This article is focused on mainstream cinema and I tend to agree with it; I miss the days when major studios were releasing DVDs packed with extras. Simultaneously, we're in the middle of a major boutique Blu-ray boom. I am not intimately familiar with the economics of this, but it's demonstrably true that it's possible to license and produce high quality Blu-rays with a lot of interesting extras in batches of 2-3K and make a living at it.
We're probably all familiar with the Criterion Collection, which has been around for decades. Fewer of us have heard of Vinegar Syndrome, which has a highly successful business producing Blu-rays of mostly B movies and exploitation flicks. Arrow, based in the UK, has been releasing cult movies for a couple of decades and we're at the point where people who worked for Arrow are going and starting their own boutique companies (Radiance Films, for example, who produce 3-4 discs a month, mostly non-English genre movies). There are easily a dozen more companies like this out there.
I think the model requires appealing to a collector mindset. The boutique Blu-ray subreddit often hosts fervent arguments between people who don't break the shrink wrap and people who care about the movies. Several of the boutique companies have subscriptions: for a thousand bucks you can get one copy of everything they produce in the year. Often a new release will be available in special packaging for a limited run, with no difference in the content: those sell like hotcakes.
I don't know if it's practical to run this model for major studios. For one thing, it's a tiny market as these things go -- does Sony really want to make the effort to pump out cool material for a couple of thousand sales? They'd be doing it for prestige and marketing reasons, not financial rewards. There might be a niche for boutique companies to do an ongoing deal with a major studio for this kind of release, though.
Hacker Cinema
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This article is focused on mainstream cinema and I tend to agree with it; I miss the days when major studios were releasing DVDs packed with extras. Simultaneously, we're in the middle of a major boutique Blu-ray boom. I am not intimately familiar with the economics of this, but it's demonstrably true that it's possible to license and produce high quality Blu-rays with a lot of interesting extras in batches of 2-3K and make a living at it.
We're probably all familiar with the Criterion Collection, which has been around for decades. Fewer of us have heard of Vinegar Syndrome, which has a highly successful business producing Blu-rays of mostly B movies and exploitation flicks. Arrow, based in the UK, has been releasing cult movies for a couple of decades and we're at the point where people who worked for Arrow are going and starting their own boutique companies (Radiance Films, for example, who produce 3-4 discs a month, mostly non-English genre movies). There are easily a dozen more companies like this out there.
I think the model requires appealing to a collector mindset. The boutique Blu-ray subreddit often hosts fervent arguments between people who don't break the shrink wrap and people who care about the movies. Several of the boutique companies have subscriptions: for a thousand bucks you can get one copy of everything they produce in the year. Often a new release will be available in special packaging for a limited run, with no difference in the content: those sell like hotcakes.
I don't know if it's practical to run this model for major studios. For one thing, it's a tiny market as these things go -- does Sony really want to make the effort to pump out cool material for a couple of thousand sales? They'd be doing it for prestige and marketing reasons, not financial rewards. There might be a niche for boutique companies to do an ongoing deal with a major studio for this kind of release, though.