Moguls will need a stiff drink nearby when they read Morgan Stanley analyst Benjamin Swinburne’s bracing report today about the state of the home video business — and Hollywood studios. He says that film operations at Universal, Disney, Paramount, Fox, and Warner Bros are worth about $19.3B, down from $40.2B in 2007…

Harry Potter fans take heart. Just because Warner Bros says it won’t ship more DVDs or Blu-rays after December 29, that doesn’t mean Hogwarts will immediately vanish from physical or virtual shelves. Or that it won’t be available for streaming, video-on-demand or downloading. "There will be Potter product come the…

A research report this morning from The NPD Group confirms the prevailing narrative that the home video business is in trouble — although you might miss that if you just look at the upbeat headline on its release: “Consumers Still Positive On Blu-ray.” NPD found that 116 million adults bought a DVD or Blu-ray disc in…

The bottom seems to have fallen out of the DVD market according to a startling report out this week from SNL Kagan. The research firm says that studio shipments of DVDs fell 43.8% to 226 million discs last year. Wholesale revenues fell about the same amount, 43.9%, to $4.47 billion. The study compared 415 titles…

One day after making a deal to co-finance the next two James Bond films and other feature films over the next five years, MGM chiefs Gary Barber and Roger Birnbaum solidified another piece of the reawakening studio’s puzzle by renewing its DVD deal with Fox through 2016. Here’s the official announcement: LOS ANGELES…

The online DVD and streaming rental provider which keeps announcing Big Media deal after deal also announced today that it now has 20 million subscribers and expects to have perhaps as many as 23 million by the end of 2011’s first quarter. But the real news is that Netflix blew past Wall Street’s forecasts with its…

EXCLUSIVE: As if Twentieth Century Fox and James Cameron haven’t made enough money off this movie… It was always the director’s intention to create the "ultimate box set" that went deeper into the filmmaker process and the Avatar journey for fans. I understand he was very involved with every aspect of the development…

Blockbuster made it official today, filing its long expected Chapter 11 bankruptcy, with a line of creditors that includes its product suppliers like Fox, Sony, Universal, Warner Bros and Disney. It seems unfathomable that given Blockbuster’s supremacy at one time–think of all the mom and pop video stores that went…

Spending on movies and home entertainment in Asia Pacific will increase by 7.2% compounded annually to reach $29.3 billion by 2014. So says PricewaterhouseCoopers' latest global entertainment and media outlook 2010-2014, published today. The pace of spending in Latin America will also outstrip the US, Canada and…

HOLLYWOOD, CA and OAKBROOK TERRACE, IL (June 15, 2010) -Paramount Home Entertainment Inc. (PHE) and Redbox Automated Retail, LLC (redbox), today announced that Paramount exercised its option to extend its revenue sharing license agreement, providing redbox access to PHE DVD and Blu-ray titles to rent at its…

Consumer spending on Blu-ray and DVD is going to decline on average by 3.5% a year between over the next five years. So says London-based consultancy Screen Digest, which predicts the amount spent overseas on "packaged media" will drop to $14.5 billion by 2014, compared with $17.1 billion last year. If Screen Digest's…

6:20 PM UPDATE: Now I hear NBC will decide on 3 possible futures for Heroes, perhaps as soon as tomorrow. The most unlikely is a 13-episode order for midseason. (Creator Tim Kring is hoping for this scenario, of course.) A real possibility is that NBC cancels it altogether. But I’m told odds are best that…