I agree that premixes do add value to the DVD, but unfortunately most consumers don’t see it that way. It costs about 10 to 30 times more money to make a Body Blast DVD than your typical DVD you see on the market. Most consumers look at our DVDs and think they’re expensive because they do not equate the value of having multiple titles and premixes on the same disc. They just look at the total price. If consumers considered the premixes to be of value they would realize that that the DVDs are amazingly cheap since each workout cost less than $2.
When we started adding advanced features to our DVDs we hoped that it would lead to all kinds of feedback about how much better our DVDs are when compared to other fitness DVDs. But what we’ve learned is that too much technology on a fitness DVD only confuses some people and frustrates others. Only a very small percentage of people will have a problem playing one of our DVDs with advanced features, but these will be the people that will be the ones posting on the various fitness forums. You will almost never hear from the people that don’t have a problem and are happy with their DVDs. It is a simple business decision for us to make when it comes to not adding advanced features on a DVD:
#1. Fewer hedaches, since there will be fewer customer service issues. Some customers will still have issues as there can be many reasons a disc will not play properly, but the number will be drastically reduced.
#2. We can save a bundle on our production cost since premixes are our major expense when producing DVDs
#3 It will take us less time to make a DVD and thus we can get you your DVDs more quickly. We can author a DVD like most DVDs that are sold today in less than one day. A DVD like Body Blast takes 2 weeks per DVD to author.
#4 Less negative publicity. Nobody gets “knocked” for not having premixes or workout blenders. It is only a problem if you offer premixes/blenders and a consumer has problems. There is no way to make these advanced features work on all players. Though they will work fine in 97% of the players, there will still be some problems for some people.
That said, we really will not make up our mind on this for sometime, so we will at least keep an open mind. I’m also going to have some conversations with NFL Films later this summer on this. Without a doubt, NFL Films, has the best facilities, studios and technicians in the world, so they may have a solution to this problem that I am not aware of.