Selling High Definition Slide Shows?

With many people now owning large, high definition TV’s, I was wondering if anyone knew if there was a market for selling high definition, 1080p, slide shows of our landscape and nature images. If not for individuals, maybe for businesses for use in their reception areas, etc.

I was thinking about creating a few different slide shows with about 20-30 of my images, and offering them as a digital video file or as a blue-ray disc. I was also thinking of creating custom shows where the client would choose the images themselves from my online gallery and I would create the show for them.

I’m wondering if anyone is doing this and/or if it’s even worth doing? If yes, how should I go about pricing them? I suspect they’d be worth less than a print but then again, they’d be buying 20 images and not just one…

I can't help you on any of your questions - but I would worry about giving (or selling) a DVD with 20-30 images that look good on a big screen HDTV. Is it possible those files could be extracted and turned into images? I'm not terribly familiar with this process...

Odds are they would be 1920x1080 pixels (that's the resolution of HDTV), so not huge, but not too small either.

Tom, have a look at what I'm doing. I spent many weeks researching this and eventually found a way to create a product of this type which prevents my high quality images from being taken. My DVD has 300+ photos set to music and sells for $50. I'm waiting to receive my first batch, but I've already sold over 30 in pre-orders. http://morninglight.us

Just an FYI Erik - those DVDs could still be played on a computer and the screen image captured at full res. So the 1920x1080 pixel idea still holds.

Thanks David for the input. I guess that is a possibility but I'm doubtful that many people would even consider that option. How many folks even have Blu-ray players on their computers? If I find that it becomes a problem, then I will discontinue the product but for now it looks like it is going to be quite a successful new item for my gallery.

I looked into this before, and decided against it. It really depends on what your marketing goals are. If you offer a low cost alternative to buying more expensive prints, then you will lose some print sales. If someone walks in and sees your work, is impressived, and is on the fence about making an impulse buy because they are caught in the moment....then they look over and see a DVD for Xdollars which is hundreds less than a print. You just gave them an out to not buy the more expensive and higher profit print. I think they might be a good idea for web sales because few buy expensive art without seeing it or previous experience working with you. I used to offer cards at my exhibits and sold a great deal, but all those card sales yeilded less profit than one medium size print. When I stopped offering anything but prints at my shows, my net profit went up a min of 30% each time if not more. In most cases, people will always look for the cheapest option...so make sure the cheapest option is a high profit one.

In the same vein, have any of you looked into using the "high" quality 20+ inch internet capable digital frames? I have looked at these for a few years and thought alot about them. These really are high quality image frames. They now come in wifi capable units. The frames are not cheap...perhaps $1000 or more. Trying to figure out how to make money with them. Perhaps for businesses (that are doing well ). Or perhaps for high end customers in their homes. Maybe for high end rental/condo units. Thinking maybe a yearly rental of the frame and so many images per month. With very little effort, the frame is accessible through their wifi so you can update the images from your own computer. So, every month, you change the images. Maybe for the year, you pre-sell monthly series of images. These digital frames can use just about any kind of frame around them.

Seems like this would be geared to high end folks with money to spare. Seems like there must be many ideas out there on how to use them. Like I said, anyone looking into this?

Thanks for the feedback everyone. I'm still not sure how or even if I'm going to go ahead with this but if I do, I'll definitely let you all know.

How many folks even have Blu-ray players on their computers?

In the couple of years Blu-ray will be the standard on computers. It's already pretty cheaply available in a lot of computers (for ~$100) especially higher end laptops. (I know several people with them.)

Now how many people would have one of these, buy your DVD, AND be willing to do something illegal with the images? Probably a tiny tiny number. But if these are images you plan on selling prints of for a long time, it could come in to play down the road with a Blu-ray DVD you sold years before..

I don't want to sound discouraging - just want to maybe help with awareness. It sounds pretty positive to me. But once you put the images in a digital form, there's probably no way to really prevent them being taken.