DVD sales

The Guardian had a piece a while back on how DVD sales have overtaken receipts from the box office. That's quite interesting - I know many people have souped-up home systems now, but many still watch DVDs on a regular 20-inch TV, and I'd imagine that would create a market for those more intimate, personal films.

That piece on DVD sales, incidentally, illustrates Chris Anderson's principle of the Long Tail. Now just because you can't get 1000 people who want to watch your movie at a time doesn't mean you can't make a profit from the movie. So documentary buffs and arthouse cinema denizens should probably rejoice.

It seems, though, that if the Long Tail principle holds, the traditional distinction between movies and TV might be increasingly blurred. If more and more films get made with the explicit intent of recouping costs / making profits via DVD or some other personal-distribution method, directors will know that films are primarily going to be viewed on screens far smaller than movie-theatre screens - and that may in fact impact their aesthetic choices, much in the same way that TV involves different aesthetic choices from movies watched in theatres.

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