Displaying items by tag: Video on Demand

All right, as expected today, the Digital Entertainment Group (DEG) held its January virtual expo and released a summary of its preliminary Year-End 2020 Home Entertainment Report. This expo is typically an in-person industry reception held at CES in Las Vegas, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic both CES and the DEG Expo have of course gone virtual this year. And as expected, this year’s report offers both good news and bad news, but also some rather dramatic big-picture observations.

Let’s knock out the bad news first: Sell-Through (read: physical media) consumer spending for 2020 was $2.45 billion, a drop of 25.6% from 2019.

A few days ago, we previewed the likely number for 2020 using the weekly Media Play News disc sales data here at The Bits, which indicated an overall drop in physical media sales of 20.46%. Well... it turns out that, based upon the official DEG data, the drop was about 5% more severe than we anticipated. As I mentioned a week ago (back January 20), that’s still in line with my general prediction from July, which was that 2020 would see a decline of anything between 9-30% in physical media sales. Obviously, there were just too many wildcards in the midst of the pandemic to be more specific. [Read on here...]