Hannover House Inc (HHSE)

[Chance To See]

From the SHM

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/12031352

I joined the company in 2002. The company, Hannover House, was a boutique book publisher, and at that time DVD was a rapidly-emerging media for home entertainment, yet the major chains like Blockbuster, Movie Gallery, Hollywood, Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target, Best Buy, had all reached a saturation point where they didn’t want more vendors. If you were a film producer and even if you had a really high-profile, exciting commercial film, and you went to Wal-Mart or Blockbuster with it, they’d say, “This is a great film. We’d love to carry it, but we aren’t going to buy it from you directly. You have to go through one of our other vendors. And so that created a little bit of a roadblock for independent producers but it also created a great opportunity for the people that were already established as vendors. I purchased Hannover House because it was already set up with almost all of the major retailers as a book vender, and so it was easy for us to be kind of grandfathered into the vendor community by just adding DVDs to an existing vendor. And I’m distressed or pleased, I don’t know it’s probably equal measure, to say that most of the major chains closed that loophole right after we did that, right after we added DVDs. They said, “You know what, even if you’re an existing vendor, don’t add home entertainment products, we have enough vendors already.”