The Media Variety Boom
As “Hollywood economist” Edward Jay Epstein has written, only about 10 percent of the U.S. population goes to movies on a weekly basis these days. That’s down from 65 percent half a century ago. The share of studio receipts coming from theater box office has declined from 100 percent in 1948 to a mere 18 percent in 2003. It’s been replaced over the years by what Epstein dubs “the rise of the home entertainment economy,” which consists of VHS and DVD rentals and sales, and pay and free TV fees. He also points out that this has hardly been a disaster for the six major studios — Paramount, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, Disney, Universal, and Sony — which are in fact doing as well as or better than ever.
Government figures on media usage of people 18 years and older estimate that the typical American consumed 3,444 hours of books, music, video, Internet, and the like in 1999. That figure was 3,599 hours in 2002 and is projected to rise to 3,874 hours by 2007.
In 2004, 19 million people could get video on demand, up 50 percent from 2003.
As Wired’s Chris Anderson detailed in his article ”The Long Tail” (also see his blog), the real action is offering everything for sale.
The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles.
“Hooray for Hollywood’s Slumping Sales,” by Nick Gillespie, Reason