M+E Daily
At UBS Conference: DVD Decline Seen To Slow, But Challenges Won’t End With Recession
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More from the UBS Global Media & Communications Conference in New York: two takes on the health of the DVD business.
Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes told conference attendees yesterday that “DVD trends are not declining as fast as they were last year.” Some of the sales slide, Bewkes said, had been attributable to “the pressure of the economic contraction.”
Bewkes added that there is “certainly a place” for rental kiosks in the packaged media marketplace, but the question of “where they should be in the temporal chain of distribution” remains open.
While a slower rate of decline is certainly welcome news to those with ties to the DVD business, home entertainment executives still will have their work cut out for them as them as the economy picks up.
“The downturn in the economy has some impact on DVDs, but it goes way beyond that,” said Robert Iger, Walt Disney Company CEO, in his conference presentation this morning.
Packaged media faces “huge competition in the marketplace for people’s time and money when it comes to entertainment,” Iger said. “We see that trend continuing regardless of the economy…We don’t see that trend slowing down.”
