Warner Vision Australia has issued a press release on the growth of DVD sales in Australia. The good bit:
… the DVD industry booming at 102% compared to the previous year (by unit growth) …This year, the DVD software market will generate expected retail sales of $860.8 million making DVD the fastest growing product format the industry has ever seen.
Strong hardware sales underpin this growth. By the end of 2003 there will be over 3.7 million DVD players in Australian homes, which is 43% of the 7.51 million households in Australia. This is almost double the number from 2002 and a far cry from the 89,000 units at the end of 1999. Estimates are for a penetration rate of around 60% by the end of 2004.
Yippee … lots of movie DVDs!
But here’s the bad news:
Music DVD as a genre is on the up and up, with a growth rate of 204% for the same period, which is double the growth rate of the total DVD market … Music DVD retail sales have grown from 6% in 2002 to 9.2% of the total market value for the same period.
The one saving piece of information about Music DVDs is that ‘Music DVD is around 3-5% of the total DVD market in the US, UK, France & Germany.’ That is, in the much bigger markets.
So why do I consider this bad news? Because I see it coming at the expense of DVD Audio and SACD.
Music DVDs are just DVD Video, except that they have concerts or video clips instead of movies. The sound is normally in Dolby Digital, sometimes in DTS and rarely in PCM. In other words, for most the sound quality is simply not as good as would be available from either DVD Audio or SACD.
The problem is that the main selling points of the high resolution formats is their sound quality, but the majority of buyers simply aren’t interested in these subtle improvements over the CD. So CDs continue to sell strongly and if people want DVD, they want the value-added video content more than what DVD Audio or SACD have to offer (even though the former can have video as well). I suspect the market will sort itself out eventually with the CD remaining the primary audio-only format, and DVD Video being the value-added format. Likely studio material will find its way onto DVD Video, with the audio accompanied by music videos where available, or lyrics and photos where not. Hopefully one of the audio tracks will be at least 48kHz/16 bit PCM.
As for DVD Audio and SACD? They’ll either remain specialty items with a very limited catalogue and distribution (when was the last time you saw either one in a major record store?), or they may die altogether.