The National Consumers League is out with the results of a new study conducted by Opinion Research showing that 90% of consumers believe they should be able to back up their DVDs to a hard drive or copy them to a portable device, and they'd be willing to pay about $61 for a piece of software that helped them back up their collections. Sounds like a good business opportunity for someone like a RealNetworks...oh wait.

Actually, what the survey shows--as if it needed further pointing out--is that the studios are fiddling with "managed-copy" while their DVD business burns. According to the survey, 55% of respondents are buying fewer DVDs today than they did a year ago. More than four in 10 (41%) expect to be buying fewer still a year from now.

Yet the same 41% said the ability to make back up copies would make their collections more valuable, and 40% said it might cause them to buy more DVDs. That sentiment ran particularly high among households with kids, obviously because it's harder for the little angels to get peanut butter on a hard drive than on a DVD. Households with kids have purchased an average of nearly 3 DVDs to replace those lost or damaged.

Despite studio fears that back-up copying will lead to massive Internet piracy, moreover, only 18% of respondents reported ever having copied a DVD to a hard drive. Another 5% said they had tried but were unable to. The vast majority of respondents (79%) said they have no real interest in copying DVDs.

So, what you have is a relatively small minority of DVD buyers, with specific copying needs (backing up kidvids, transferring to iPods), who are likely to see greater value in the DVDs they buy if they could make those copies and would therefore be inclined to buy more of them.

And what have the studios come up with to deliver that value to their customers? Litigation against Kaleidescape Systems and RealDVD for providing tools that allow people to back up their DVD collections. The managed-copy negotiations, meanwhile, drag on toward the four-year mark with nothing yet to show for the effort. 

Other interesting findings from the study:

• While DVD purchasing may be down, DVD rentals are holding their own. 19% of respondents said they are renting more DVDs today than a year ago, compared to only 9% who said they are buying more, and 8% show said they are going out to the movies more. Only 34% said they are renting less, compared to 55% and 50%, respectively, who said they buying less and going out less.

• A surprising 18% said they own a Blu-ray Disc player, yet only 16% reported regularly using it. That could mean , a) there aren't nearly enough Blu-ray titles available for people to watch, or b) most of those Blu-ray players are really PlayStation 3 consoles, which only some people in the household use at all.

• More than three-in-10 (31%) regularly use an in-car DVD player, which would suggest a high demand for portable content, were the studios ever able to deliver it.

• DVDs that come with pre-ripped "Digital Copies" for transferring to a hard drive or portable are seen as a half-measure. More than half of respondents (51%) said they are "bothered" that they can't save their DVDs to a hard drive without cracking the encryption or buying an "expanded version" with Digital Copy.

Paul Sweeting

Paul Sweeting is the Editor of Content Agenda, a business-to-business brand dedicated to the nexus of content, technology and business. This piece was originally published on Paul's blog "Media Wonk" on Content Agenda and is posted on DMW with the author's permission.

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