Page 157 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

1 | The DVD: Home V ew ng of Mov es Comes of Age

television, of their histories and their versions. At no time have so many people
known so much about so many movies in particular—many of which had come
close to being completely forgotten by the end of the twentieth century.
Today, studio executives still worry about the loss of control that home view-
ing represents. Because they are so cheap to produce, DVDs are pirated and
sold, often for a quarter of the price of the legitimate release. Studios try to
stop this, but do not want to do the one thing that would really counter piracy:
bring down their own prices. They are also trying to stop copying and altering
of DVDs by home viewers through technological blocks, but this is proving ex-
tremely difficult in the face of the ingenuity of home viewers.
Whatever form movies may be brought into the home by in the future, the
impact will probably not be as great as that of the DVD. The new technology
probably will not be packaged as discrete entities as DVDs are, allowing each
movie to be surrounded by commentaries, alternate endings, and related mate-
rial of all sorts (these will be available, certainly, but probably through links on
the Internet and not as part of a package). But the impact of the DVD will re-
main; knowledge of movies will probably never fall back to its pre-DVD level.
see also Alternative Media in the United States; Online Digital Film and Tele-
vision; Political Documentary; Piracy and Intellectual Property; TiVo; Transme-
dia Storytelling and Media Franchises; World Cinema.
Further reading: Abramson, Albert. The History of Television, 1942–2000. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2003; Barlow, Aaron. The DVD Revolution: Movies, Culture, and Technol-
ogy. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005; Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film History.
New York: McGraw Hill, 2002; Briggs, Asa, and Peter Burke. A Social History of the
Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002; Lewis, Jon, ed.
The End of Cinema as We Know It: American Film in the Nineties. New York: New York
University Press, 2001; The Velvet Light Trap no. 56 (2005), special issue on DVDs.
Aaron Barlow