HOME VIDEO MARKET BETTER THAN BELIEVED

The home video market may not be so depressed as some reports have suggested. While average household spending for sales and rentals of physical discs dropped 11 percent — to $133.31 in 2011 versus $149.53 in 2010 according to researchers IHS Screen Digest — the reason may have had less to do with piracy than with the fact that there was less interest in the movies that were released in 2011 than in 2010 — as theater-attendance figures demonstrated. Moreover, according to the Screen Digest report, when revenue is added from video-on-demand, sales and rentals from Internet sites like Amazon and Apple, and subscription streaming from Netflix, Hulu Plus and others, video spending overall appears, in the words of the report, “less bleak.”