Studios Begin to Push TV Episodes’ Digital Release Before DVD [Media]

Showtime has begun selling episodes of Weeds online before the show’s full-season DVD release, a first for the series. And Weeds isn't nearly the only one—is Hollywood finally embracing digital as the successor to DVD?

Well, sort of. This is really more of a symbolic shift than a full-scale adoption. Thing is, even as DVD sales decline and Blu-ray fails to explode, they both still dwarf revenues from digital streams—so you can't really blame the studios for moving slowly.

But pushing the digital release (and here we’re talking about streaming, not iTunes-like downloads) ahead of the physical, as in Weeds and a few other movies and TV shows, is a definite shift for the studios. Typically, they've tried to protect physical media with its larger profit margin, so this is a pretty big change for them—but it remains to be seen how widespread and how soon the digital adoption will be. [WSJ via Electronista]






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