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Redefining Home Entertainment – Welcome to Media Play News!
January 2, 2018
Welcome to Media Play News, dedicated to informing, educating, and entertaining everyone involved in the business of bringing entertainment home.
We have launched a new responsive website filled with the latest news, research and analysis, reviews, and blogs essential for your business.
We are unveiling a new daily e-newsletter and breaking news alerts to keep you in the loop with the latest home entertainment news.
Later this month, we will debut a new monthly magazine that will be available in both print and digital editions, a carefully curated collection content culled from our website and 24/7 industry coverage.
And we are beginning the new year with an invigorated social media push, augmenting our Facebook and Twitter pages with Instagram and, soon, a new YouTube channel focused on bringing our content to the masses.
Our team has had a good run as Home Media Magazine under Questex LLC, and as Video Store Magazine under Advanstar before that.
And now, as we begin our third chapter, as Media Play News, I sincerely hope I can count on your continued support as we embark on this ambitious and exciting new venture.
We believe our industry both needs and deserves an independent trade publication – perhaps now more than ever – to cover our business from an insider’s perspective, with a focus on what’s important to you.
We reach a broad audience of retailers, both digital and physical, as well as a growing group of analysts, entertainment and technology reporters, and other consumer influencers.
We are your voice, your representative – and we will continue to champion and advocate for our industry in our blogs and columns while providing the world with first-class coverage of the home entertainment industry and its ongoing evolution.
I’d like to make it clear that we are not just reinventing ourselves. We intend to redefine the very concept of home entertainment. Initially, home entertainment was renting movies on videocassette. Then it became the sale or rental of discs, first DVD and then Blu-ray Disc.
Today, home entertainment is a multi-faceted industry that ranges from disc to digital distribution, from Redbox to Roku, from iTunes to Netflix. And with the promise of premium VOD, the home entertainment business – with its guiding principle of bringing entertainment home – stands to play an increasingly greater and more significant role in the overall entertainment business.
Bringing entertainment home. That’s what you’re all about – and that, too, is what we are all about.
As a reader for years I want to wish you all the best. It would be nice to have a comprehensive list of new releases on DVD and Blu-ray, listing ALL releases every week, down to the minor labels. One other thought I had, it seems the movie studios never get direct input from consumers, most of their web sites don’t even have an email address for customers to request titles. But those of us that deal with consumers get title requests all the time, and I think it would be a great service to the stores and customers that we all depend on to have a small section showing title requests from our customers that the studios might read. Just a little, inventive thought for you.
In the meantime, contact Bob Tollini (bob.tollini@gmail.com) who sends out a weekly list of what is coming out, including minor labels and purchasing recommendations.
And if you want to go REALLY deep, check out http://hometheaterinfo.com/dvdlist.htm for spreadsheets with every known DVD with price, UPC, etc. Updated when release dates are known, so will include items currently in prebook.
An awesome piece of the history of home entertainment over the years has been the independent careers, films, businesses and artistic sensibilities that were cultivated outside of the traditional Hollywood business machine. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to participate in producing, developing and or releasing hundreds of independently made films with a wide variety of filmmakers that likely would not have been made, or found a home were it not for the home entertainment / video/ dvd market.
Currently, that kind of opportunity for future young filmmakers and entrepreneurs does not yet seem to have found a secure home in the digital landscape. That said, there are successes, but they are random and not as “educated guessable” as what it would take to get a PO from Blockbuster or the like. A solid place where a new artist with a few hundred or a few thousand dollars and a video camera (or today a smart phone) could find an audience, as well as a film with a budget of several hundred thousand to a couple of million, or a very independent distributor like myself could nurture and develop a successful film franchise from the expected income from direct independent retail sales, does not currently exist.
While the financial reality of advertising as well as the overall ability to develop entertainment on a broad scale requires a focus on the business aspects of the larger entertainment media corporations, with it’s belief that “our industry both needs and deserves an independent trade publication …” Media Play News would be wise to make it a point to include a focus on the challenges and successes of the very independent filmmakers. We are quite possibility the soul and future of the industry that often is overlooked.