Plunging DVD sales threaten to reduce profit for studio owners Time Warner Inc.,Walt Disney Co.,Viacom Inc. and News Corp., and may force them to write down the value of movies, analysts said. Fourth-quarter shipments fell 32 percent in the U.S. and Canada to 453.6 million DVDs, according to Los Angeles-based Digital Entertainment Group. The drop is the biggest since the industry-funded researcher started keeping track in 1997. The decline is being fueled by viewer shifts toward rental services such as Netflix Inc., the U.S. recession and technology that makes it easier to stream Web videos to televisions. ‘Making a movie just won’t be as profitable as it once was, Barclays Capital analyst Anthony DiClemente in New York said in an interview. ‘There will be a complete bottoms-up reconstruction of the economics of the film business. DVD sales may fall 11 percent this year and cause studios to write down new and recent titles that miss internal forecasts, Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York, wrote in a report this month. Home-video sales and rentals, mostly reflecting DVDs, accounted for 68 percent of the $88.9 billion global filmed- entertainment market […]