Viacom (VIA-B) made a big marketing push when it promoted the newest installment of SpongeBob SquarePants on April 13, on its Nickelodeon channel.
Within a short five days, the company had "Friend or Foe" for sale in retail outlets all over the place. With this happening in the television industry, we'll probably see it start to happen more often with movies also.
The problems are different with movies than with TV releases. You have the theater owners in strong opposition to short DVD releases because of fears of losing moviegoers. Now that the industry has started to rebound some, they are probably going to dig their heels in on this one.
For the studios, they love it because it helps to deal with the piracy problem, which has more impact upon them because it cuts into their DVD sales, which is the real moneymaker for them. In a real sense, movies have pretty much become loss leaders to the studios, with DVD sales and money made from action figures and toys being where their real profits lie.
There is the added expense of running different marketing campaigns across the various products too, which is a large added expense.
What the "Friend or Foe" campaign did was use the toy promotion through Burger King to help promote the show, and at the same time they are now able to use the same campaign to promote the DVD also. It really makes a lot of sense from that way of looking at it.
I've been saying here for a long time that it's the theater owners that will eventually have to find ways of generating new revenue, as this isn't going to be stopped. All they can do is slow it down a little.
Studios will have to go this route as they can't allow DVD sales to be eroded like the music CD sales have been, or they might go the route of the airline industry that rarely makes a profit.
I don't see how the shrinking of time between movies and DVD releases can or should be stopped from happening. It just makes too much financial sense for it not to be deployed.
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