DVD revolution

The increasing importance of DVDs is changing the way the film industry operates, argues Tim de Lisle in The Guardian.

In the cinema, if the big get bigger, the small get squeezed out, because there are only so many screens; but in DVD-land, a gentler Darwinism prevails. Your local supermarket may stock only the top 50 titles, but HMV has thousands. There are an estimated 29,000 titles in print, which is about five times as many as video. DVD has been good for several species of small fish: arthouse films, foreign films, ethnic-minority films, classics, and especially documentaries.