Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has become the first major studio to license niche and older DVD titles for production and distribution through Hewlett-Packard's year-old DVD manufactured-on-demand service, the two companies said Thursday.
The MOD service allows Sony to offer a wider choice of catalog titles to consumers because
Sony has not released some of the content--including classic television shows, foreign and independent movies, specialty programming such as religious or food shows, and local sporting events--because of the cost of maintaining inventory and the difficulties of gauging demand, said David Bishop, president of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
"We know there is strong consumer demand for these titles, and by working with HP we can monetize our deep product library and help give retailers the means to bring a wider offering of Sony Pictures products to consumers without a significant investment in inventory," Bishop said in a statement.
HP has signed up 40 other content providers and digitized about 5,000 titles for its electronic library since the service became available a year ago, said Doug Warner, vice president of HP's digital content services business.
The companies were mum about which would pay to digitize the Sony titles, how many would be offered and about how revenue from the sales would be shared.
Consumer pricing would not be known until the list of titles was finalized, Warner said.
HP typically presses the disc, prints the packaging and drop-ships DVDs the same day consumers order them through wholesalers or third-party retail Web sites, Warner said.
Although Sony, a frequent HP partner, is the first to link its library to the micro-manufacturing service, Warner said its potential application is broad in the media industry.
"We believe a significant portion of the 80,000 content libraries out there would fall within the sweet spot of the demand curve for (manufacturing on demand)."
Sony Pictures home Entertainment is a division of Sony.
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