For the most cynical, this amounts to driving the last nail in the coffin. The video market, already in free fall for the past ten years, crushed by piracy and buffeted more and more each day by fierce competition from streaming platforms, has received very bad news head-on. Implemented since the end of January, the latest version of the media chronology – the order in which films are exploited in the various media after their theatrical release – will penalize this market even more.
DVDs, Blu-rays, 4K, for rental or for purchase via download, will still be able to be released four months after the day of the film’s first theatrical screening, but the video will now only benefit from an exclusivity window. two months – against four previously, since Canal+ and OCS will be able to broadcast these feature films six months (and no longer eight months) after their release. A hard blow for video editors, especially the subsidiaries of American studios or television channels that release new releases.
Since 2010, the physical video market, made up of 60% films, has been falling inexorably, year after year. It has unscrewed, according to the CNC-GfK barometer, from more than 1.4 billion euros in 2010, to 245.5 million in 2021. A drop of 82.4% in a decade. “It’s too easy to bury the physical”, is moved Yves Elalouf, president of the Union of digital video publishing (SEVN). He explains the 17.2% drop in this market in 2021 by the Covid-19 pandemic and recalls that fee-for-service (purchase or rental) still represented 216 million euros last year. The total video market was €461.5 million, in total.
“We got nothing”
“Where we expected government support, we got nothing, and video was the most penalized activity”, regrets Mr. Elalouf, referring to the file of the chronology of the media. He would have liked the video to start sooner, three months after the theatrical release of a film. “It would be coherent, he said, since 99% of films disappear from the screens after twelve weeks of exploitation. This poses a fundamental problem: these “fallow” feature films are no longer visible anywhere for at least a month, which is conducive to piracy. »
In the other countries, the exclusivity of exploitation of the films in room lasts, in general, three months, “or even less, only forty-five days in the United States, the Netherlands, Spain or the Nordic countries”underlines the president of the SEVN. “We don’t want to come to this”, he admits. The lobby of the rooms to preserve its square is above all too powerful for the video to manage to start it. ” The fight goes on “wants to believe Mr. Elalouf, hoping to win his case in a year, when the chronology of the media will be re-examined.
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