• The Hollywood Reporter, Monday, July 14, 2008 9:15 AM

The home video business seems to be holding up despite the down economy, the high price of gas and consumer shift toward the Internet.

Showing that people are still willing to pay for offline entertainment at home, purchases and rentals of DVDS and Blu-ray inched up 1.6% in the first half of 2008 compared to last year, per Home Media magazine. Disc purchases rose 1.1%, to $6.9 billion and rental spending rose 2.6% to $3.9 billion.

Wall Street has negative perceptions of the packaged media business because "most analysts are techno-geeks with plenty of money and not much time, while most Americans are not technically savvy and have plenty of time but not much money," said analyst Tom Adams. "The fact is there is very little digital downloading going on."

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