by As I mentioned a while ago I’ve been watching a lot of movies on DVD recently. Many of those are newer releases but a fair amount are from 2011 and earlier. So I’ve been seeing a lot of old trailers that were added to those DVDs back when the movies they were promoting were either about to hit theaters or were coming soon to home video. The continued relevancy of five year old trailers is…questionable. Sure, someone may uncover a gem they’d missed all those years ago but for the most part I’ve either seen it or at the very least already have made a decision as to whether it’s one I’ll eventually watch or not.
My Blu-ray player (yes, I have a Blu-ray player but no Blu-rays because reasons) is hooked up to the internet so I can watch Netflix and so on through that machine. So what if instead of hard-coding trailers that are going to be out of date in roughly a year the discs triggered a web player and inserted trailers for movies from that studio that were still in their theatrical marketing cycle?
Now to be clear I don’t know enough about the technical side of things to propose how exactly this would work. But I have Star Wars DVDs from 1999 that, when I put them in a computer’s DVD-Rom drive, would take me to the Star Wars website where I could unlock all sorts of content. Now granted I haven’t done this in 15 years but I *did* and it was pretty great at the time. So there has to be a way to make this happen.
I know at least one reason the studios may not want to do this is that they’re not going to take away something that’s at least ostensibly propping up and supporting the home video business that’s falling faster than oil prices. And there’s nothing that says dynamically updated trailers couldn’t also include home video releases. But eventually the tide is going to shift and home video is going to be objectively a dying market. And even if that needs continued support the trailers can be for movies that are new to home video, not ones that are a decade old.
Let’s put this in context and see which portion of the media is doing more to effectively place ads alongside content, which what trailers on home video releases are:
Example 1: Open up a magazine from 10 years ago and the ads are all irrelevant. They’re for medication that’s probably been recalled by the FDA, shows that are no longer on the air and other out-of-date products.
Example 2: Open a web page for a story from 10 years ago (assuming it’s not behind a paywall) and it will have currently ads displayed alongside it that were sold in the last quarter and may even be, through retargeting, related to something you were just searching for or looking at elsewhere.
Again, I’m not the tech guy to figure out how to make this work. But from a user experience point of view there has to be a better way to make home video trailers better for the people who are still buying or renting those discs.
