Graziadio Business Report Blog

This is the second in a series of posts reporting on the hot button issues discussed at the 2008 Entertainment Supply Chain Academy Conference. See the first post here.

Devendra Mishra, MBA

Since 2004, when the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary became members of the European Union, these countries have seen the emergence of an ever-growing middle class. Over the last four years, the changing home video market in these territories has presented Hollywood studios and their distribution partners with a set of unique challenges for market growth of DVD and video games. At the Academy, a group of executives shared their experiences with the video supply chains in Central and Eastern Europe. They highlighted the lack of retail infrastructure and information standards for trading in the supply chain and identified the following drawbacks to doing business there:

• vendor inventory management,
• rampant piracy,
• product pricing,
• gray market,
• unknown royalty payments for Blu-ray,
• limitations posed by copyright encoding in corporate businesses where content protection is unnecessary, and
• the difficulty of getting answers to intellectual property matters.

Continue reading ‘The Global Entertainment Market’

This is the first in a series of posts reporting on the hot button issues discussed at the 2008 Entertainment Supply Chain Academy Conference.

Devendra Mishra, MBA

Over 140 executives of the European and U.S. entertainment industries assembled in Prague, Czech Republic, in early October to address “The Future of Packaged Media in the Emerging Digital World.” Leaders of operations management at the home entertainment companies, retail behemoths, thought leaders and solution providers of the industry engaged in open information exchange, collaboration and networking, confirming that supply chain management is everyone’s business.

As conference chairman, I was pleased to see that this year’s Academy not only reflected the overwhelming success of last year’s event but also a keen understanding throughout the executive suites of studios and their supply chain partners that we are facing extraordinary opportunities and challenges.
The operational agenda for the industry was to:

• Launch Blu-ray and unleash web-enabled connectivity, including figuring out how to embrace digital distribution to satisfy consumers and be profitable,
• Grow the business in the emerging Eastern European market,
• Ensure sustainability of the environment, while reducing the overall cost in the supply chain.

This is the first in a series of posts, each devoted to discussing one of the issues above and what came out of the Academy. The relevance of supply chain management thinking and practice has never been greater than in our current circumstances with the global economic crisis we now find ourselves in. At the heart of it all is the potential to reduce inventory and time in the supply chain through collaboration where waste and redundancies are further eliminated.

Continue reading ‘How Blu-Ray is Driving the Entertainment Industry’