Movie rentals ditched 10% during in 1H 2012

Research firm NPD Group has published its latest statistics looking at the movie rental industry for the first half of 2012. According to the statistics, the movie rental industry declined 10% overall during the first half of 2012. The 10% decline is compared to the first half of 2011. NPD says the decline is occurring even though consumers are switching from physical media to digital rentals.

I think one major item we should take into account what this is the quality of movies available to rent during the first half of 2012. It's been a very bad year for movie rentals if you ask me because it hasn't been a great year for movies. We didn't have truly popular movies at the theater to watch, and anticipate on DVD, until the summer movie season kicked off and many of those films, such as The Avengers, are still not available on DVD.

According to NPD, physical discs are still the most common way people rent movies in the US making up 62% of all rentals. Digital rentals made up 38% of the movie rental industry. When you look more closely at physical DVD rentals, kiosk options such as Redbox were the most popular rental locations with 45% of physical disk rentals happening there.

Rentals of Blu-ray discs declined by 17% and the only gain in the movie rental business during the first half of 2012 came via video-on-demand. According to NPD's numbers, video-on-demand outlets such as iTunes, Comcast, and Netflix grew 5% during the first half of the year. This is no surprise as more and more consumers turned to video-on-demand rather than having to drive to the kiosk or store to rent a film.

[via LA Times]