Video Industry

What do "The Thin Blue Line," "Baseball," "Brother's Keeper," "America's Castles," "Hoop Dreams," "Unzipped" and "Crumb" have in common? If you said they are all documentaries, take another look. The home video industry would prefer that you think of them as "nonfiction features" or "historical films." From a marketing standpoint, none dare use the dreaded D-word. Or the E-word, for that matter. As in educational.

Santa Ana-based Video Store Magazine reports that the home video industry is alive and well, despite a wave of consolidations that's occurring as big chains overwhelm smaller competitors. Blockbuster Video, the Fort Lauderdale-based giant, is by far the nation's largest chain, with 3,350 locations and nearly $2.7 billion in yearly revenue from rentals and sales. West Coast Video--based, oddly enough, in Philadelphia--is a distant second with 508 stores.

He is a field representative for the Siemens Ultrasound division of Siemens Medical Systems. She is a video editor at the Point Mugu Naval Base. He has the practical business experience. She has the technical video knowledge. Together, they have a new business. Husband and wife Ken and Dee Finning recently opened Virgin Moon Post, a video post-production facility in Ventura.

To the home video industry, there is no greater Satan than the black box. That's the electronic device that can allow certain unscrupulous viewers to filch TV signals and get movies for free. The Video Software Dealers Assn., or VSDA, an Encino-based industry trade group, says the devices are proliferating, robbing both video retailers and cable companies of revenue during a time of critical technological change.

A new generation of consumers presents a marketing challenge for the video industry. In a business driven by the newest releases, how do you stimulate interest in long-available classic titles? For major studios with deep vaults, the answer is to release them again--for the first time. Some of Hollywood's most beloved movies are getting yet another chance to find a home on video. They have been re-priced and repackaged. They have been remastered for definitive sound and picture quality.

Tornado season officially begins today with the theatrical release of "Twister." To video suppliers, this dark cloud has a potential silver lining. Distributors are rushing back to nature in anticipation of the excitement generated by what has been forecast to be one of this year's biggest box-office hits. Things started early with "Tornado!," a preemptive made-for-Fox movie broadcast this week. The movie was seen in about 9.

It was probably inevitable, what with the explosive growth of the video industry: the birth of the "keepsake" ultrasound video. That is, "entertainment" videos of Junior in the womb, carefully edited with music, fancy graphics and even subtitles for showing-and-telling by expectant parents. But this is one newfangled idea government officials hope to kill. The Food and Drug Administration has reacted to non-medical video companies opening at malls or in private homes with a swift uh-uh.

The walls of Annex A at the Las Vegas Convention Center were reverberating with the electronic sounds of software publishers from around the world intensely competing for attention from the nearly 100,000 attendees of the biannual Consumer Electronics Show. Not even as benign an icon as Mickey Mouse was exempt from the booming hype. The virtues of an upcoming video game, Mickey Mania, declared in huge letters and the ominous tones of an announcer: "NO GOOFY! NO MINNIE! NO MERCY!"

Pop culture is finally hitting the eject button on the VHS tape, the once ubiquitous home video format that will finish this month as a creaky ghost of Christmas past. After three decades of steady if unspectacular service, the spinning wheels of the home entertainment stalwart are slowing to a halt at retail outlets. On a crisp Friday morning in October, the final truckload of VHS tapes rolled out of a Palm Harbor, Fla., warehouse run by Ryan J. Kugler, the last major supplier of the tapes.

In a potentially divisive move, the Screen Actors Guild's national executive committee on Tuesday rejected a proposed contract covering performers who provide the voices of video game characters. The unexpected move scuttled a deal -- reached earlier this month by union negotiators -- that would have given actors a 36% raise over three years but failed to gain residual payments for actors in top-selling games.