In the first quarter of every year, the Digital Entertainment Group can be counted on to offer an optimistic outlook on a metric of its own design called Total Home Entertainment Spending in the US market. And 2024 is no exception: Preliminary data puts total spending in 2023 at $43 billion, up 16.8% from the previous year.
Thom Yorke – Last I Heard (…He circled the drain)
But DEG, which was founded in 1997 as a trade association focused on the home video category, occasionally has to adjust the way it reports these statistics to keep this positive story going.
For example, if DEG had made no major changes in 2011 and only tracked the core home video business itself (which includes DVD sales and rentals, VOD services like Xfinity, and Electronic Sell-Thru platforms like iTunes), that number would have dropped from $17 billion to $6 billion (a 65% drop) in the latest report released earlier this month.
But because DEG added subscription streaming to Netflix’s home entertainment spending and other SVOD services in 2011, those revenues alone skyrocketed from $994 million to $37 billion by 2023. That’s an almost laughable 3,631% increase in just 13 years.
