LOS ANGELES — Total spending on film and television in home entertainment formats rose ever so slightly in 2012, to about $18 billion, up 0.23 percent from $17.96 billion a year earlier, the Digital Entertainment Group, a trade association, said on Tuesday.
Any sort of increase was welcome news to the industry, given the long slide in DVD sales. The numbers were helped along by a sharp increase in revenue from the subscription streaming of movies and shows, to $2.3 billion from $1.6 billion.
Disc sales declined 5.5 percent to $8.5 billion, from almost $9 billion last year, and revenue from video rental stores declined sharply, to $1.2 billion from about $1.6 billion. But growth in video-on-demand and digital sales pushed the industry ahead.