In reply to UKC News:
Something that can be forgotten is that the filmmakers do not get anywhere near the £19.99 RRP.
For a UK climbing film, that RRP's at £19.99, this is a basic breakdown.
For the filmmakers, it costs anywhere from £1 - £2.50 per unit, depending on the quantity of DVDs you are willing to risk buying in bulk. Then the UK's climbing media distributer purchases the DVD's from the filmmakers at around £9.55, to sell to the shops at around £10.55.
So if we say a DVD costs the filmmaker £2, then the distributer buys it for £9.55, this leaves the filmmaker with £7.55 per unit, no where near the RRP that we pay as consumers.
It's a very small market, it's not like a Batman DVD release which will sell millions and cost less than 5p per unit to produce.
However, £20 does seem like way too much money for a usually 60 minute film, that you may only watch once or twice. The future is undoubtedly in high quality HD Downloads, in fact it's not the future, it's been happening for years, but it seems like climbing films are catching up. It's cheaper for the producers as they don't need to pay for duplication, distribution etc, and consumers alike as this brings the overall cost down. If there was an option to download at maybe a tenner and burn your own physical DVD, do you think that would interest people?
One thing that we could do to help ensure future high-quality releases, is to buy directly from the filmmakers websites, therefore avoiding shop fees and helping out the filmmakers at no extra cost to the consumer.
It would be a positive and a negative thing if major corporate sponsors got involved to pay some of the overhead and bring the price of a DVD down. Obviously the main positive is exactly that, the DVD would be cheaper... Perhaps they'd help pay for the best kit and this would help deliver a superior product. Maybe we might one day catch up with skateboarding, snowboarding and surfing and have high-quality DVDs being given out for free in magazines several times a year.
The negatives of major sponsorship, as hinted at in the article, is that they'll need major exposure and perhaps taint the film. This will probably mean obvious adverts at the start and end of the film. But more than that, and it's been happening in 'mainstream extreme sports' for a while, is product placements. I really think this would get tiresome very quickly, and generally put a downer on a potentially enjoyable film. Really, do we care about the brand of wrist watch, mobile phone and sunglasses? Because this is probably what we'd have to endure, as most (not all) climbing companies just don't have enough money. It would be major advertisers who'd have the cash to pluck up for something like this.
It'll definately be interesting to see what happens over the next couple of years.