It was supposed to be a cure for what ails the home entertaiment market, but a year after studios began instituting 28-day rental delays on new releases, sales of DVDs continue to plummet.
Analysts say the effect has been like handing out Band-aids for third-degree burns.
Overall, sales and rentals of movies on all home formats dropped 3 percent to $18.8 billion domestically in 2010. More worrisome, while sales of Blu-rays jumped 68 percent to $2.3 billion, sales of standard DVDs fell 11 percent to $14 billion, according to the Digital Entertainment Group. 
"Windowing may improve things around the margins,“ Edward Jay Epstein, author of “The Hollywood Economist,” told TheWrap."But it's just a temporary fix."
No one denies that the 28-day delays in releasing films to Netflix and Redbox are having some impact.
Studio officials who spoke to TheWrap said that deals preventing Netflix and Redbox from renting movies until a month after they hit store shelves have bolstered sales by as much as 15 percent on some titles.
What's more, they hope to extend the window to as many as 45 days.
“We’d love to push the windows back and give our sell-through more time to breath, but it’s a matter of time because there are already arrangements in place. This is a unique and new business model,” a senior home-entertainment executive told TheWrap.
Doing that, however, could lead to courtroom battles -- ones that the studios could easily lose.
Currently, the U.S. Supreme Court prohibits content makers from preventing the resale of copyrighted goods. Redbox was at the center of legal cases involving Warner Bros., Universal and Fox for roughly a year before ultimately deciding it would be less costly to broker an agreement with the studios.
But should studios push to almost double the window, a court fight might make more economic sense.
Whether the lengths of the release delays is ultimately decided in corporate boardrooms or through protracted legal fights, a year after windowing went into effect, it’s clear that delays are a permanent addition to the rental map.
Redbox has deals in place with three studios, while Netflix maintains some form of windowing with four studios. All told, more than 50 percent of the major studios -- including Warner Bros., Sony, Universal and Fox -- now institute delays.
They might have company.
Holdouts such as Disney are being slammed by analysts for not embracing the policy, though studio chief Robert Iger says the studio will continue making its movies available for rental and sale on the same date.
“Getting a DVD window was a milestone; renewing it will be less monumental. It’s more about tweaking,” Tony Wible, an analyst at Janney Montgomery Scott, told TheWrap. “It’s a very dynamic landscape, but studios need to find a way to bolster studios profits.”
What’s good for the studios might not be good for Netflix and Redbox.
