WB: Not *ALL* VOD Day and Date with DVD

So remember when Warner Bros. said it would release all of its film titles on VOD day and date with the DVD release? Well… about that… At the Digital Media Summit, Michele Edelman, vice president, marketing for Warner Bros. digital distribution told me that the studio will still delay the VOD release of certain films “if there will be a sizable sell-through” on DVD.

The length of that release window isn’t set in stone, it could be one week, fourteen days, thirty days, the amount of time will be determined on a case-by-case basis. The Bucket List, for example, will not be released day and date, there’s too much money to be made on DVD. It doesn’t take Karnak to guess that The Dark Knight and Harry Potter will probably follow suit.

According to Edelman, 75 percent of Warner Bros. films will go out on day and date.

This news was reinforced later in the day when during his keynote at the same conference, Thomas Gewecke, President of Warner Bros. digital distribution referred to the day and date release program as experimental, though the studio has seen some encouraging signs early on.

Gewecke said that the results for day and date release saw an uptick in both DVD and VOD sales because Warner Bros. was able to get a multiplier effect by concentrating marketing and awareness when promoting both formats of the film at the same time.

Warner Bros. is in the tricky position right now of managing the growth of digital with the decline of DVDs, and trying to maximize revenue out of both.