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This chapter deals with the consumer electronics industry: the devices consumers use to receive, record, amplify, and display media information. Without them, electronic media would not exist. Together with content production and distribution systems, media devices form a triangle of media industries. Here, the market concentration of telephone, radio, television, DVD players, camcorders, cable television consumer equipment, satellite receivers, CD players, and MP3 players is analyzed. The media consumer electronics industry in the United States is large and diverse in terms of its products. In 2004, its US volume alone was $63 billion. Some firms appear to be niche players, usually sitting at the high-end of the price scale. As for the low and medium price ranges, the market is dominated by around seven or eight large, efficient firms which enjoy enormous economies of scale and scope. Several large firms have been acquired or operated primarly as a brand. There is little middle ground in the industry.

This chapter discusses China's home-video market for TV drama. It examines what happens when TV dramas are consumed on DVD, focusing on the ideological and commercial significance of the DVD market of TV drama for contemporary society. The chapter begins with an examination of a number of issues in the development of China's audio-visual market since the 1980s, and provides statistics to support the claim that there is a marked polarization in audio-visual publications. It also discusses recent trends in illegal recording, and examines anti-piracy offensives by the state and the video industry. The chapter concludes with a close look at consumers of TV drama on video and the socio-ideological implications of using video as an alternative medium to broadcast television.

Red light emitting p-n diodes (LEDs) became prominent in the 1960s based on GaAsP and GaP, finding application in alpha-numeric displays and as indicator lamps. Much improved brightness became available from AlGaAs in the 1970s, together with orange and yellow emission from InGaAlP. Modest efficiencies in the green were also available from GaP doped with nitrogen. Blue emission could be obtained from SiC, but only with very poor efficiency. Full colour had to wait until the middle of the nineties when Akasaki, then Nakamura in Japan developed bright blue and green diodes based on InGaN. This enabled the fabrication of white light emitters either by combining red, green, and blue LEDs or by using a blue LED to excite a suitable phosphor. Current LEDs are some five times more efficient than tungsten lamps and are set to replace them for general lighting in the foreseeable future. Nakamura also developed a blue laser diode for application in the DVD player.

This chapter uses a historically and geographically mobile approach to map a range of films and filmmakers often absent from discussions of extreme cinema. The chapter starts with an exploration of the extreme works of directors like Luis Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman and Roman Polanski, stressing their importance to the creation of an extreme art aesthetic. The chapter focuses on the paratextuality of these filmmakers, and studies DVD and Blu-ray versions of their more extreme texts. Focusing closely on how exploitation marketing traditions co-exist with their art film counterparts on these objects, the chapter highlights the complexity of extremity’s commercial identity. The chapter takes the same approach to its study of European exploitation cinema. Using home entertainment paratexts to highlight influential films, the chapter investigates companies such as Arrow Video, Vipco, Anchor Bay, BFI and Redemption DVD, paying special attention to their handling of a range of directors, including Lucio Fulci, Dario Argento, and Jean Rollin. The chapter underscores the crucial role exploitation cinema had in shaping extreme art cinema and highlights the contradictory role extremity performs within the commercial sphere.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the death of film, which began in the late 1970s. The process has been technologically driven, founded on the emergence of home videotape recording, and soon after that, home computing, leading to film's redefinition at the end of the 1990s in the launch of the DVD. The chapter also argues that the cinema of complexity — the emerging punk cinema — is today the cinema of supplementary-ness born out of the supplementary-ness of videotape and CD-ROM technology, in which activities beyond the visual and aural content of the primary medium are highlighted in its consumption. Complexity, or the grouping together of similar ideas, activities and actions, makes the centre of the DVD not the film itself but what has, until now, been considered auxiliary material in the practice of film viewing.

This chapter states that the Video Recordings Act and the ‘extreme pornography’ provisions of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 need to be understood as measures that transcend matters of narrow party policy. It then elaborates what kinds of material are still likely to find themselves cut from films, and more particularly DVDs, in contemporary Britain, even in the adults-only ‘18’ and ‘R18’ categories, and, more importantly, explain the reasons behind such acts of censorship. Sexual violence is a theme that has continued to preoccupy the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), and is one of the most common reasons for cuts at the ‘18’ and ‘R18’ levels. 2009 saw the passing of the Coroners and Justice Act, sections 62 to 68 of which criminalise possession of what is termed a ‘prohibited image of a child’.

This chapter examines how Splat Pack director Eli Roth uses the DVD format as a platform to shape audiences' interpretations of his films. Focusing on the DVD releases of his horror films Hostel and Hostel: Part II, it considers how Roth makes claims for the subversive and oppositional nature of his work. In particular, it looks at Roth's use of ‘quotes’ in his films to encourage viewers to consider the films in the light of world events, in this case, Abu Ghraib and the Iraq War. It argues that Roth's efforts to control interpretations of his films are undermined by multiple tensions between the films' content and the claims he makes for them. The digital remediation of Roth's Hostel films, as well as their attendant instability, make them much more complicated and collapse ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’ to create a new narrative that is about Roth fashioning an image of himself. The chapter also analyses the national security subtext of Roth's Hostel films and suggests that they were not reactions to, or reflections of, post-9/11 trauma, but emerged from a specific context in which a film's success depended on its being watched over and over again.

Music video aesthetics have seeped into other genres, and music video directors like Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze are altering the landscape of feature films. But there are no archives for music video, and music video’s history remains uncharted. Focusing on the Palm DVD Music Video Director Series, this chapter considers music video directors as auteurs. Music video has become a site for directors to develop style and technique. Directors have a hand in every phase of production: the making of storyboards, the casting of extras, shooting, and editing. Directorial styles diverge because there are no schools for making music videos nor industry internship programs, nor are there communal video-making practices like making music videos in garages. This chapter examines differences among the Palm Series directors (Mark Romanek, Michel Gondry, Chris Cunningham, Spike Jonze, and Hype Williams) in order to argue for the value and limits of music video auteurship.

This chapter examines the role of two types of affectivity mediated through sound that can be seen as helping to position the comedy fan as part of a particular kind of audience formation. Recorded laughter has played a long and important role in broadcast comedy, simulating ‘liveness’, providing cues for the viewer’s laughter and locating them within an electronic ‘community’. Recorded laughter, however, was until recently largely seen to be in decline, its absence a marker of quality, its presence seemingly a deliberate and significant choice as opposed to a default mode. The DVD commentary, on the other hand, offers what Thomas Doherty calls an ‘imaginary friendship’ between viewer and artist, not community but ‘a new order of intimacy’. This mediated intimacy takes on particular force in comedy – as a League of Gentlemen fan comments, ‘it’s like listening to a great private conversation between best friends’. The commentary might constitute a comic performance in its own right, one that rivals the ‘main feature’ as a source of entertainment. Even when the commentary works against this – The Mighty Boosh’s are more like hearing a joke from which one has been excluded - the listener may still long for this affective inclusion. This chapter, then, examines these two technologically mediated structures of feeling – community and intimacy.

This final chapter explores the enduring legacy and fascination surrounding the Hitchcock branding. Since his death in 1980, Hitchcock has continued to fascinate audiences, scholars, critics and culture in general. By exploring the repeated rereleases of Hitchcock’s work on DVD (despite the relative youthfulness of the format, Psycho has already been released in seven different DVD editions in the UK alone), and Varese Sarabande's series of reissues of Herrmann soundtracks on CD, this chapter looks at how the co-authorship of Herrmann and Hitchcock has been contextualised, narrativised and conceptualised in different ways by the artefacts included in the reissued, remastered and recontextualised versions of Hitchcock’s work with Herrmann (and Herrmann’s work without Hitchcock). Drawing on recent scholarship on the DVD as ‘auteur machine’ by Catherine Grant, and new work on authorship by C. Paul Sellors, the chapter argues that the digital reconceptualization of authorship struggles to account for a notion of collaboration.

Exploring the historical mobility and diffusion of drive-in theatres and their patrons provides an explanatory lens for the shift from theatrical exhibition of exploitation films to their remediation on home video, thus helping explain the mobility and diffusion of contemporary fan cultures that uphold such physical sites as lieux de mÉmoire. The drive-in as a lived place has become increasingly obsolete, its disappearance from the physical landscape allowing it to better function as a symbolic space invested with multiple class-inflected nostalgias. The drive-in's disreputable connotations developed from the mixing of unconventional populations, and especially the influx of working-class viewers drawn by exploitation cinema's populist appeal. Since this populism can conflict with contemporary fans’ claims to subcultural capital, the pastness of the drive-in serves as a spatiotemporal site historically distant enough to contain but not resolve classed cultural distinctions. These distinctions are reproduced in the variety of home video editions that coexist in the marketplace, mediating different class-inflected nostalgias that can complicate the aspirational value typically assumed by new video formats.

This chapter examines how DVD led to the mainstreaming of once marginal ‘Unrated’ horror films. It looks at the emergence of the Splat Pack films after an industrial change in ratings policy. During the DVD era, the film industry's ‘sell-through’ pricing mandates, coupled with DVD's ability to add to — and take away from — the content of a film, allowed ‘Unrated’ movies to make their way to the mainstream. This chapter considers the increasing prevalence of gory, graphic and prolonged violence in films made by the Splat Pack as a reflection of Hollywood taking advantage of a rating system that had changed because of DVD technology. Cinema versions of these films need only feature ‘just enough’ gore, blood and carnage to entice viewers to check out the ‘Unrated’ version on DVD, a product that, the consumer is assured, is ‘uncut’. This chapter discusses the reasons why home video became a viable avenue for the release of ‘Unrated’ films.

This chapter examines how Splat Pack director Rob Zombie utilises extra text to dramatise and narrativise the making of his horror films — that is, to collapse the ‘fiction’ of the film's narrative with the ‘reality’ of the film's making into one supertext that encompasses ‘the story of the film’. It suggests that Zombie's films are preoccupied with monstrous denizens from the underclass attacking the middle class, and that they are seemingly subversive because of the ways in which Zombie sympathetically depicts his ‘white-trash’ monsters and does not offer the middle class any redemption. The ‘white trash’ stereotype in popular media serves to demean white people from lower economic strata by portraying them as ‘poor, dirty, drunken, criminally minded, and sexually perverse people’. However, the chapter shows that the oppositionality of Zombie's films is complicated by how it is presented on the DVD platform, and argues that Zombie's films-on-DVD and how they focus on the acting process foreground the fluidity of identity and the ultimate instability of class.

This chapter examines the Saw films as they appear on DVD and how they differ from other horror films. American journalists often included the creative minds of the Saw series — James Wan, Leigh Whannell and Darren Lynn Bousman — in the Splat Pack. Any analysis of the Splat Pack and its relation to media industries would be incomplete without a consideration of the Saw films because, out of all the films in the Splat Pack cycle, they are the most concerned with media. The Saw films are designed to resemble interactive, new media products that encourage audience interaction, employing storytelling techniques shaped by new media. Yet these films are uniquely suited for the DVD platform, where their cyberintimations are given full digital expression. The chapter considers how the Saw films are plugged into two new media iterations of Tom Gunning's idea of a ‘cinema of attractions’: the DVD as ‘digital theme park’ and YouTube as a digital cinema of attractions.

This chapter examines two horror films made by Splat Pack directors and released on DVD: Alexandre Aja's Haute Tension (released in France in 2003 and as High Tension in the United States in 2005) and Neil Marshall's The Descent (released in Britain in 2005 and in the United States in 2006). Haute Tension and The Descent are metacinematic exercises in horror film-making that have made Aja and Marshall darlings of more film-literate, ‘hardcore’ horror fans, a group of fans who have not necessarily embraced the rest of the Splat Pack. Lionsgate tampered with both films when they released them in cinemas in the United States. The DVDs retain evidence of this tampering in various ways, with this residue constituting what Timothy Corrigan calls the ‘material scars’ of a film's troubled production and/or release. The chapter considers the ways in which Aja and Marshall play with intertextuality as well as genre and gender conventions through their films.

This chapter explores relics and icons in identifying cinema's authenticity. A particular cinematic experience proceeds in terms of content delivery and media environment. Content delivery, through DVD players, desktops, laptops, notebooks, tablets, and smartphones, enables people to remain in contact with cinema. The engagement of people, however, remains limited as cinema in this mode only projects the content and the object of the film: this is identified as a relic. Media environment, such as home theaters, provides a model of a traditional movie theater in order to engage people in an almost complete cinematic experience: this is identified as an icon. This chapter demonstrates the presence of these two concepts, by citing some sequences from Giuseppe Tornatore's film Cinema Paradiso (1988).

This chapter looks at how television provided a radical new way of watching films. Now viewers have a choice between “going to the movies” and “watching a film on TV”—a practice that has threatened the very survival of cinema. However, despite the two avenues that the “television revolution” opened up, everything that was shown on screen was decided by commercial agents, over which the “ordinary viewer” had no power. Viewers had a choice, but this was a limited and restricted choice. The reason the hegemonic model had been dissolved is because, for more than sixty years, we have been able to watch films without any other formality. Over time, we have become able to obtain films in a domestic format—videocassettes and digital versatile disc (DVD)—as well as receive access to video on demand (VOD, on television or via the Internet) and to films offered directly on the Internet (downloading and streaming).