THE LAUNCH yesterday evening of 6 Steps to Sam,the story of Dublin's 2011 All-Ireland victory marks the GAA's seasonal entry into the highly competitive seasonal DVD market.
It is also further evidence of the evolution away from the old formats of annual reviews and hopes are high that the first success in 16 years for the country’s most populous county will prove a winner for Sideline productions, the company that have held the GAA video rights for the past six years.
Gerry Kelly, Sideline’s executive producer, said the most surprising thing learned since acquiring the rights in 2006 is how restricted the market is.
“It’s certainly not as big as many people might think nor as big as we thought it might be. There isn’t really a strong correlation between the numbers who go to matches and sales of DVDS.
“There are probably two different aspects to it. With modern technology most people are either seeing or recording the match so there doesn’t seem to be a great need for copies of the matches but on the other hand the archive, once you go back a few years, there is no other source. We would see quite a difference between recent years and farther back.”
Nostalgia is an important market for GAA DVDs and the Irish Film Institute’s release of its highlights footage of All-Ireland hurling finals from the 1940s and 50s was one of the top three sports releases last year and the companion football compilation is currently in the shops.
Hurling Goldshifted 7,000 units in a five-week period, selling out twice and would have sold more but for the intervention of the snow, which prevented reordering in the run-up to Christmas.
Sideline have catalogued most of the All-Ireland finals since, using RTÉ recordings going back to the station’s launch nearly 50 years ago. These DVDs have attracted localised interest but do steady business, 50 per cent of which is transacted on the dvdsales.ie website – Kelly says there’s hardly a country to which GAA product hasn’t been shipped.
“There’s a commercial advantage in having a big catalogue and a range of matches so that if say someone from Tipp uses the website for one particular match, they’ll probably buy more of the Tipperary DVDS that are there.”
According to Kelly the conventional end-of-year review market has slipped, which is why different approaches, such as this year’s concentration on winners Dublin, has become necessary.
“There’s a certain annual market but our own experience of it over the past few years is that it is shrinking. Whether that’s a reflection on where the DVD market is or a reflection of the repetition of All-Ireland success of Kerry and Kilkenny or both isn’t clear but we certainly saw jumps when Tipperary came through last year and Tyrone in 2008.
“It became uneconomic to produce them unless there were certain levels of sales, which weren’t happening. We would have changed the mix in the end of year stuff quite a bit to make it add up.”
Hurling has outsold football in recent years. Last year for instance in the wake of Tipperary’s victory, the hurling DVD sold five times more than the football.
The future of video may well be entirely on-line in downloads. “The big obstacles to this were technical,” says Kelly. “There had to be adequate security to facilitate sales. If someone pays for the complete download it has to be protected against being copied onto someone else’s hard drive.
“If it’s been downloaded for limited views, the coding also has to make sure that two or three views are all that can be seen . . . .”
As well as 6 Steps to Sam, which features the full final against Kerry and a documentary on Dublin's year, Sideline will be releasing recordings of three of the 2011 quarter-finals: Donegal-Kildare, Mayo-Cork and Dublin-Tyrone.
The 2011 hurling DVD will include the full All-Ireland final between Kilkenny and Tipperary and the Munster under-21 final between Cork and Limerick.
* Six Steps to Samis available in retail outlets and on www.dvdsales.ie at €17.95
