The rise and acceptance with digital content has made it unnecessary to own physical media forms. Who needs a CD or DVD when we are watching and listening with iPads, iPods, and laptops. Why clutter our home with cases and cases piled on bookshelves and closets and floors, when we can capture media on a drive and play anywhere. And with the iCloud, we won't even need to keep content local; we can just call it up from a remote server on demand. It is this changing world that has led to the loss of DVDs and CDs. With content easier to carry on a device, these disks become irrelevant. And so sales have dropped, production has slowed, and the business must be redeployed.
"Such reductions are a direct result of the continued drop in DVD sales. Purchases of DVDs, Blu-ray discs and digital movies fell 18% in the first quarter of 2011 compared with a year earlier, according to the industry trade organization Digital Entertainment Group." But why cut the employee count; why not take their expertise and move them to other uses. Consumers still like to own content and new ideas are still needed to push these consumers to buy digital content in new forms. Digital media remains a nascent business that consumers are still learning how to use effectively. For movie studios intent on selling their media, opportunities are there to offer unique digital content that is easy to access, easy to transport, easy to share, easy to play, and easy to interact with across current and next generation devices. These same employees may bring ideas to aid in the synergy that is needed to develop that next successful business model. The DVD business may be slowly ending, but the time is ripe for new growth models.
