Commentary: Rethinking DVDs

Edit Smarter by Larry Jordan

The world of software and hardware move faster than we want them to. I was thinking about this fact during the last week when I got yet another email asking how to create DVDs.

One of the more interesting marketing facts that I’ve learned is that people will pay more for something they can hold in their hands than they will pay for something to download. No where is this more evident than in the world of DVDs (and, by extension, CDs and Blu-ray Discs).

Check out the price of an album on iTunes versus Best Buy and you’ll see what I mean. I’m not suggesting there is a vast pricing conspiracy at work here, its just a fact of life that we value things we can touch more than things we can’t. And any marketer worth their salt will always charge as much as the market will bear.

We do the same thing when pricing our services: we try to find the best balance between the amount we want versus the amount the client will accept. It is a fine balancing act that’s been going on between buyers and sellers since time immemorial.
However, the tech world has embraced downloads with a vengeance. Every where you turn, if the product can be reduced to bits and bytes, its available online. Getting physical product is increasingly difficult. The reasons are not hard to see: downloads are faster, easier, and, if properly implemented, safer and more secure as well. Distribution costs are also much, much cheaper; even when you include bandwidth and web development costs.

The tech world, which lives about six months farther into the future than the rest of us, is all over downloads. Which means that for those of us that depend upon DVDs and other optical media, we have a variety of hard business choices to make. read more...