This article is focused on mainstream cinema and I tend to agree with it; I miss the days when major studios were releasing DVDs packed with extras. Simultaneously, we're in the middle of a major boutique Blu-ray boom. I am not intimately familiar with the economics of this, but it's demonstrably true that it's possible to license and produce high quality Blu-rays with a lot of interesting extras in batches of 2-3K and make a living at it.
We're probably all familiar with the Criterion Collection, which has been around for decades. Fewer of us have heard of Vinegar Syndrome, which has a highly successful business producing Blu-rays of mostly B movies and exploitation flicks. Arrow, based in the UK, has been releasing cult movies for a couple of decades and we're at the point where people who worked for Arrow are going and starting their own boutique companies (Radiance Films, for example, who produce 3-4 discs a month, mostly non-English genre movies). There are easily a dozen more companies like this out there.
I think the model requires appealing to a collector mindset. The boutique Blu-ray subreddit often hosts fervent arguments between people who don't break the shrink wrap and people who care about the movies. Several of the boutique companies have subscriptions: for a thousand bucks you can get one copy of everything they produce in the year. Often a new release will be available in special packaging for a limited run, with no difference in the content: those sell like hotcakes.
I don't know if it's practical to run this model for major studios. For one thing, it's a tiny market as these things go -- does Sony really want to make the effort to pump out cool material for a couple of thousand sales? They'd be doing it for prestige and marketing reasons, not financial rewards. There might be a niche for boutique companies to do an ongoing deal with a major studio for this kind of release, though.
We're probably all familiar with the Criterion Collection, which has been around for decades. Fewer of us have heard of Vinegar Syndrome, which has a highly successful business producing Blu-rays of mostly B movies and exploitation flicks. Arrow, based in the UK, has been releasing cult movies for a couple of decades and we're at the point where people who worked for Arrow are going and starting their own boutique companies (Radiance Films, for example, who produce 3-4 discs a month, mostly non-English genre movies). There are easily a dozen more companies like this out there.
I think the model requires appealing to a collector mindset. The boutique Blu-ray subreddit often hosts fervent arguments between people who don't break the shrink wrap and people who care about the movies. Several of the boutique companies have subscriptions: for a thousand bucks you can get one copy of everything they produce in the year. Often a new release will be available in special packaging for a limited run, with no difference in the content: those sell like hotcakes.
I don't know if it's practical to run this model for major studios. For one thing, it's a tiny market as these things go -- does Sony really want to make the effort to pump out cool material for a couple of thousand sales? They'd be doing it for prestige and marketing reasons, not financial rewards. There might be a niche for boutique companies to do an ongoing deal with a major studio for this kind of release, though.