There are a number of film titles that I store in the My Movies section of IMDB that have inexplicably not been published on DVD, and I use the list to periodically check to see if they've finally surfaced. And it looks like I've got an inkling of hope of marking some titles off of my list, thanks to movie studios looking to the long tail to counter falling DVD sales. This week, Sony (which owns such studios as Columbia, Tri-Star, and Screen Gems) announced that it would license older DVD titles not currently released for production and distribution through HP's manufactured-on-demand service. As Studio Briefing notes:

The deal will allow consumers to order movies that ordinarily would not be stocked by dealers because they are too obscure or too old. HP indicated that it expects to sign similar deals with other studios. "We're hoping this provides another option to make available products that wouldn't necessarily garner widespread retail shelf space," Jason Spivak, head of strategic development at Sony Home Entertainment, told the Times. Added Doug Warner, head of HP's digital content business, "If studios can sell more catalog than previously, they can generate more money."

Sadly, this won't help me with the lost movie that's at the top of my list--The Big Fix, which starred Richard Dreyfuss as a 1970s gumshoe--as Universal Studios owns that property (and it's been frustratingly available only on VHS for years... c'mon, it's Richard Dreyfuss!). But if this venture is successful, hopefully we'll see other studios move to production-on-demand.

In other optical disc news, it seems that Warner Bros. announcement that it was moving exclusively to the Blu-ray high-definition disc format is pretty much killing off the HD DVD format. Noting sales for the week after the announcement just before CES, Electronista writes that Home Media Magazine found that "83 percent of movie sales were for Blu-ray versions of movies, leaving the remaining 17 percent to HD DVD."

~Agen G.N. Schmitz

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