Video window

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The video window is the period between the release of a feature film to movie theaters and its release for the home video, or DVD, market. Other related "windows" include the pay-per-view window and the broadcast window.

In the movie business, ticket-buyers now account for just a small fraction of the money earned by each film, and yet studios persist in honoring the window in the belief that a successful theatrical run will energize all of the subsequent markets for a film. For a long time, these subsequent markets were called "ancillary markets," yet according to a recent article in Slate [1], Hollywood studios now get less than 15% of their proceeds from box office receipts.

[edit] The Shrinking Window

In 1996, the National Association of Theater Owners unanimously passed a resolution expressing concern about the shortening video window, which had then shrunk from six months and 21 days in 1993 to five months and 28 days in 1995. That organization's then-president Bill Kartozian blasted the shrinkage for threatening to "kill the goose that lays the golden egg." (Daily Variety, October 24, 1996)

Nonetheless, the shrinkage continued, as summer blockbusters are now routinely made available four months later, in time for the holiday gift-buying season.

While the jury is still out on whether the shrinking video window has harmed the film industry, one industry that has shrunk significantly are dollar theaters. Once a mainstay in most American markets, many metro areas no longer have a single discount theater.

There have been at least two notable experiments in a zero window, aka a "day-and-date" release. In the early 1990s, a company called Carolco Pictures announced that it would experiment with simultaneous theatrical and video releases but later retreated from this strategy before its ultimate dissolution. In 2006, noted director Steven Soderbergh released Bubble as a so-called "day-and-date" film. However, it was seen as a commercial failure in both theatrical and DVD release.