The Top Retailers in Home Entertainment 2019: The Golden 12

Welcome to Media Play News’ second-annual look at the top home entertainment retailers. As we noted last year, technology and innovation have completely revolutionized home entertainment retailing in the more than 40-year history of this industry.For the first 20 years, home entertainment retailing consisted first of a network of independent mom-and-pop videocassette rental shops, and then a handful of powerful national video rental chains such as Blockbuster Entertainment and Hollywood Entertainment.The 1997 launch of DVD moved home entertainment retailing into the hands of the big mass merchants such as Walmart, which at one point controlled 40% of disc sales, as well as consumer electronics chains such as Best Buy.But for the past 10 years, just as home entertainment viewing options have proliferated, the distribution pipeline has split into all sorts of different directions, with the only common ground being that filmed content, either digitally or physically, is being delivered to consumers on an on-demand basis.Accordingly, studios that used to generate the bulk of their revenue through physical product sales to traditional retailers now have several other ways to generate money from their content. With transactional video-on-demand (TVOD), particularly digital sales, on an upswing, digital-only retailers such as Microsoft Movies & TV and Google Play Movies & TV have become an increasingly important component of the home entertainment food chain.