Why Can't I Buy Volume 3 As A Download Yet?

on
Download in 2015
Every once in a while I get asked why Volume 3, Sea Kayak with Gordon Brown is not yet available as a download.  The question came up again recently on Twitter.
We have no plans to release Volume 3 as a download until 2015 at the earliest, and there are a couple of reasons.

 The main one is this:- if we make it instantly available as a download, physical kayak stores won't stock it as a DVD.  Apparently we'd take away their Unique Selling Point - which is to say, if the customer wants this product today they go to the store and buy it rather than waiting for the DVD by mail. (more…)

We sell a lot of DVDs through kayak shops and we want to support them, both in Europe and especially in the US where they account for a larger percentage of our sales.  

What's more, many homes outside cities still struggle to download large video files. Without getting into technicalities, it is difficult to compress sea kayaking video (where every pixel is changing from frame to frame) to produce a file that's small enough to download and yet still looks good when screened.

 Incidentally, our US distributor is not a big DVD distributor - he's a kayak gear representative.  That shows you where we're aiming our films.

 I'm currently investigating combined Download / Streaming sales through site such as VHX and Reelhouse as an alternative download option. 
 
They work well for one-watch films which sell at under $10 but I'm not yet convinced they're right for our more expensive multi-viewing films which are really like video text-books.

I've investigated iTunes and it's still designed for mass market films. We'd have to go through a third party who charge a small fortune to place any film on iTunes and we would make a hefty loss on the volumes we sell. (Free podcasts are different - see our SeaKayakPodcasts.com)


Yet things change.  Technology and habits may soon render the above explanations obsolete, even for our low-volume 'niche' films.  DVDs may die. All films may be streamed or Downloaded.  
But for the moment at least, with our highly specialised, niche, low volume product, we're supporting our stockists.
In time Volume 3 will be released as a download.  Quite how to do it is another matter.  

Perhaps we'll release the four films as four separate downloads.  Perhaps we'll string them all together into one long video file.  Perhaps I'll bundle all four into a Zip file and sell that as a combined Download.  I'll sort that out in 2015.