Both Sony and CAV Warner Home Entertainment Co. -- a Shanghai-based joint venture between Warner Bros. and China Audio Video, a publishing house affiliated with the Ministry of Culture -- are working separately toward creating outlets for legitimate DVDs.
Both sell licensed DVDs through Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the French supermarket chain Carrefour and the Chinese bookstore chain Xinhua. They also sell through Joyo Amazon, a Beijing-based online bookseller that delivers discs the next day. Sony promotes new DVD releases through popular Chinese movie websites such as Mtime.
Warner Bros., the first Hollywood studio to release a DVD version of a film in China on the same day as its U.S. theatrical release, has developed an elaborate pricing and timing strategy to beat pirates to market with DVDs of movies such as "Happy Feet."
"We're a long way from the tipping point," CAV Warner managing director Tony Vaughn said. "But the momentum is in the right direction."
Now it's not alone. Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Animation SKG officials traveled to Beijing last week to announce that the studios would sell bargain-priced DVDs through CAV Warner's 20,000 retail outlets in 50 Chinese cities. The new releases will retail for $2.75. This is the first time that Paramount's legitimate DVDs, such as "Transformers," will be sold in China.
Still, creating a legitimate DVD market remains a tall task.
The five-story Silk Street Market is one of Beijing's biggest counterfeit bazaars. Booths bulge with cheap knock-off clothing, eyewear, shoes and watches, and clerks hawk their wares in five languages to the tourists who arrive by bus.
One booth offers licensed DVDs on its shelves, with holograms etched into the plastic shrink-wrap as proof of authenticity, and they're purely window dressing. Customers flip through stacks of DVD sleeves on the front counter, then place their orders for bootleg discs that clerks retrieve from the back.
Customers don't bother walking the aisles to inspect the collection of licensed merchandise.
And why should they? A legal copy of Sony's "Spider-Man 2" sells for $4.68, while a bootleg copy of the newer "Spider-Man 3" goes for $2.
dawn.chmielewski @latimes.com
