Author: Digital Digest | Latest News

The results and analysis for Blu-ray (and DVD) sales for the week ending 9th January 2016 are in. New release Sicario was the clear best seller on DVD and Blu-ray for the week.

Read the rest of the stats and analysis to find out how Blu-ray (and DVD) did.

Blu-ray sales declined for the first time in 2014, will the trend be continued this year, or will Blu-ray make a comeback?

Our "State of Play" feature looks at Blu-ray sales results from the last year and beyond, and identifies the major release milestones (Furious 7, Jurassic World), as well as looking at trends involving both Blu-ray market share and revenue. Click on the link below to read our analysis: 

Blu-ray: The State of Play - 2015

From the movie industry's unfounded worries about piracy to the music industry's unfounded worries about Spotify, read the news roundup for the week ending 17 January 2016

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Despite many complaints from some in the music industry about Spotify's low royalty payments, music labels are actually coming out ahead thanks to free music streaming, a study has found.

The paper, which was presented at the annual general meeting of the American Economic Association last week, is written by the EU's Joint Research Centre (JRC), specifically looking at the effect that music streaming has had on music industry. The paper examines the effect streaming has had on music revenue, focusing in particular on Spotify and Pandora, and its conclusions are very different from the ones espoused by some in the music industry.

Far from the low royalty rates from Spotify cannibalising music sales and reducing the revenue for labels and artists a like, the study found that at its worst, Spotify appears to be a revenue-neutral prospect for the music industry.

Instead of killing music sales on a large scale thanks to ad-supported free streaming, only one sale is affected for every 137 listens of the free streamed track, at an estimated loss of USD $0.82. But each of these 137 streams also earns the music industry 0.7 cents (for a total of $0.96), meaning the music industry actually comes out ahead.

This is because Spotify, as the researchers found, did not affect the habits of those who buy music, and instead, offers those that don't buy music (for example, music pirates) a way to contribute without having to spend their own money.

And all of this is not including the indirect promotional effect Spotify and Pandora has, with research suggesting songs played or streamed via these services have better sales than songs that don't get "airtime".

So it appears Spotify not only does not compete directly with music sales, it supplements sales and gives the music industry with another way to "sell" its music.

Hollywood's dire warnings about the effect of piracy seems to be far and wide of the mark, as the movie industry enjoyed a spectacular 2015 in terms of ticket sales and profit.

With two of the top four all time box office hits being released in 2015 ('Jurassic World' and 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens'), it was a record year for box office takings in North American and around the world.

For the first time ever, ticket sales in North American broke through the $11 billion barrier, up 9% from a year ago. Globally, box office receipts were also at a record breaking $38 billion, with China, a previous (and perhaps current) piracy hotbed, now being the second largest market in the world.

The actual number of tickets sold also increased, by more than 5%, suggesting that it's not just the rise in ticket prices that's accounting for the higher takings.

All of this comes despite 2015 being another massive year for piracy, with the increasing threat of easy to use piracy platforms such as the "Netflix-for-pirates" Popcorn Time enjoying huge popularity among eager movie pirates.

It appears for now though that piracy's effect on the movie business can be contained, and certainly seems to be more optimistic than the previous predictions of bankruptcy, job losses and even the entire end of movie-making business.

The results and analysis for Blu-ray (and DVD) sales for the week ending 2nd January 2016 are in. A quiet week in terms of new releases, with the highest selling one being Hitman: Agent 47.

Read the rest of the stats and analysis to find out how Blu-ray (and DVD) did.

The founder of a Chinese cracking forum has warned that game cracking may become an impossible task, thanks to anti-tampering technology Denuvo.

Denuvo is unlike traditional copy protection solutions in that it's an anti-tampering system that is used to protect existing DRM solutions. How it works exactly is still a closely guarded secret by the Austrian company behind the technology, but what it most likely does is to employ code obfuscation to make it hard for crackers to examine and make changes to the code.

With an ever increasing level of encryption, the founder of the Chinese cracking forum, Bird Sister, fears that within two years' time it will become far too difficult to break the copy protection on games, at least in a timely fashion. 

Even now, games are proving far too difficult to break to make it worthwhile for pirated game downloaders. Whereas games used to be cracked within a day of release, recent games such as the soccer game FIFA 16 has yet to be cracked despite being released in September. The first month of a game's release is extremely important for game publishers, as this when most of the sales occur. If Denuvo can successfully delay the pirated version's timely release, even if the game will be eventually cracked, then this will give game publishers exactly what they want.

If Bird Sister's prediction proves true, it would seem that Denuvo would be the perfect solution for game publishers, but its use is still not widespread due to several reasons. For one, it's a relatively high cost solution to implement, and there have been unsubstantiated reports of performance problems associated with the use of Denuvo.

The results and analysis for Blu-ray (and DVD) sales for the week ending 26th December 2015 are in. Not a big week for new releases (War Room was the only one in the top 10, and it came 4th), but the Holiday sales spike, plus Star Wars fever, helped Blu-ray weekly revenue results reach a 2015 high, for the last full week of the year.

Read the rest of the stats and analysis to find out how Blu-ray (and DVD) did.

The mystery of where high quality 4K pirated rips of streaming content may have been solved thanks to information obtained about a lawsuit filed by Warner Bros. and Intel subsidiary Digital Copy Protection (DCP).

The major Hollywood Studio and DCP, the company that owns and controls the HDCP copy protection standard, sued a Chinese manufacturer of HDMI converters and HDCP strippers. The company, HDFury, recently released a device that is capable of stripping the most recent version of HDCP, version 2.2, which is used to protect 4K content from streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon.

The first of these devices shipped in early November, which was just days before the first pirated 4K content started appearing on file download and sharing sites. It was theorized at that time that a loophole existed within older HDMI devices capable of playing 4K content, which allowed Netflix and Amazon content to be ripped. 

Warner Bros. and DCP allege HDFury violated the anti-circumvention provision of the DMCA and asks the court to bar the sale and promotion of the device in the United States. Both companies will be keen to prevent the HDFury device from being sold, not only to protect existing streaming content, but also to protect content released on the upcoming Ultra HD Blu-ray format, which also uses HDCP 2.2.