frances Langford, the real-life "Sweetheart of the Fighting Fronts," singing her lungs out for our GI's under the direction of...of all people...Anthony Mann, whose classic films noir and Jimmy Stewart westerns have made him a film immortal.
The films arrived in less than a week, housed in standard DVD containers with all the pertinent liner notes. The cost: $19.95 each, which is pretty much the standard price for a DVD in stores, and no charge for postage! They're beautiful, flawless copies of the original films and not some outlaw copies taped off the air by moonlighters.
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Go to www.WBshop.com and click on "Warner Archive." |
Think about this for a minute and try to fathom the implications. First is the impact on the so-called "collectors market" for films not commercially released by their copyright owners.
Currently, if a film is not being marketed commercially by the studio, the authorities have permitted film collectors to make copies when the films are telecast on channels like Turner Classic Movies or Fox Movie Channel and sell them, theoretically, to other collectors. I've acquired hundreds of films this way. Many are of very poor quality, but you don't complain if that's the only way you can get a copy for your own enjoyment at any time.
The Warner Archive collection even solves that problem Since most of these films have not been remastered, you can actually preview the quality of the film online and decide it it meets your needs.
And, by the way, you can also download these films on demand if you don't want to wait for the films to come in the mail.
Once all the rights holders follow the Warner lead, it would be possible for film fans to order any film they want and not have to wait for somebody to decide it's commercially viable to be sent out to video stores.
Here's the big point: It no longer matters much if there's only a minor interest in such a film. You don't have to make thousands of copies and send them out to every store in the world., Therefore, you're making a very small number at a time and you're essentially waiting until enough people order the film to make more copies. Overhead goes way down. Cost of manufacturing stays low.
Technology now makes electronic ordering and sale of DVDs very efficient. The mail order DVD rental outfits like Netflix have proved that point already. They're already threatening the survival of DVD rental stores.
The current recession also has hit video stores hard. People who might want to buy a DVD may just rent it until they can afford to buy it. But a direct-from-archives operation cuts out the middle man, saves all the expense of keeping stores open when customers aren't coming.
It won't take long for everybody in the business to realize this can work for new films even better than it can for vintage oldies like the collectors want. Studios could save lots of money by selling their new films directly to the public via their websites in a Netflix-style operation that swings into action as soon as the theatrical run of a feature is over.
I've found that solid online companies like Amazon.com are very reliable and often are cheaper than a video store, especially if you order several films at once and qualify for the "no postal fees" deals most of them offer. No reason a big movie studio can't set up something just as efficient to handle their new product and their archival material online.
The Warner experiment is the best one could hope for because the studio controls a lot more than just the films made by Warner Bros. The archive seems to be selling films from the same sources Turner Classic Movies has available to it for telecast on the cable channel: The RKO, MGM and Columbia archives as well as the Warner backlog of films.
Right now the Warner setup is opening the archives 150 films at a time. This will allow the company to make all the proper containers with the right information collectors want on them. So far, I haven't seen any signs that they're putting "extras" on the discs, but perhaps that will come later.
The little video store on the corner is surely not going to survive all the pressures of cable networks with "on demand" collections of films you can watch. The pay-per-view cost of brand new movies "on demand" is usually on a par with rental fees from stores--and your cable system is never out of the hit films you want to watch. Even the big rental outlets are dying from Netflix competition and have been forced to go into that business themselves, even dropping late rental fees.
But opening the archives of the studios is the final death knell for video stores, who could never afford to stock such low demand films, even if they were made available by the studios to stores.
As for film nuts like me, this is the start of a grand era in which we may be able to see all the films we ever wanted to see--and put them in our library, too.
©2009 by Ron Miller. The DVD covers are courtesy of The Warner Archive. This column first posted April 6, 2009.
TO ACCESS RON MILLER'S ARCHIVE OF COLUMNS ON THIS SITE, CLICK HERE: MILLER ARCHIVE
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