CBS and Amazon.com Announce Customized DVDs
Amazon.com subsidiary CustomFlix Labs, Inc., has announced that CBS News has selected CustomFlix and Amazon.com to distribute thousands of hours of prime-time and classic news content, including award-winning “Minutes” programming, through the CustomFlix Create Your Own DVD(TM) service.
CBS News content will also be placed in the CustomFlix Future-Proof Archive(TM) service, a secure storage platform designed to repurpose content into future digital formats.
“This arrangement provides CBS News with a new way to make thousands of hours of our content accessible to millions of Amazon.com customers on DVD, most of which has never before been available in this format,” said Sean McManus, President of CBS News. “The service gives us the flexibility to distribute our content the way the customer wants it.”
“CBS News programming is a natural fit for the CustomFlix Create Your Own DVD service,” said Dana LoPiccolo-Giles, co-founder and Managing Director of CustomFlix. “We understand that many customers want the flexibility of picking and choosing CBS News content in a collectible format and customized DVDs are a perfect solution. Through the CustomFlix Create Your Own DVD service, customers can select the specific news clips they want and then CustomFlix builds a customized DVD containing just that content.”
Amazon.com customers can order complete programs of daily or weekly news broadcasts and compilations on Amazon.com, or choose from thousands of news segments and assemble their own compilations through the CustomFlix Create Your Own DVD service. CBS News programming now available for purchase includes:
- “60 Minutes” – Content from the most successful news broadcast in television history, from hard-hitting investigative reports, interviews, and feature segments to profiles of the people who have helped change our world.
- “CBS Evening News” – Classic and current news broadcasts from the “CBS Evening News,” the “CBS Evening News Saturday Edition,” and the “CBS Evening News Sunday Edition.”
- CBS Long-Form Documentaries – Numerous single-topic documentaries produced by CBS News Productions over the past 10 years.
The DVDs created by the CustomFlix Create Your Own DVD system have customized artwork, are professionally packaged with full-color DVD faces and covers in overwrapped amaray-style cases, and can contain up to 10 news segments or 90 minutes of video.
CBS News content can be purchased through www.amazon.com/60minutes or www.CustomFlix.com/60minutes.
While much of the focus in the media World is on downloading content for immediate viewing, there is likely to be a continuing market for disc-stored (DVD) content into the future. The Create Your Own DVD offering is likely to appeal to those who want a permanent copy of a broadcast that is significant to them. A DVD also has portability advantages – it can be (literally) moved to different locations without worries about bandwidth. Also, while DVD players are just about everywhere, if you want to play a stored file in a new location, the necessary hardware may not always be available.
It will be interesting to see if other broadcast networks move into this area.
