Now, it’s the turn of Digital Video Discs, otherwise known as DVDs, to toss and turn on their deathbed. DVDs, the mainstay of home entertainment since 1999, have been battling a steep decline in revenue.
Even the bootleg marketeers of DVDs, who flourished around Mumbai’s local railway stations like Grant Road and Andheri, and the business district of Flora Fountain, have switched to selling illegal downloads of films on pen-drives that can cram in five films at one click on weather-beaten laptops.
Not many are likely to mourn the impending passing away of DVDs though. Unlike vinyl records and vintage gramophones, there’s no romance attached to DVDs and video players. Similarly, there has been no love lost over the now-archaic video cassettes and laser discs that preceded the DVD boom at the turn of the millennium.
If at all, the friendly neighbourhood DVD rental libraries, which thrived in Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Bengaluru among other metros, are being sorely missed. Only a scant few dial-a-DVD outlets plod on.
But for how long?
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Surviving The Downturn
According to Kalpesh Kerawala of
Casablanca, a movie rental store on Mumbai’s upscale Peddar Road, “The
overheads have spiralled. So has the yearly rent which I pay to the landlord.
It’s a matter of time before I will have to move to some other business.”
Until D-day arrives, movieholic Kerawala intends to soldier on, recommending difficult-to-access movies from Bollywood, Hollywood and even world cinema, many of which led to Bollywood retreads (or unacknowledged remakes).
Mumbai city and the suburbs, at the peak of the DVD boom, were dotted with 200 rental libraries, led by Shemaroo on Napean Sea Road, which shut shop exactly a year ago. Its employee for over a decade, Yogesh Patil, hopes to set up a stationery shop. As for his colleagues, who could rattle off 10,000 movie titles, Patil sighs,“We used to lunch together for years but no one has kept in touch. With our kind of work experience, it is very difficult to find a job.”
Besides Casablanca, the other DVD outlets that have survived are Sarvodaya, Movie Empire, Movietime, Chariot and Read Sure. The long-standing Teenage in the busy Colaba neighbourhood is in the process of winding up since its owner met with a road accident.
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DVD’s Fading Charm
A rental-library, Movie Extreme, without so much as a notice to its regular clients, shut shop without returning a substantial amount of deposit money running into lakhs. All efforts to retrieve the cash have been in vain.
“The fast vanishing clientele”, 45-year-old Kerawala says, “was to be expected with age. It’s like finding myself losing hair every new morning. Those who still call up for DVDs either don’t know how to download or don’t have the patience to spend time at the computer. It’s essentially the 40-plus customers, particularly housewives, who are still faithful to DVDs. Plus, there’s a section of movie lovers who still want to watch original high-quality prints on original DVDs.”
International pay channels, primarily Netflix, are expected to be a top attraction in the near future. Currently, illegal downloads are the flavour of the season. So-called ‘video shares’ of freshly released films like Tamasha and Prem Ratan Dhan Paayo are also known to have become rampant on the mini-screens of cellphones.
DVDs To Be Sold Off As Scrap?
As for the massive stock of DVDs on the racks at the rental stores, they will find a home in the collections of cinéaste or be sold off as scrap material.
While tracking the DVD scenario at the stores over the last decade-and-a-half, it can be detected that the viewership taste is largely predictable, although there are some surprises.
Unbeknownst to most, the DVD audience for Hollywood has been rising at such a rapid rate that it has outstripped the mania for Bollywood entertainment. Of an average of 10 DVDs rented in a day, eight of these are of Hollywood movies.
(The writer is a film critic, filmmaker, theatre director and a weekend painter)
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