The Criterion Collection, Inc. is an American home-video distribution company that focuses on licensing, restoring and distributing "important classic and contemporary films". A de facto subsidiary of arthouse film distributor Janus Films, Criterion serves film and media scholars, cinephiles and public and academic libraries. Criterion has helped to standardize certain aspects of home-video releases such as film restoration, the letterboxing format for widescreen films and the inclusion of bonus features such as scholarly essays and documentary content about the films and filmmakers. Criterion most notably pioneered the use of commentary tracks. Criterion has produced and distributed more than 1,000 special editions of its films in VHS, Betamax, LaserDisc, DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray formats and box sets. These films and their special features are also available via The Criterion Channel, an online streaming service that the company operates.
Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment, Inc. is the American home video distribution division of Warner Bros. Discovery.
The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) is the industry consortium that develops and licenses Blu-ray Disc technology and is responsible for establishing format standards and promoting business opportunities for Blu-ray Disc. The BDA is divided into three levels of membership: the board of directors, contributors, and general members.
20th Century Home Entertainment is a home video brand label of Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment that distributes films produced by 20th Century Studios, Searchlight Pictures, and 20th Century Animation, and television series by 20th Television, Searchlight Television, 20th Television Animation, and FX Productions in home entertainment formats.
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Inc. is the home entertainment distribution division of Sony Pictures Entertainment, a subsidiary of Sony.
MGM Home Entertainment LLC is the home entertainment distribution arm of the American media company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). It is owned by the Amazon MGM Studios subsidiary of Amazon.
United International Pictures (UIP) is a joint venture of Paramount Pictures and Universal Pictures that distributes their films outside the United States and Canada. UIP also had international distribution rights to certain Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) and United Artists (UA) films when MGM was part of the venture and also distributed Disney films in certain territories until 1987. In 2001, MGM left UIP, and signed a distribution deal with 20th Century Fox's overseas arm. The company formerly distributed DreamWorks Pictures releases internationally as well until late 2005.
Buena Vista Home Entertainment, Inc., doing business as Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, is the home entertainment distribution arm of the Walt Disney Company. The division handles the distribution of Disney's films, television series, and other audiovisual content across digital formats and platforms. Until the early 2020s, the division also handled distribution of those properties in several traditional home media formats, such as Ultra HD Blu-ray, Blu-ray discs, and DVDs under various brand labels around the world.
CBS Home Entertainment distributes films and television shows produced by the CBS Entertainment Group and is a division label of Paramount Home Entertainment that releases content from the CBS library on home media.
Universal Pictures Home Entertainment LLC is the home video distribution division of Universal Pictures, an American film studio, owned by NBCUniversal, which is owned by Comcast.
Ocean Shores Video Limited(Chinese: 海岸錄影有限公司 or Chinese: 海岸貢獻) is the home video division of Win's Entertainment Co Ltd. The company is owned by Television Broadcasts Limited the entertainment division of Panasonic, Pioneer and Philips was a Hong Kong based distributor of martial arts films in the 1980s.
This article compares the technical specifications of multiple high-definition formats, including HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc; two mutually incompatible, high-definition optical disc formats that, beginning in 2006, attempted to improve upon and eventually replace the DVD standard. The two formats remained in a format war until February 19, 2008, when Toshiba, HD DVD's creator, announced plans to cease development, manufacturing and marketing of HD DVD players and recorders.
Cinema International Corporation (CIC) was a film distribution company started by Paramount Pictures and Universal Pictures in the early 1970s to distribute the two studios' films outside the United States – it even operated in Canada before it was considered part of the "domestic" market. During the 1970s, CIC was the "most important agent of overseas distribution" for American films. In 1981, CIC merged with United Artists' international units and became United International Pictures. The formation of CIC, and the profit-sharing arrangement that made it work, has been described as the product of "revolutionary thinking".
Blu-ray is a digital optical disc data storage format designed to supersede the DVD format. It was invented and developed in 2005 and released worldwide on June 20, 2006, capable of storing several hours of high-definition video. The main application of Blu-ray is as a medium for video material such as feature films and for the physical distribution of video games for the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. The name refers to the blue laser used to read the disc, which allows information to be stored at a greater density than is possible with the longer-wavelength red laser used for DVDs.
China Blue High-Definition is a high definition optical disc format announced in September 2007 by the Optical Memory National Engineering Research Center (OMNERC) of Tsinghua University in China.
The high-definition optical disc format war was a market competition between the Blu-ray and HD DVD optical disc standards for storing high-definition video and audio; it took place between 2006 and 2008 and was won by Blu-ray Disc.
Roadshow Entertainment is an Australian home video, production and distribution company that is a division of Village Roadshow that distributes films in Australia and New Zealand. Their first release was Mad Max. Roadshow Entertainment is an independent video distributor in Australia and New Zealand.
UltraViolet was a cloud-based digital rights locker for films and television programs that allowed consumers to store proofs-of-purchase of licensed content in an account to enable playback on different devices using multiple applications from several different streaming services. UltraViolet also allowed users to share access to their library with up to five additional people. UltraViolet was deployed by the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), an alliance of 85 companies that included film studios, retailers, consumer electronics manufacturers, cable television companies, internet service providers (ISPs), internet hosting vendors, and other systems and security vendors, with the notable exceptions of Walt Disney Studios, Google, Amazon and Apple.
The Warner Archive Collection is a home video division for releasing classic and cult films from Warner Bros.' library. It started as a manufactured-on-demand (MOD) DVD series by Warner Bros. Home Entertainment on March 23, 2009, with the intention of putting previously unreleased catalog films on DVD for the first time. In November 2012, Warner expanded the Archive Collection to include Blu-ray releases, Some Warner Archive releases, such as Wise Guys, previously had a pressed DVD release but have lapsed out of print and have since been re-released as part of the Warner Archive collection.
Lionsgate Studios Corporation, simply known as Lionsgate Studios, is an American film and television production and distribution conglomerate owned by Lionsgate and based in Santa Monica, California. It was formed on 14 May 2024 after Lionsgate spun out its film and television businesses, which was completed a week earlier on the 7th.
