Author: Digital Digest | Latest News

The results and analysis for DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray sales for the week ending June 25th 2016 are in. 'Zootopia' held on to the number one spot, with new release My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, finishing in second place, having come closest to unseating the Disney hit.

Read the rest of the stats and analysis to find out how DVD, Blu-ray, Ultra HD Blu-ray did.

From the best Blu-ray to the worst DRM, read the news roundup for the week ending 3 July 2016

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'Frozen' has topped 'Avatar' when it comes to selling the most copies on Blu-ray, but it's the other way around when it comes to revenue earned.

Home Media Magazine has released a chart of the 50 best selling Blu-ray titles of all-time, first by units sold, and then separately by the revenue earned.

It was actually the pricier 'Star Wars: The Complete Saga' box-set, which features the first six movies in the franchise, that earned the most, with an estimated Blu-ray revenue of $207.16 million, ahead of the $174.48 million for 'Avatar' and the $154.31 million for 'Frozen'. The box-set was 36th on the units sold chart.

And despite being available for less than three months, 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' is already third when it comes to number of discs sold, 5th when it came to revenue.

The reason why 'Frozen' (7,134,000 units sold) beat 'Avatar' (7,099,000 units sold) in the units sold stakes, but not when it came to revenue, is both simple and complicated. Blu-ray prices have been dropping steadily since 2010, when 'Avatar' was released on Blu-ray, and this means studios have been earning less and less on a per unit basis since. From the two tables, we can deduce that the average price for 'Frozen' is $21.63, while for the older 'Avatar', it's higher at $24.58. 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' had an average price of $21.85. 

These averages will also drop in time, as titles become discounted (for example, 'The Dark Knight', one of the most frequently discounted titles available, now has an average price of only $20.11, despite being released in 2008 when Blu-ray prices were $30+ on average). The availability of "special" editions, such as 3D or 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray editions, will also affect the average unit price.

Other movie franchises that populate the top 10 include 'The Lord of the Rings', Universal's 'Despicable Me', Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, 'Jurassic World' and 'The Hunger Games'.

There were some potential surprises in the revenue chart, although perhaps not surprising to the millions who purchased these discs. Demo quality 'Planet Earth' is 12th, while Disney classics appear more frequently in the top 50 than you might realise ('The Lion King', 'Beauty and the Beast', 'The Little Mermaid', 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'), despite many of them falling foul of Disney's vault from time to time (when titles enter the vault, they are no longer available for sale at retail outlets - titles like 'Snow White' have entered and existed the vault on numerous occasions, on various Blu-ray editions).

[Source: Home Media Magazine]

Ultra HD Blu-ray is off to a better start than Blu-ray, according to the latest sales stats from Home Media Magazine.

Launching only in March, 228,000 Ultra HD Blu-ray discs have already been sold as of June 24. This compares extremely well to when Blu-ray was first launched, when only 57,000 discs were sold in roughly the same time period.

The fast uptake is happening despite the fact that only two Ultra HD Blu-ray player models have been launched so far, from Samsung and Panasonic (availability of the Panasonic model varies according to region). 

But despite the lack of hardware choices, over 45 Ultra HD Blu-ray releases are already on store shelves. In trying to answer the age old question of who came first, the chicken or the egg, or more specifically, the movies or the players, it appears that the overall strategy is leaning towards making 4K movies available first.

Of the released titles so far, the popular picks among early 4K adopters have been a mix of new releases, like 'The Martian' and 'Deadpool', and re-released classics like 'Independence Day'. But showing that the format still has a long way to go, one of the more popular recent releases on 4K, 'Independence Day', only accounted for 4.54% of all disc sales for the title (including Blu-ray, DVD and combo editions).

The format also recently received a huge boost from an unlikely source, with Microsoft announcing their upgraded Xbox One console will include Ultra HD Blu-ray playback, and will retail for $100 less than the Samsung player, currently the cheapest on the market.

[Via Variety]

The season finale of the sixth season of Game of Thrones has failed to break the all-time torrent swarm record, but it will still most likely end up being the most pirated TV show in 2016.

According to data gathered by TorrentFreak, over a million users downloaded the season finale just hours after the torrent was uploaded. At one point, more than 350,000 people were sharing a single copy of the episode, the most for any content this year, but not enough to break the all-time swarm record. The season premiere also failed to break any records.

Total downloads are expected to be similar to that from last year, perhaps even down a little.

The reason for the lack of a rise in piracy, despite the show's popularity growing, could be due to the greater number of legal means to watch the show, as well as HBO's more proactive actions on GoT piracy. HBO's actions have resulted in popular torrents being taken down, with new torrents taking their place, and thus scattering the swarms and dashing any chance of new records being broken.

[via TorrentFreak]

The results and analysis for DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray sales for the week ending June 11th 2016 are in. London Has Fallen was the week's best selling new release, but it only managed to get a second place finish, behind the unstoppable Zootopia.

Read the rest of the stats and analysis to find out how DVD, Blu-ray, Ultra HD Blu-ray did.

Hollywood's main copyright lobby has warned the EU not to adopt new laws which could ban the use of geo-blocking in EU countries.

The EU is aiming to remove geographical restrictions when it comes to accessing audio and visual programming, such as streaming Spotify or Netflix, within member countries as part of its Digital Single Market reform.

But addressing the CineEurope convention this week, MPAA Chairman and CEO Chris Dodd urged the EU to reconsider their actions, and warned that these changes could mean fewer movies, and higher prices for consumers.

"While the stated goals of these proposals are laudable – offering greater choice to European consumers and strengthening cultural diversity – in reality, these ideas could actually cause great harm to Europe’s film industries and its consumers," said Dodd.

"The European Union is made up of 28 different nations with different cultures, different languages, and different tastes. Forcing every film to be marketed and released the same way everywhere, at the same time, is a recipe for failure," he added.

"The ability of filmmakers and distributors to market and release their films where, how, and when they think best gives them the greatest chance to succeed."

Dodd urged the industry insiders attending the convention to put pressure on their elected representatives.

The European Commission will unveil their detailed plans for the audio-visual sector later this year.

Legal content is winning over piracy, at least according to Sandvine's latest Global Internet Phenomena report.

While Netflix continues to dominate both peak upstream and downstream traffic, the fastest growing bandwidth consumer was actually Amazon Video, one of Netflix's biggest rivals.

Moreover, BitTorrent usage continues to decline as a percentage of total web traffic, with legal sources such as Netflix, YouTube and even iTunes all having greater downstream peak traffic than the download method synonymous with piracy. 

Netflix's share of total peak traffic actually declined compared to the same report from 2015, down to 32.72% from 33.81%. This may be due to rivals increasing their market share, or may be due to the new bandwidth saving technologies now employed by Netflix.

Amazon Video's share of total traffic rose from 1.82% in 2015 to 3.96% in 2016, a significant rise for a service that's now available as a standalone product for the first time - it is now the third most popular video platform, behind Netflix and YouTube.

The report noted that as Hulu and HBO have more seasonal content (based on when new seasons of hit shows start and finish), the reported data for these services are subject to these seasonal changes.

Also new to the top 10 in the latest report is 'Xbox One Game Downloads', now the 9th most popular traffic source in peak times, rising above Facebook.

The results and analysis for DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray sales for the week ending June 11th 2016 are in. Disney's animated hit Zootopia was the new release of the week, and it easily became the top seller on Blu-ray for the week. 

Read the rest of the stats and analysis to find out how DVD, Blu-ray, Ultra HD Blu-ray did.