Welcoming You to Our Screening Room

7 Apr, 2008 By: Thomas K. Arnold

I had a most interesting chat the other day with the home entertainment president of one of the six major studios. He told me that Home Media Magazine and its suite of products has become not just a selling tool for his studio, a vehicle for his sales team to reach its retail customers, but also as a trusted source of information for his staff. “There's so much going on, especially in the digital, Internet space that at times we are overwhelmed,” he told me. “We look to you to not just report the news, but also to filter out what's important and what's not, so that by reading your magazine, your daily news blast and your Web site, we can get a better handle of what's going on in our business and make sure we stay on track.”

That was gratifying to hear because our mission here at Home Media Magazine is to provide all of you involved in the business of bringing entertainment into the home with the necessary information, tools and resources to better run, and continually enhance, your own businesses — regardless of whether you are a supplier, a retailer or a distributor; or a journalist or analyst covering home entertainment.

We see our print magazine as the mother ship, the Bible of the home entertainment business, a weekly news and research compendium. Our Web site is a continually updated refresher course; our daily news blast, a quick morning “cheat sheet” designed to keep up you up to date on the latest news as it happens.

The newest addition to our stable of products is the Home Media Screening Room, featuring trailers of upcoming DVD releases. I believe it's the only video Web site devoted exclusively to new DVDs currently in solicitation — a great way to separate the wheat from the chaff that you simply don't get on YouTube or all the other video Web sites. We're hoping our Screening Room will become an invaluable tool for both retailers trying to decide what to bring in, and for consumers trying to decide what to buy or rent.

As icing on the cake, we have a whole channel devoted to exclusive content, video clips that augment our regular news coverage. You'll find everything from snippets of our conferences and awards presentations to coverage of press conferences, from highlights of our first-ever High-Def Disc Awards to Warner Home Video's George Feltenstein talking up the studio's 85th anniversary DVD campaign and director Ridley Scott on American Gangster.

If you haven't already done so, check out our Screening Room — and let me know what you think.