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Sony Warns It Will Take $1 Billion Writedown, Blames Slowing DVD Sales (reuters.com)
Sony has warned investors that it will take roughly $978m writedown on its film business, blaming a goodwill impairment charge that dates back to an acquisition of a Hollywood studio almost three decades ago. From a report on Reuters: The impairment charge came as Sony cut its outlook for profits from DVD, blu-ray discs and other home entertainment operations in line with a broader market decline, the company said in statement on Monday. Sony has been working to revive its movie business. In November, the Japanese conglomerate's chief financial officer, Kenichiro Yoshida, said a turnaround was "progressing, but it takes time for the benefit to be realized."
Won't be long until we'll be building all of those electronics in the USA again. Praise the Lord.
Though I'm not a big fan of having tall, gangly caucasians assembling high-tech electronics. Japanese people are short, so their eyes are closer to the electronics than other nationalities. This results in a superior product IMO
Let's ban the internet and lobby congress for more DRM. Thats IT MORE DRM! It has to be piracy. Let's work to make hardware not work with Linux and I am sure everyone will be happy to cancel their netflix accountants and open their wallets.
That's the ticket
http://saveie6.com/
DVD? What the fuck is that?
New Meme: That lottery terminal that spits out your tickets? It's called Chucky!
Let's ban the internet and lobby congress for more DRM.
And that would have worked under Hillary with her cozy Hollywood relationships.
Under Trump, Hollywood can go pound sand.
One fun thing Trump could do to get back at the screeching entertainment industry going after him; halve the current copyright expiration period.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...they don't be releasing Bad Ronald in Betamax after all? I have a deposit on it at All Star Video.
Uuuh, what is the resolution on DVD movies again? I've forgotten it.
DVD sales are "ok", because the media and platform doesn't suck like Blu-ray. Sony needs to pay big time for the death sentence they gave Blu-ray. Very very bad business decision. The paid their way in, and then locked it down to make it unusable.
Subject line should read: "Sony Warns It Will Take $1 Billion Writedown as their Vision of the Future Sucked"
<div class="pedantic">"DVD Sales" is plural. The proper conjugation for the verb is "Decline."</div>
Finding God in a Dog
One fun thing Trump could do to get back at the screeching entertainment industry going after him; halve the current copyright expiration period.
Switching from life of grandchildren back to the 56-year term of the 1909 Act would require leaving not only the WTO but also several bilateral treaties already in force. Good luck getting that passed without angering constituents in districts with a strong export manufacturing sector. And watch entertainment industry lawyers argue in court that shortening the term of subsisting copyrights qualifies as a "taking" that requires "just compensation" pursuant to the Fifth Amendment.
Most households have realized their unwatched DVD collections are worthless and have written their value down to $0.
DVD Video is how people lawfully watch a Hollywood movie without having to pay the ISP $5 to $10 per GB* every time they watch it.
* Source: satellite and cellular ISPs' rate plans
That's funny! Somebody should tell Disney
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Or Blu-Ray disks? The formats are obsolete - they do not hold so much data, they are fragile, they become unreadable in a few years. Forget that junk. We want to stream movies, all the movies, all the time, to all devices. We can already do that, to a large extent, thanks to BitTorrent. If you, Sony, wants to see a dime, get on board; otherwise, people will carry on using unofficial BitTorrents, and you won't get a single penny. The choice is yours.
I have had a Bluray player for a few years now but I have never brought a bluray disc at all and the last time I brought and played a DVD was also a few years back. I only got the Samsung Bluray for the surround sound only. DVD/Blueray is a dying format.
DVD is a dying horse in these days dominated by HD-delivery channels. From Blu-Ray, to Netflix, with every human's dwelling now decorated with an HD TV-set, how not surprising comes the fact about declining anamorphic SD DVD sales?! "Duh...!" would say Homer.
Or Blu-Ray disks? The formats are obsolete - they do not hold so much data
Data speeds are faster today to be sure (well actually not wholly true, but lets pretend they are) - but 50GB is still a lot of data even today.
Mostly I don't keep physical media around anymore for movies I just kind of like, streaming is close enough. But there are a number of movies I enjoy watching from time to time, and using a physical disc ensures I can do so any time, regardless of interest connection - or I can easily loan them out to friends.
The docs are not that fragile either, Blu Ray discs can take a lot of abuse and play just fine.
What will probably happen is the physical disc market will shrink and the price for discs increase. I can live with that in combination with streaming.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
People are realizing that $30 for a disc is too expensive and would rather pay $10/mo to stream/rent unlimited movies.
Many are also tired of Hollywood's self-importance bullshit and are either saving their money or spending on something else that doesn't refer to their customers as being backwards inbred zealots.
Installing root kits on computers that play their CD, DVD etc and pissing off the customer base. That was A-OK.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
A dwindling second hand market for 8 tracks. It's all the market's fault! *sob* *whine* *sob* *whine*
We'll make great pets
Funny they don't mention a few high profile bombs that lost money as well, which would cost money on both ends as DVD sales for said bombs would also eat into profits.
Could it not be that Sony are just making movies that people don't want to buy? The 2 big failures I know of are Spiderman and Ghostbusters, but looking at what else they've made, they seem to have a bunch of terrible movies (Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 and Pixels, anyone?) and a lot I have never heard of. I'm sure some of them were profitable (I think I heard the Angry Birds movie did well), but for me personally their movies don't really excite me.
Whenever I read statements like "blaming a goodwill impairment", I figure some company is trying to manufacture a paper loss. They'll write an asset down to zero (taking the income hit on their tax return) and transfer it to a new jurisdiction (like Ireland) where it will magically start making money again.
Have gnu, will travel.
Most of the posters here look at this article from a first world perspective. Think about other countries where CRT TV's are commonly still in use. Why get a BluRay player?
Back in the first world: Which would you have your darling little child destroy: a $30 DVD player with a $10 DVD or a $90+ BluRay player and ROKU device with a $35 disc? Plus with upscaling technologies DVD's don't look bad on modern TV's, Assuming you're looking for entertainment and not hi res.
Sony has been going the 'internationalization' route which means make the movies are inoffensive to no one and uninteresting to everyone. Can you say Alvin and The Smurfs? Finally Sony has been putting out a lot of just stinkers lately:
The 5th Wave (16% RT)
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (43% RT)
The Brothers Grimsby (37% RT)
Money Monster (57% RT)
The Angry Birds (43% RT)
Ghostbusters (73% RT but lost money in the box office)
Inferno (19%)
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
... the "forced to view" unskippable advertisements were not present at the beginning of a lot of the DVD's I had purchased in the past. It is amazing how a content provider can intentionally piss off its potential customers, then wonder why sales are down.
Meanwhile - vinyl hits a 25 year high in sales. https://www.theguardian.com/mu...
I'm sure music cartels would LOVE a model you can only listen to ONCE and never share with anyone, similar to the direction digital books were going - with only a pittance going back to the content creators.
I think people are wising up and actually want to own something and do with it what WE as consumers choose.
Physical Media is dying. Literally.
Last night I wanted to get caught up with Better Call Saul before season 3 so I put on a never-played-before season 2 BluRay disc and it stuttered so bad I had to stop it was so irritating. I downloaded a torrent in about 30 minutes and watched that instead.
Maybe my BluRay player is getting long in the tooth, maybe the discs I bought had some defect, I really don't give a shit anymore. Just let me buy HD digital with no BS so I can load it on Plex and be done with it
I know, lets buy a successful franchise and completely fuck it up then disparage the people that try to tell us it is horrible.
Sounds good
Considering both sides of the Atlantic have been ping-ponging the extensions back and forth every 20 or so years to keep Steam Boat Willie in chains.
A copyright term that approximates the life of the author's grandchildren has been standard in Europe for well over a century. The 1990s term extensions didn't change this rationale; they merely amended its implementation to account for health care improvements during the twentieth century. Barring some drastic change to this rationale or a dramatic improvement to human life span within the next seven years, Gershwin and Disney won't be able to use this excuse again before Rhapsody in Blue, The House at Pooh Corner, and the original Mickey Mouse trilogy enter the public domain in the United States by 2024.
I've been actively boycotting Sony for about a decade now. Not that I buy many DVDs, but I have put a few back on the shelf (and downloaded it instead) after realizing they were from Sony Pictures.
I'm not a rocket scientist but a couple of turd movies might have something to do with it.
Both Netflix and Bittorrent allow you to download the movie on an unmetered network
What unmetered network? In many areas, even home Internet is metered. This includes home satellite Internet, home terrestrial microwave Internet (which uses cell towers), and reportedly even home DSL in parts of Iowa. I imagine many find it easier to order DVDs from a web shop than to drive into town to make a multi-gigabyte download over restaurant Wi-Fi.
Netflix because they graciously allow you to do so
I was told this was available only on select devices and only for select titles in its dwindling selection of third-party feature films and TV series.
bittorrent because that's just how it works when you have a drm free file.
Which publishers of notable motion pictures routinely make them lawfully available through BitTorrent?
We never hardly the DVDs we own, and we got a blue ray player two years ago that we never used but 2 times. We gave the blue ray player to grandma to replace her player that got fried in a power hit.
Everything thing we watch is streaming. If we need to watch a DVD, we play it on the PC through the TV.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
racist...redneck voters
You want us to see Trump as a racist, but I'm afraid if we're looking for racism yours looms so large we cannot see Trump being racist in comparison.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sony still awful.
... is one of the reasons Sony took a loss in 2016. Also, their oh-so-clever strategy to not support UHD BluRays in PS4 "Pro", plus their oh-so-genious decision to publish a stand-alone UHD player not supporting Dolby Vision (while their TV does) all tell the same thing: Sony has no product strategy other than pissing its potential customers off.
My best guess is that "it" refers to "PS3/PS4" and stuff refers to "ads". I could be wrong though, but I don't think so.
The only thing I have to say about this is.... channeling Nelson here: Ha HA
Lousy fuckers. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of root-kitting assholes.
A shame really. Back in the 1980s, if you wanted the best consumer grade electronics, you went with Sony. Always a little higher priced than the competition, but you got what you paid for. The Walkman was a worldwide hit, long before there was ever an iPod. Sony used to be a company that people would want to buy from... nowadays? Notsomuch. The aggressive DRM stance, the rootkit fiasco, removing the alternate OS from the PlayStation 2, all of these things described a company you would not want to buy products from. The chickens have come home to roost.
If Sony would not have flirted with Hollywood, this would never have happened. Greedy Hollywood mother fuckers.
Well....if you want to sell DVDs at $20, probably nobody will buy them. If there is no demand, lower the price. The main cost of DVDs are marketing and transportation, so sell volume.... make a limited offer of 10 new DVD titles for $20 with free shipping and let's see how the market will react. Offer cheap digital copies and kill piracy without lawyers in the middle (the main cost)