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A new movie service is proposing to bring Hollywood movies into subscribers homes the same day they hit theaters.  The price tag for this ultimate home theater experience?  $20,000 for a digital delivery system, plus $500 per film.  While this may be at the extreme high end, it does seem to indicate the direction that film distribution is heading - a narrowing of the gap between when a film plays the big screen until it’s available on the small screen via DVD and the internet.  

From the Wall Street Journal article “Movies at Home, for $20,000”:

The proposed system represents a twist in an ongoing debate over the future of “release windows,” the practice of staggering the distribution of movies through different channels to maximize profits in each. Traditionally, that has meant a movie hits theaters first, followed several months later by DVDs, video-on-demand, subscription-cable channels, and so on.

The windowing system has already come under pressure amid plummeting DVD sales and rising digital piracy. And consumers have grown accustomed to receiving entertainment content more readily than they used to.

One hot-button issue in that debate has been an early, “premium” video-on-demand window, in which cable subscribers could pay $30 or so to watch a movie a month or two after its debut in theaters.

Studios no longer make as much from DVDs. U.S. consumer spending on DVDs is down about 20% in 2010 from 2009, to $7.8 billion, according to media-tracking firm IHS Screen Digest. DVD spending is down 43% from its 2006 peak of $13.7 billion.

At the same time, consumer spending on video-on-demand services rose 17% in 2010 from 2009, to $1.4 billion, according to IHS.