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THE HOME entertainment business is rapidly becoming a digital one, but Redbox is still capitalizing on those stragglers who prefer their movies in disc form. The movie rental company now accounts for half of the DVD rental market in the US thanks to its 44,000 kiosks across 36,000 locations, said Galen C. Smith, cCFO of Redbox?s parent company Outerwall, speaking Thursday at the Gabelli & Company Movie and Entertainment Conference in New York. In its fourth quarter, Redbox had a 38% stake in all movie rentals, including VOD.

CINRAM GROUP Inc, a Najafi Companies-owned affiliate, has completed the acquisition of JVC America Inc. The award-winning JAI manufacturing and fulfillment operations based in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and Kennesaw, Georgia, provides services to major gaming and software publishers,
and a range of non-media and retail clients. It will now operate as Cinram Operations, Inc. The newly formed affiliate will be integrated into Cinram's current mix of business and will strengthen its offerings to new and existing clients.

THE majority of electronic sell-through business in the US in 2013 was for catalogue titles, according to new research from The NPD Group. About 57% of digital sales were for catalogue titles - a percentage comparable to packaged-media sell-through. That percentage is down from 2012, when 63% of digital sales were catalogue. In addition, 70% of the top digital sell-through titles were associated with franchises, including Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Star Trek and Despicable Me.

AUSTRALIA is second only to the US in adoption per capita of the cloud-based digital locker system UltraViolet for legal streaming and downloading of movies, according to the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), which runs UltraViolet. More than 160,000 people in Australian and New Zealand have opened UltraViolet accounts, DECE said.

PHYSICAL discs continue to account for the majority of video and video game revenues, but digital content has established itself as a significant and growing sector of the market, according to the Entertainment Merchants Association?s latest report The 2014 D2 Report: Discs & Digital - The Business of Home Entertainment Retailing. It finds that 35% of video spending in 2013 was for digitally-delivered content and, while total physical video game spending slightly exceeded that of digital game spending, digital video game spending surpassed spending on new discs for the first time. Overall video spending increased to $18.2 billion, the second consecutive year of growth in consumer spending, with Blu-ray Discs and digital delivery compensating for a decline in DVD revenues.