Digital Videodiscs

Harry Potter, the teen wizard whose films have generated billions of dollars and become one of Hollywood's biggest franchises, is known for battling the evil Lord Voldemort. Now he's about to confront an even darker foe: A soft DVD market. "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," the sixth installment in the Warner Bros. film series, will be released July 15, and expectations are that it will be one of the year's biggest blockbusters. The previous five "Potter" movies have generated $7.

Recession-fueled penny-pinching is driving consumers to rent more movies and buy fewer. New data released Thursday by the Digital Entertainment Group, an industry trade organization, showed that movie rental revenue rose 8% in the first half of the year -- a remarkable uptick for a business that many in Hollywood had thought peaked. At the same time, sales of DVDs have taken a shellacking, falling 13.5% for the period.

Warner Bros. is setting its sights on Redbox and Netflix amid the latest sign that consumers are abandoning retail DVD stores in favor of the fast-growing rental kiosks and mail subscription companies. The Time Warner-owned studio on Thursday joined 20th Century Fox and Universal Pictures in announcing that it would not provide movies to leading kiosk operator Redbox until 28 days after they go on sale. In a surprising move that hasn't yet been made by any of its competitors, Warner said it would impose the same restriction on Netflix and other DVD-by-mail subscription providers unless they agreed to "a day-and-date revenue sharing option."

Hewlett-Packard Co. plans to announce today that it has signed an agreement with Sony Pictures Home Entertainment to create made-to-order DVDs of some of the studio's movies and TV shows. The agreement, whose terms were not disclosed, boosts Palo Alto-based HP's ambition to play the middleman in the future of how entertainment is distributed.

What started as a Los Angeles family's creative way to dispose of a box of old movies has grown into a project that helps sick children cope with their illnesses. Sisters Marni and Berni Barta, 15 and 17, run Kid Flicks, a nonprofit organization that collects old movies and ships them to children's hospitals across the country and even as far as South Africa. So far the family has collected 28,700 movies and donated them to 287 hospitals.

The HD DVD format is reeling from another body blow. The nation's largest retailer, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., said Friday that it would sell movies and players only in the rival Blu-ray format at its 4,000 discount stores and Sam's Clubs. Wal-Mart said it would continue to sell its HD DVD inventory over several months, then devote more shelf space to Sony Corp.'s Blu-ray. The announcement from the country's biggest seller of DVDs comes amid a growing number of defections from the Toshiba Corp.

Newspaper subscribers are accustomed to the sample-size boxes of laundry detergent or aspirin bottles that sometimes arrive packaged with their morning paper, courtesy of advertisers. But readers in battleground states are getting a different kind of freebie: the DVD of a controversial documentary on Islam.

The major promotion push behind the DVD release of Warner Bros.' summer blockbuster, "The Dark Knight," appears to have worked -- at least out of the gate. The film, which brought in $530 million in ticket sales in the United States, sold nearly 3 million copies Tuesday, the first day of its DVD release in the U.S., Canada and Britain.

Hollywood studios have approved a new technology and licensing arrangement that should remove a major obstacle consumers now face with burning movies they buy digitally over the Internet onto a DVD that will play everywhere. Sonic Solutions today is introducing the Qflix system for adding a standard digital lock to DVDs burned in a computer or a retail kiosk.

Warner Bros. is set to introduce a high-definition DVD that can hold films and TV shows in rival and incompatible formats, the latest sign that the yearlong war over formats is far from over. Warner Bros., a unit of Time Warner Inc., said Thursday that it developed the Total HD Disc to help break the stalemate between HD DVD, developed by a consortium led by Toshiba Corp., and rival Blu-ray, backed by Sony Corp. Both deliver sharper pictures and increased space for special features.