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.

In Hollywood, direct-to-video movies, and the folks who make them, have always been second-class citizens. But it's clear from recent media earnings reports that recent changes in the DVD market are now driving the type of movies the upper crust is making as well. Call it, direct-from-video. In Viacom's Q4 earnings call earlier today, for instance, CEO Philippe Dauman said slumping DVD sales are weighing heavily on green-light decisions at Paramount Pictures.

Well that was a downer from Disney yesterday in its fiscal Q1 earnings call. The DVD business is tanking, nothing else is taking up the slack and we have to spend less money making movies. The "conversion rate" for new releases (i.e. the ratio of DVDs sold per million dollars of box-office gross) is falling, consumers are buying fewer catalog titles, shelf-space is disappearing and prices are plummeting. And oh, yeah: the rest of businesses pretty much suck right now, too. It sure didn't sound like the happiest place on earth.

Seattle - Microsoft is apparently looking at opportunities to expand the Halo franchise including "additional ways to tell the story that may not be game-related at all." Speaking to Eurogamer, Halo Wars' lead producer Jason Pace hinted at the launch of non-gaming properties such as movies or TV series alongside the expansion of the Halo gaming franchise this year with Halo Wars and Halo 3 ODST for Xbox 360.

Warner Bros. just became the latest studio to announce cut backs, unveiling plans to eliminate 800 jobs, about 10% of its global workforce, through layoffs, attrition and outsourcing. The move follows similar cut backs at Paramount Pictures and NBC Universal, as well as earlier downsizing moves by Warner Bros. parent Time Warner. In a memo to staffers announcing the cuts, Warner Bros. toppers Barry Meyer and Alan Horn called the decision painful but necessary.

Sony didn't include Blu-ray players or PlayStation 3 consoles among the product lines expected to take a hit this fourth quarter from the global economic slowdown. Instead, it blamed the 38% cut in its earnings forecast for the holiday season on slowing sales of LCD TVs, digital cameras and video camcorders, along with the rise of the yen against the dollar and euro. But given the overall outlook--including the company's indication that further cuts to its forecast are possible--it's probably only corporate pride that keeps Sony from lumping its two flagship products in with the rest of the disaster.

Is scarcity still a viable foundation for a business model for content owners? For most of their histories, movie and TV studios relied on a strategy of limited distribution to extract maximum value from their works. Movies were released through a carefully ordered sequence of exclusive windows defined by distribution channel (theaters, DVD, pay-TV, broadcast); network TV series didn't enter the broader syndication market for three or four years after their debut, assuming the series lasted that long. In each case, the relative scarcity of the content provided the content owner with maximum pricing power. Since the advent of digital platforms, however, ubiquity has become the name of the game, challenging content owners' pricing power and business models.

Los Angeles - Intel Corp. is launching The Mass Animation project in which it will combine computer animation and social networking to produce an original animated short film. According to The Hollywood Reporter (THR), it will be produced and directed by Yair Landau, former vice chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment and president of Sony Pictures Digital.