Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
has become the first major studio to license niche and older
DVD titles for production and distribution through HP's year-old DVD manufactured-on-demand service, the two companies
said on Thursday.
The MOD service allows Sony to offer a wider choice of
catalog titles to consumers because HP can press and ship
single discs as they are ordered through affiliated Web sites.
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 Corp.