A Brief History of the DVD

Almost twenty years ago, DVDs debuted at the Consumer Electronics Expo. It was 1996, and the DVD technology was the VHS killer the movie industry was longing for. For the next decade, DVDs dominated, Blockbuster was king of the in-store rental, followed by a number of years later, Netflix.  Did you know that Blockbuster turned down buying Netflix in 2000 at a bargain basement price.  That was a fail.

Blockbuster eventually lost the DVD battle to Netflix and in the subsequent years Netflix would begin to minimize the DVD as too costly and too time consuming for its future growth strategy.   Sure they still rent them, as do RedBox and others, but the DVD’s future will mostly struggle on  at yard sales and $3 bins at Walmart.

There’s Blu-Ray for sure.  I like Blu-Ray.  I rent Blu-Ray via Netflix and own many of my favorite movies on Blu-Ray, but it never caught on the way DVDs did and it too has peaked.

So what does that this have to do with Forever Lucky.  For the eight years we’ve been shooting weddings, DVD has been a staple of every package.  Eight years ago the camera and the DVD were on equal footing, but now the disparity in quality is glaring.

While, cameras, computers and editing software have taken a massive leap forward, DVDs are the same. We have phones with 4K cameras and we’re watching them on a time-machine from the 90s?  It doesn’t make sense.   DVDs have been every filmmakers least favorite aspect of the process, simply because you are forced to  trade creativity for compatibility.

We burn DVDs the same way we did 8 years ago.  We have priced our packages mostly the same way with DVD has the final product.  We’re going to change that.  In automotive speak, we’ve added digital files via dropbox, vimeo and YouTube in the past as a standard package and in the future we’ll be making the DVD optional.

Changing the final product, gives us the freedom to make other changes.  So, sometime in the next month, we’ll be introducing a completely different pricing structure, one that will include everything from, shooting only to deluxe films.  We will have more to fit more budgets but also allow us the flexibility to price weddings by market, something we’ve wrestled with over the years.  Weddings in certain markets just cost more due to filmmaker pricing, commuting and parking.

This posting serves mainly as a head-up but if you have something you’ve seen from someone else you think we should include please let us know.   I’m sure body cams will play a role in the future of wedding cinema.