Though consumers put the brakes on most discretionary spending during the second half of the year, the video rental segment wasn't hit as hard other retail businesses. The main reason: new and attractive forms of rental—online subscriptions and $1/night kiosks—are making up for continued declines in traditional specialty-store rentals.

Video Rental 2009: Innovations Halt Long Decline management report from Adams Media Research quantifies and projects the long-term impact of the new forms of video rental on the future of the traditional video store.

In the report:

Projections to 2013 for Traditional, Online and Kiosk Rentals
This report is based on AMR's proprietary Video Rental model, updated to reflect the impact of the U.S. recession that began in December, 2007, and includes projections to 2013. Competition from video-on-demand (VoD) and digital rental via the Internet is analyzed for its impact on packaged rental, now and in the future. Detailed models are provided for each packaged-rental sector: traditional, subscription and kiosk. In addition, the five-year revenue forecast for each of those sectors is compared to projected revenue from cable, DBS and Internet-delivered rental propositions.

As the rental business reached its 30th birthday, it is still the most popular way to watch movies at home, with a total of 2.5bn rental turns in the U.S. last year. Coming in virtually flat in a year when everything else was down, the video rental market continues to be the target of innovative business plans ranging from Netflix and Redbox to iTunes and the Xbox Live Marketplace. That makes this report essential reading not just for executives in the rental business itself, but for anyone hoping to build a business based on distribution of movies in any format.