The Future of the Disc

This article highlights the problems that DVD and CD retailers are having as the industry goes digital. The article discuses the shift from store bought movies and music to online based downloading. Some examples include Wal-Mart's new online movie download service to battle slumping DVD sales and stay ahead of competitors like Best Buy and Circuit City. The article reinforces that moving this whole industry digital hurt the retailers in the long run; the sale of DVD and CDs traditionally drove consumers to the store to buy new releases. Purchasing online crates much less foot traffic in stores and is bad fro business.

I feel that the entertainment industry can handle the move to downloads as they survived many transformations in the past. For example, moving from Videocassette to compact discs was a fast transformation because movies and music sell them self. I noticed that in my town 7 of the 8 Music stores closed; thanks to Itunes and free/stolen music downloads from services like limewire purchasing CD's is a thing of the past, Ipods rule now. I don't think online movie downloading will be popular until they develop a faster way to download, lower prices, and increase the quality of the image.

The real problem that is driving the whole industry to the Internet is the I pod. People want to download these movies and songs so they can put it on their I pod's. If retailers could create a physical store front for I pods/ digital players where people can bring them to a store and have movies put on to them fast instead of wasting hard drive space on a computer. This will keep foot traffic in stores and I think would increase sales.