Warner Home Video
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Warner Home Video is the home video unit of Warner Bros. Entertainment. Inc. It was founded in 1978 as WCI Home Video (for Warner Communications, Inc.). It was re-named Warner Home Video in 1980. The company releases titles from the film and television library of Warner Bros. Studios, as well as programs from other Time Warner companies. Currently, they also serve as the U.S. distributor for television and/or movie product released by The BBC, Lifetime, Cartoon Network, Turner Entertainment, Court TV, TNT and the National Geographic Society.
Some early releases were notable for being time-compressed in order to save tape time and money and to compensate for long-playing cassettes being unavailable in the early days of home video. One example was 1978's Superman: The Movie in which the film was released in a 127-minute format, compared to its 143-minute theatrical release.
Warner Bros. began to branch out into the videodisc market, licensing titles to MCA DiscoVision and RCA's SelectaVision videodisc formats, allowing both companies to market and distribute the films under their labels. By 1985, Warner was releasing material under their own label in both formats.
Warner also experimented with the "rental-only" market for videos, a method also used by 20th Century Fox for their first release of Star Wars in 1982. Two known films released in this manner were Superman II and Excalibur.
In 1997, Warner Home Video was one of the first major American distributors for the new DVD format, by releasing Twister on DVD. Warner executive Warren Lieberfarb is often seen as "the father of DVD".
In the UK, WHV distributes most of the DVD releases of Icon Entertainment, and also distributes Icon releases in Australia and Equinox Films releases in Canada.
In 2006, WHV announced they would enter the market of releasing original direct-to-video films, a market that has proven lucrative for studios over the past few years, and which has for the most part been dominated by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. They announced much of their output would be followups to films that had done well at the box office theatrically, but wouldn't be expected to do well if a sequel were to be made. The first release under the Warner Premiere banner is the prequel The Dukes of Hazzard: The Beginning.
On September 26, 2006, WHV became the first company to street a title in three formats on the same day and date with the home release of The Lake House on DVD, Blu-ray and HD DVD.
Also, for a number of years from the 1980s to the late 1990s, WHV was the distributor for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer video titles.
