Audio Video News

In the spirit of "if at first you don't succeed . . .," Hollywood is attempting every combination of interactive DVD/Internet "synergy" it can think of. Warner Home Video will be taking its latest stab at convergence January 17 when the company will be hosting a "Virtual Theater" event for their DVD release of <I>The Perfect Storm</I>.

After bleeding money for two years, <A HREF="http://www.hollywoodvideo.com/">Hollywood Entertainment Corporation</A> has announced that it is pulling the plug on <A HREF="http://www.reel.com/">Reel.com</A>, its high-profile online video sales operation, whose losses have been in the range of $4 million to $5 million monthly. The announcement came June 13, in which Hollywood Entertainment stated that it has laid off all 150 employees of Reel.com and arranged a deal with <A HREF="http://www.buy.com/">Buy.com</A> to fulfill orders. The Reel.com site is still active, with a pop-up advisory telling customers the bad news.

No one who's ventured into a computer store recently could have failed to note the amount of space devoted to video capture and editing technology. Most of it is being marketed to amateur videomakers and would-be cinematographers, but there's an obvious implication that the next step is bit-for-bit copying of commercial DVDs.

One notable example is Time Warner, whose CEO Jeff Bewkes once referred to Netflix as the Albanian army. As in: "Is the Albanian army going to take over the world?" Then Netflix paid Time Warner $200,000 per episode for 100 episodes of Nip/Tuck. Now Bewkes refers to Netflix with "fondness."