It isn't necessary to look at the sales figures to know that there has been something remarkable about the rise of digital video discs (DVDs) in the past six years. They are the fastest growing entertainment technology of all time. In what seems like an instant, they have appeared at the front of music stores, in supermarket aisles, and under our noses when we pay for petrol.
Design gurus have theories about why certain objects infiltrate our lives without resistance, and certainly the thin, light-refracting slickness of the disc - the brittle, magical fact that something that small can contain Citizen Kane or The Battle of Algiers - is attractive. But a comparison with the music industry explains why these qualities alone are not enough to explain DVD's triumph. When audio compact discs came along in 1982, there were grumbles and protests, because their aim was to replace a much loved home format: vinyl. Film buffs, by contrast, collected video tapes with weariness. VHS was a crude, fuzzy medium, comparable to audio tapes rather than vinyl. With the advent of DVDs, cinephiles abandoned VHS in a heartbeat.
So complete has been the DVD revolution that it is hard to believe that the first discs were sold in the US, by Toshiba, as recently as 1997. Philips and Sony quickly followed suit, and as word got around of their vastly improved image sharpness, colour registration and Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound, discs flew off the shelves. In 2001, 13m western European homes had a DVD player. By 2006, 103m will. Discs themselves are seeing a 36 per cent year on year sales growth. In 2001, the UK's total box office was ?690m, whereas its DVD and video market was ?1.5bn, over 50 per cent higher. Nowadays, in nearly every territory DVD and videotape revenues far outstrip theatre and television sales and merchandising income; the video proportion of this is falling fast. In other words, those little discs of rainbow light, what the US film industry's chief spokesman, Motion Picture Association of America boss Jack Valenti, called "that beguiling discovery," will, within a few years, be the central plank of world cinema's revenue platform: the reason, if you will, for cinema to exist.
Many of the implications of this have already been noted, but two have been overlooked. The first is that the entertainment media's obsession with weekend box office figures has become irrelevant. From the mid-1970s until the arrival of DVD, the first Friday to Sunday takings of an American film were increasingly not only a predictor of its final box office, but a maker or breaker of mainstream careers. Now such sums are an ancillary revenue stream; something to get tabloid television excited, but little else. The earning potential of any work for cinema has returned to the pre-1970s situation of a slower, more steady slope. This doesn't look like good news for the banks and sales agents who stump up multimillion dollar budgets and expect quick returns. But a better funding process for cinema is possible in the age of DVD: sales agents could become more like building societies in the property market, still providing the lump sums at the outset but expecting more modest returns from producers, charged at much higher interest rates over far longer periods. Repayment arrangements over a decade or more are easily imaginable and, again as in the property market, the producer would end up owning (at least some of) the intellectual property rights.
Beyond this radical restructuring of the film financing system, however, lies a more profound implication of the ascent of DVD. Not only can old films suddenly become commercially reactivated, but the very idea of what is makeable changes. Now the stay-at-homes, the re-watchers, the thinkers and those hungry for more contextual information such as directors' commentaries, forgotten classics and considered storytelling, find themselves the new focus of the film world. The central fact of the DVD experience is that film is no longer a one-hit thrill. The film does not flow inexorably before you but bends to your instincts. DVD turns cinephiles into capricious obsessives, analysers and fetishisers.
Already this fact has influenced pre-production and production. Many films now shoot their "making-ofs" at the same time. Christopher Nolan's Memento, which was a story told backwards in movie theatres, is also presented chronologically on DVD. Isn't it inevitable that filmmaking aesthetics in the future will be more widely influenced by DVD's appetite for context and rearrangement? Won't writers, directors and producers begin to stud their stories and images with hidden references and implications which on first viewing could never be spotted, exactly as computer game designers already do? And isn't there a chance that some - at least some - of these narrative secrets won't just be puzzles and tricks, but genuine enrichments?
Thanks to DVD's technical triumph over VHS, the days when films were intended to be viewed only once in their pristine state are coming to an end. Film is beginning to be seen, even by its most market-driven proponents, as a lasting rather than momentary medium.
