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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."
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/
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
No idea. I've only heard about DVDA, and very few performers can do 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"
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.
DVD Video is 704x480* (24 or 30 frames per second) or 704x576 (25 frames per second) for 1.33:1 or 1.78:1 display aspect ratio. (Many players support only one of those resolutions, such as the PlayStation 2 that was popular during the early DVD market.) Video at "scope" aspect ratio is encoded with hard letterboxing, producing a lower resolution: 704x360 or 704x432 respectively. Chroma is encoded at half resolution (4:2:0). DVD also supports interlaced video, trading off vertical detail for high motion (50 or 60 fields per second).
* Stored as 720, including eight pixels of "nominal analog blanking" pillarboxing on each side for recentering the signal.
DVD? What the fuck is that?
It is a physical audio-visual media storage format that you can purchase in a store or online. Once you purchase a movie or other content on a DVD, you can watch it as many times as you want without any expiration or revealing to anyone how many times you have watched the content. This is in contrast to an online streaming model where the provider of the content can at any time decide that you can no longer watch the content and with which the content provider knows what you watch, when you watch it, and can sell or use that information without restriction.
While it can be argued that it is possible to copy the contents of a DVD or an online stream for unrestricted and offline use, doing so is likely against the law. Physical media purchases are a way to legally watch the content you want in an unrestricted way.
I always thought a DVD was a legal way to watch FBI warnings and previews for other movies.
DVDs weren't actually locked to a particular resolution. In NTSC markets (e.g. North America), 720x480 interlaced (i.e. 480i) was probably the most common, whereas in PAL markets (e.g. Europe), 720x576 interlaced (i.e. 576i) was more common. That said, DVDs were kinda weird, since they supported legacy formats and some various extensions to the standards. They could go down to 240p on the low-end, but they also supported anamorphic widescreen (i.e. using the same resolutions as above, but telling the player to stretch the pixels wide, that way it would fill a widescreen TV), which were typically marketed as widescreen versions of the movie, and that would look squished if you tried to play them on a 4:3 TV, since it wouldn't stretch the pixels wide.
All of which is to say, DVDs weren't in HD. Or, at least, the use of DVDs to support HD was never adopted in the mainstream, though there were some efforts to do so.
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
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.
Thus "Crazy people" with Dudley Moore
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.
Most likely your player is bad. I've been using DVDs and Blu-Rays for nearly as long as both have existed and have never had a disk spontaneously fail. I certainly have had players fail though.
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.
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"
How do they delete the movie from my offline hard drive?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... 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.
All of which is to say, DVDs weren't in HD. Or, at least, the use of DVDs to support HD was never adopted in the mainstream, though there were some efforts to do so.
DVDs are substantially higher resolution than VHS, particularly after several watchings.
Blu-rays are sometimes not worth the hassle (though it's easy to pirate HD content without the hassle)
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.
DVD? is that?
from some info I found (I forgot who the originator is) and kept in my diatribes folder:
All of the following have been proposed as the words behind the letters DVD:
- Delayed, Very Delayed (referring to the many late releases of DVD formats)
- Diversified, Very Diversified (referring to the proliferation of recordable formats and other spinoffs)
- Digital Venereal Disease (referring to piracy and copying of DVDs)
- Dead, Very Dead (from naysayers who predicted DVD would never take off)
- Digital Video Disc (the original meaning proposed by some of DVD's creators)
- Digital Versatile Disc (a meaning later proposed by some of DVD's creators)
- Nothing
And the official answer is... "nothing." The original initialism came from "digital video disc." Some members of the DVD Forum (see 6.1) tried to express how DVD goes far beyond video by retrofitting the painfully contorted phrase "digital versatile disc," but this has never been officially accepted by the DVD Forum as a whole. A report from DVD Forum Steering Committee in 1999 decreed that DVD, as an international standard, is simply three letters. Nevertheless, Toshiba —the maintainer of the DVD Forum Web site— still confusingly prefers "digital video disc." And after all, how many people ask what VHS stands for? (Guess what? No one agrees on that one either.)
mfwright@batnet.com
Wow, I never thought I would know about the mystery of 720 vs 704 resolution. Thanks.
Odd. I never encountered a signal cable that didn't want to transport my content. You only got to tell it what it wants to hear and presto, it does what it is supposed to do. ;)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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)