Kodak Axes Digicams, but keeps film

[Photo Engineer]

Things you missed.

Kodak consumed a huge amount of chemicals for film production and for film processing. With this sea change, these chemicals will not be consumed in huge quantity nor will they be produced in huge quantity. THEY WILL VANISH!

The Phenidone family of developers may vanish as photography is their only bulk use.

Ammonium Hypo is used in agriculture so it is somewhat saved. Sulfites are saved due to their use in the food industry. But, there is a list of stuff that will vanish. And this goes for the home processor and emulsion maker as well.

It's gonna hurt.

PE

 

[Aristophanes]

No, of course it's not sustainable in the long run. But yet again you seem to think that just because EK can't keep churning out products at past levels that all is lost and the sky is falling. False. A tidy profit can be earned for quite a while (years), even in a declining market. Which I have said, oh, a dozen times and whch you have apparently ignored. Did you not look at the lovely Philip Morris data?? Apparently not.

You'll run out credit and reinvestment long before you will reach terminus with your consumers. Phillip Morris is a false comparison because film is not a narcotic and requires discretionary income to exist. Also, film;s overhead requires far more of a supply chain than cigarettes. You can roll your own cigs from weed (tobacco or the other stuff) grown in your back yard. Not so with roll or cartridge film. Invalid comparison.

What? Not true at all. Those who truly own their own process will not bat an eyelid when mass-produced film is completely gone, in, oh, a decade or so.

You are imposing arbitrary timeframes to make your argument.

Your sky is falling, just at 16 fps and not 24fps.

There are nowhere near enough guys tipping Patterson tanks in the world to swallow all the film capable of being produced by a one week run of Kodak's machine. This thread is still about Kodak, right?

Labs are critical to that dynamic and we repeatedly hear about how the mom and pops are gone and how multi-million person regions are down to 1 or 2 fire-and-forget mini-labs, or even none at all. Tri-X prices are up and our friends Down Under struggle to get affordable chemistry, if any at all.

As we saw with a housing market, it can take less than 24 months for a complete market unravel.

Please just stop complaining about things not being the same as they always were and embrace the fact that change happens. And life goes on. People adapt. Companies come and companies go. Photography is way older than Kodak anyway. We'll be fine, just fine if and when they do go. But count me among those who thinks it'd be idiotic to fold up the profitable Kodak film line because of mismanagement and debts incurred in an entirely different sector.

It's not profitable. People just say that, including Kodaks PR gang because they have to. The financial data says not and no one, not a single person, has provided hard data otherwise, just anecdotes. They do so through accounting as clever as sub-prime mortgages where they shove legacy burdens into other company accounting structures, such as the pension, ecological,and medical liabilities. Take those out and the whole company is actually book value doing OK. On paper, Kodak did NOT have to declare Ch.11. They did so in part because they cannot reorganize knowing the devolution of the film side is going to hit a wall where Kodak cannot downsize their emulsion systems fast enough. They also chose to dump P&S cameras because Kodak makes no smartphones. They dumped sensors because they cannot compete. They are going to dump film because their creditors will tell them there appear to be no customers for the creditors/investors who will, by Ch. 11, be "going long" on the new stock issue.

They are not in Ch.11 ten years from now. They are in Ch. 11 now.

I know, right?! I swear, some people couldn't innovate their way out of a wet paper bag these days. It really raises serious questions about where our technology-driven culture is headed. It's 100% convenience and gee I hope somebody else knows how to solve the problem.

Film tech evolved as fast as digital. Innovation depends on money. Solving problems depends on money. I follow the money. It may not be a handicraft sentiment, but it is how George Eastman made it work.

I need more Scotch.

 

[Photo Engineer]

Film tech evolved much more slowly than digital. This is a proven fact!

PE

 

[keithwms]

Phillip Morris is a false comparison because film is not a narcotic and requires discretionary income to exist. Also, film;s overhead requires far more of a supply chain than cigarettes. You can roll your own cigs from weed (tobacco or the other stuff) grown in your back yard. Not so with roll or cartridge film. Invalid comparison.

What? Are you serious? It is a perfectly valid comparison because PM did what any sensible company does when they see the overall market shrinking: they consume their competitors, one by one, and in so doing they actually grow market share even as the overall market decreases. Then, once they've done that, they set the price at whatever they choose. Simple. Did you even look at the charts I provided?

As for your comments about PM's supply chain not being just as long, that is nonsense. Obviously PM's cigs aren't hand rolled, and there is a very long supply chain that goes all the way back to the good earth. There is a lot of chemical technology involved. That's why Altria is headed in that direction. They're not dumb, they're pushing directly into pharmaceuticals and such.

I still think you completely missed the point. I didn't say film=cigarettes, I said look at the business model. It is quite interesting and if you don't understand it then the problem is with you. I visited PM along with a bunch of business school people (still no clue why they had little old me along, to be perfectly honest) and we were all blown away by PM's ingenuity and long-term strategy. They came right out and said that they were told the market was dead and it's all over, shut down, go home... but they realized that all they have to do is be the last man standing to extend their profit for a very long time. And they did that even with almost complete prohibition on advertising and facing endless lawsuits. They did the math and saw that it can work... easily. Do you understand why?

Film tech evolved as fast as digital.

Also grossly incorrect. And I don't see the point anyway.

And need I point out that 99% of the hard work of setting up the supply chain and researching the chems and figuring out how to get fresh products out to consumers has already been done? Another great reason why Kodak or some other licensed partner should take keen interest in harvesting the easy profit: the hard part is already done. No need to reinvent the wheel. If they don't pick up EK's licenses directly, well then Fuji and Ilford and others will still gain market share and life will go on.

Yeah it'll get more expensive and less convenient and so forth. Nobody's saying it won't hurt some. So? We just cry about it?

film is not a narcotic

Not so sure, have you computed how many hits people get for five or six bucks now? And quite a few people are willing. Compare that to how many puffs you get from a single cigarette, which individually costs much less. Now tell me, which is the more potent substance?! Like I said before, I think I will invent a digipatch to wean people off the addiction...

 

[Athiril]

There are quite a few labs here where I am.

There's already a dead end taking shape with mirror-less bodies designed to look like their film ancestors, e.g., the Olympus OM-D, Pentax K-01 and the Fuji X10. EVFs are making mirrors and prisms obsolete--Sony's NEX bodies a case in point.

Schneider's already making iPhone lens kits:

http://www.iprolens.com/

It's not a dead end they are very popular.

I for one have a GH2 just for the video, and the available hacks for video.

Sure, if you're willing to spend 3 large+ for the D800 or 6 large for the D4. The finder on the D7000 is just barely passable. Most dslrs use cheap, dim penta-mirrors, not heavier, pricier glass prism finders.The Sony EVF on the NEX 7 and tack-on OLED finder for the NEX5n are great for anyone not shooting fast action. Mirrorless cameras are also tiny compared to the bulk of a dslr.

I was very happy with the VF on my Canon 30D.

I've heard nothing about an Ilford B&W processing service. Even assuming it exists, it has to account for processing only a tiny fraction of the film they produce. They seem to be surviving quite nicely without C41 (except XP2 Super, and that's black and white.)

My SWAG is that the vast majority of black and white film sold today is processed at home or in school or club darkrooms by artists and hobbyists, generally the same ones who shot it. Admittedly it's a SWAG, If anyone has any real data to the contrary, not just a contrary SWAG, I'd like to see it.

There are labs here machine processing B&W, as well as labs hand processing it.

Things you missed.

Kodak consumed a huge amount of chemicals for film production and for film processing. With this sea change, these chemicals will not be consumed in huge quantity nor will they be produced in huge quantity. THEY WILL VANISH!

The Phenidone family of developers may vanish as photography is their only bulk use.

Ammonium Hypo is used in agriculture so it is somewhat saved. Sulfites are saved due to their use in the food industry. But, there is a list of stuff that will vanish. And this goes for the home processor and emulsion maker as well.

It's gonna hurt.

PE

There are bulk suppliers in India and China, whether you want FOB and to do your own brokerage, or even CIF to your house. The cost works out pretty good, but you're getting quite a lot.. same with other hard to get chems.

In regards to Phenidone, from what I can see there is companies making it.. more companies than number of big companies putting out phenidone developers.. I have no idea why or where they're sending it.

Yes, Rudeofus, I am assuming cine sales will go to heck, that is a given. In that case, then the most profitable sector... good old individually packaged film... may be able to emerge in a much leaner and meaner spinoff. I am reminded of 3M's strategy, make it by the mile, sell it by the inch. That's the kind of thinking that can help a company turn a very tidy profit on film for several years to come.

Bill, there is an ignore member function...

Print film likely, I'm not sure about motion picture film.. Kodak not too long ago (last year iirc, and the year before) started bringing more colour neg formats to 8mm, like people are actually using that enough to warrant that is surprising.

I need to try some of that new 5203.

Yeah I don't see how cafes survive at all, they have to be hawking something on the side.

I have the solution. LPQ could very easily become a fairly high-end restaurant at meal time. That'd bring in big bucks. When your avg per person expenditure goes from $5 to $30 at peak meal times, that has a way of taking care of overhead. They could do $30+ at dinner, no problem. Great food. Much better price point than Panera.

You guys should visit Melb... ridiculous number of cafes/coffee shops.

To put that in perspective, more digital cameras will be sold in the next 5 years than all film cameras manufactured from their invention to the present.

You're talking about mass consumers, digital cameras were new market, the growth is more from new users, not previous film users (1 person in the family having a camera etc), as opposed to now everyone having a camera of some kind (essentially).

Digital growth is not equivalent or comparable to film decline.

 

[Athiril]

you guys are lucky. I can't find tapes to copy my CDs to so I can listen to them in my car, which only has a casette deck.

Try finding 8-track!

 

[Athiril]

Chances are that Hollywood film strips are not scanned frame by frame on Nikon 9000s or Imacons either (that's what many scan labs in Central Europe offer and what makes it so atrociously expensive). They must have scanners which work faster, with a lot less user interaction and multiple formats beyond 35mm.

[hypothesis&conjecture mode] If Hollywood indeed buys Kodak's film assets, this together with state of the art scanning could provide exactly the kind of service you've asked for and in private ownership. [/hypothesis&conjecture mode]

The last thing I watched scanned was Super16mm 5201 on a Spirit DataCine, yes they do scan fast. Though you can get frame by frame scanning done elsewhere (automated of course).

 

[Rudeofus]

There are nowhere near enough guys tipping Patterson tanks in the world to swallow all the film capable of being produced by a one week run of Kodak's machine. This thread is still about Kodak, right?

Aristophanes, that's one point where I agree 100% with you. I know, APUG is all about doing stuff yourself, mixing your own dev&fix, coating your own wet plates, dry plates or whatever, but when it comes push to shove, a lot of people here buy their film and bring the exposed rolls to a lab. This reminds me of digital forums where everybody claims to shoot in M mode with strobist flashes and prime lenses, when almost all I see out there is green box mode, pop-up flash and kit lens.

It's not profitable. People just say that, including Kodaks PR gang because they have to. The financial data says not and no one, not a single person, has provided hard data otherwise, just anecdotes. They do so through accounting as clever as sub-prime mortgages where they shove legacy burdens into other company accounting structures, such as the pension, ecological,and medical liabilities. Take those out and the whole company is actually book value doing OK. On paper, Kodak did NOT have to declare Ch.11. They did so in part because they cannot reorganize knowing the devolution of the film side is going to hit a wall where Kodak cannot downsize their emulsion systems fast enough.

Kodak filed for ch 11 because when they were hugely profitable long time ago they committed to lots of future payments which they can't afford in a digital world, neither with their declining film line, not with their digital product lines. These commitments are void now thanks to ch 11, so there is not reason Kodak can't be profitable from now on.

PS: You keep posting Kodak's numbers as fact, but when it suits your agenda you accuse Kodak of shoving around numbers in order to fake profits in their film line. Please make up your mind whether Kodak's number should be treated as facts or not.

PPS: Antonio Perez was tasked with completing Kodak's transition into a digital company, not with keeping their film business alive at all costs. If Kodak's film line would have incurred real losses, they would have killed it in a heartbeat, not propped it up with accounting tricks. So if you came to the conclusion that Kodak's reported numbers come from shoving around profits and losses between their divisions, there's a good chance that in reality Kodak's film business is a lot more profitable than reported.

PPPS: to all those who announce the imminent death of film because Kodak bumped Tri-X prices: would you also announce the imminent demise or cars, trucks, ships and planes because fuel prices have risen so much in the last few years? If not, please stop posting this rubbish, especially when the same threads claim that Ilford is also headed for the gutter when they sell three rolls HP5+ for the price of two.

 

[CGW]

Survivalism???! Generating my own electricity?!

All I did was point out the obvious irony that APUG is a place where many take pride in "owning the whole process" and cite handcraft as being the thing that most distinguishes our work from the other thing; yet some now lament every minor inconvenience or imply that The End is Near because there isn't a full service lab next door.

All I see ahead are new beginnings and opportunities to make even more individual photographs. I don't know how my tone could possibly be any more positive.

It's abundantly clear where the sour-grapes negativity has come from throughout this thread and recent related ones.

Sorry but you're disconnected from larger realities(hence the "bubble") and can't imagine anyone dealing with or reacting to the issues in this thread in any way beyond your own "solutions." That's unfortunate.

 

[Aristophanes]

Kodak filed for ch 11 because when they were hugely profitable long time ago they committed to lots of future payments which they can't afford in a digital world, neither with their declining film line, not with their digital product lines. These commitments are void now thanks to ch 11, so there is not reason Kodak can't be profitable from now on.

PS: You keep posting Kodak's numbers as fact, but when it suits your agenda you accuse Kodak of shoving around numbers in order to fake profits in their film line. Please make up your mind whether Kodak's number should be treated as facts or not.

Statements made to the likes of Freestyle are not corporate statements. Financials are. They are legally required for public companies including audit. PR statements and things said by the sales force are not verifiable.

PPS: Antonio Perez was tasked with completing Kodak's transition into a digital company, not with keeping their film business alive at all costs. If Kodak's film line would have incurred real losses, they would have killed it in a heartbeat, not propped it up with accounting tricks. So if you came to the conclusion that Kodak's reported numbers come from shoving around profits and losses between their divisions, there's a good chance that in reality Kodak's film business is a lot more profitable than reported.[/QUOTE]

Kodak needs to milk film for all its worth, but then what? Now it is bankruptcy, largely caused in part by their inability to scale down their overhead to meet their declining customer base. They are still losing film customers, especially with MP stock. The point you are missing is the secular declining revenues from film is by far the biggest problem facing a restructured Kodak even if past obligations are wiped through court administration.

The whole point of Ch.11 protection is to restart the investment process. Creditors become shareholders. If you are a new shareholder of Kodak and you see a declining customer base, and have concerns (like we all do), that the digital printer market cannot replace those lost revenues, you need to dump film and put that reinvestment capital into something that will increase your customer base and increase your revenues.

The loss of labs, the loss of camera manufacture, the loss of distribution, the loss of advertising, all make it very difficult to see how Kodak's new shareholders can see a return on their new film investment. Cinemas are going digital projection and MP film cameras are special order. The new shareholder risk is that Kodak cannot trim overhead on film anymore and the market continues to dwindle with no end in sight for the infrastructure reasons stated above. The judge in Ch.11 is tasked with approving an equity structure that prevents further erosion of equity. The equity base is determined by revenues, the ROE by profits. Ergo if your revenues continue to decline there is a certainty your ROE will decline. I have no doubt there is a huge tussle going on between a faction at Kodak and core creditors about this matter with Perez and company letting that play out. I strongly suspect that many creditors are going to push for a private equity solution for Kodak's FPEG. FPEG's value now is as high as it will ever be along with third party trust on the numbers through the Ch.11 process. Waiting 3 years for another 50% decline net on equity is madness. You don't buy and hold on a predictable loss.

Looking at the financials and statements from the motion picture side, I partly conclude that what tipped Kodak into bankruptcy protection was the very rapid loss of the MP projection market. It was not just about debt servicing and pensions. The stock market reflected that more than the pension issue which was well known a decade ago, and yet still Kodak's share held some value. The stock tanked on the revenues scenario. Dozens of institutional investors saw the same scenario I outline here. I say the bondholders are arriving at the same conclusion.

 

[PHOTOTONE]

I just went to see a movie at our local theater, which is equipped for digital or film projection. To my surprise, the presentation was film, and it was excellent. The film was clean, no speckles of dirt from improper make-up. It started in-frame and sharp and stayed that way. It was a wide-screen anamorphic film. Nothing wrong with film, no sir. It was really difficult to tell whether it was film or digital, except for a teensy bit of weave in the image...very subtle..I had to turn around and look at the projection booth window to confirm film.

 

[keithwms]

It occurs to me that there are two essential kinds of people who work these chapter 11 situations. There are those whose sole aim it is to reduce the lower bound on the worth of some of the assets, and there are others whose sole aim it is to increase the upper bound on others. A bit like a garage sale. Both serve their purposes, but one can only hope that a leaner, more profitable firm emerges.

 

[Wayne]

Things you missed.

Kodak consumed a huge amount of chemicals for film production and for film processing. With this sea change, these chemicals will not be consumed in huge quantity nor will they be produced in huge quantity. THEY WILL VANISH!

The Phenidone family of developers may vanish as photography is their only bulk use.

Ammonium Hypo is used in agriculture so it is somewhat saved. Sulfites are saved due to their use in the food industry. But, there is a list of stuff that will vanish. And this goes for the home processor and emulsion maker as well.

It's gonna hurt.

PE

That's why I'm more concerned about what happens to Photographer's Formulary than Kodak. Not that I think they are in any trouble, but what would I do without glycin?

 

[keithwms]

Wayne, if anything I would expect the Formulary to do better - I hope that they are positioning themselves appropriately. The overall trend in analogue photography is "back to the future"... more interest in those processes that existed before mass-produced roll film etc.

 

[Aristophanes]

I just went to see a movie at our local theater, which is equipped for digital or film projection. To my surprise, the presentation was film, and it was excellent. The film was clean, no speckles of dirt from improper make-up. It started in-frame and sharp and stayed that way. It was a wide-screen anamorphic film. Nothing wrong with film, no sir. It was really difficult to tell whether it was film or digital, except for a teensy bit of weave in the image...very subtle..I had to turn around and look at the projection booth window to confirm film.

Your film went through a digital intermediate process that uses a scan technique to colour match and clean the film before copy and distribution. Almost all commercially released MP film has been digitally mastered like this for over a decade now. Kodak was the prime innovator of the process. Google it.

 

[Brian C. Miller]

Film tech evolved much more slowly than digital. This is a proven fact!

PE

I must disagree. Electrically operated digital processing started off with Hollerith tabulating machines of the 1890s, and real digital computers were developed in the 1930s. When Kodak produced the first digital camera, it didn't come from a vacuum. There were already decades of invention and infrastructure behind it. Look at how much had to be done before that! And from reading Tim Parkin's 8x10 vs DMF test, digital imaging still has quite a ways to go. So, over 40 years of work from the first true digital computer to the first camera, and then it wasn't until the mid-1990s that the first digital camera for the consumer appeared on the market.

 

[Photo Engineer]

Brian;

If you are correct in your definition of digital, then photography evolved from chemistry which evolved from Alchemy! This still makes the evolution of analog photography slower than digital.

But, if we measure from Daguerre to the present, and the invention of digital IMAGING to the present, you see over 100 years in one case and about 40 years in the other. That is a big difference.

As for digital quality, I must agree with you that it has a long way to go, but its state now is far better than analog was 40 years after Daguerre! At that time, we had B&W only, with slow speed and were just learning how to fix images. We had the tools and knowledge for many other advances but not the know how to put them all together.

As for vanishing chemicals, yes, China and India supply some of these - in huge quantity though and I cant afford to buy a ton of phenidone! Even buying and splitting it up, I have no place to do this and could not afford to even start such a project.

PE

 

[keithwms]

Well.... film photography arguably begins ~1816 with Schultz Of course there were non-silver methods of making images long before that.

The ideas underlying digital photography arguably emerged with the invention of the fax ~1830, although that device was of course analogue. But let's be clear, digital photography, as we now define it, involves a sensor (which is actually analogue) coupled to an ADC. That begins in ernest around the 1950s or so. I don't know when the first ADCs were available but it was certainly not in the 1800s.

As a solid-state guy, I don't know what you guys mean by "digital has a long way to go." I can attest that the hardware of digital photography is pretty much complete, and has been for some time now. By that I mean that I can explain 99.44% of the physics using models that existed by the 1960s. Contrast that with the theories of the latent image, which actually were not refined until Jack Mitchell's work in the 70s and 80s. We didn't know about the atomistic details of the materials physics until around then. Surprisingly recent! And actually I think there still plenty of room for that to go further; e.g. I have mentioned thin-film photovoltaics a few times and tried to get EK to look at that several years ago before it was a fad. But as Jack told me, don't waste your time on EK, go directly to Fuji. In hindsight it looks like he was probably right!

Anyway, regarding where digital photography stands now, there are advanced sensors that simply haven't reached the market yet, but which already press right up against theoretical limits. There isn't much more left on the r&d front apart from more of the same. Apart from microlenses and a few architectural refinements and of course software, we are actually much where we were a few decades ago. It's just taken a long time to make the technology affordable and user-friendly. About the only major thing left to hit the market in a big way is full frame foveon, integrated sensor cooling, and, perhaps later, truly adaptive lensing. But apart from a few specialized things and the overall packaging and software, the developments have pretty much stagnated. Recent interest has been all about smaller sensors tailored to portability sharing.... not to actually improving image quality.

 

[DREW WILEY]

There are so many damn black and white developers already that missing a particular ingredient here or there isn't going to slow down anyone serious. Things like glycin and amidol never were dependent on Kodak. I even know someone who precisely copied HC-110 in a university lab and made himself a lifetime supply (simply because it wasn't available anymore in his country without a big hazmat fee). Look at a list of what is out there
from chemical supply chains and its fairly amazing. Small batches or high grades of purity will make certain things
more expensive, but most of the relatively exotic ingredients we don't use large quantities of anyway. Sodium
sulfite it produced by the ton as a food preservative. A number of other things are used in the medical industry.
Color chemistry is more involved, but with RA4 being so healthy at the moment, probably no worry for some time.
The commercial viability of chromogenic prints rests on the fact that they are far cheaper to make than inkjets.
Sad to see Cibachrome go - but that had nothing to do with Kodak. That analog photography has less "market share" than in its heyday is meaninful only if that the kind of plastic figure you need to tweak investor confidence. From a hard cash standpoint, the world now has a much bigger population than a few decades ago,
so even a smaller percent of people using film translates into quite a bit of cumulative activity, and not just "hobbyists". Over time, we all lose favorite products. No difference now. The weak link in the whole chain is
probably suitable film base mfg. But with Ilford and Fuji unquestionably still healthy, and with a reasonable adjustment upwards in price of such substrates, this should be sustainable too.

 

[PHOTOTONE]

Hence, digital and film can coexist and complement each other.

 

[keithwms]

P.S. Here is a reference to a hydraulic ADC dating back to the 19th Century! It's actually quite a nice way to understand digital.

http://www.analog.com/library/analogDialogue/archives/39-06/Chapter 1 Data Converter History F.pdf

I am not saying this is when digital photography began though. The first ADCs as we know them apparently emerged around the 1930s or so with vacuum tubes. And that technology was just too unwieldy for photography until silicon-based ADCs came online.

 

[removed account4]

snip snip

As for vanishing chemicals, yes, China and India supply some of these - in huge quantity though and I cant afford to buy a ton of phenidone! Even buying and splitting it up, I have no place to do this and could not afford to even start such a project.

PE

yeah, but we all know what happened with the chinese amidol group buy.
not that great stuff hasn't , doesn't and won't come out of china, but sometimes
the market is driven by profit at any cost, even if it means selling not what was hoped for ...

 

[Chan Tran]

I checked online and see that Kodak net worth is around negative a billion bucks. So to buy Kodak it would cost a few billions I guess. But if we could buy Kodak. Get rid of everything and keep only the film, paper chemical stuff. I think it's can be a profitable business although a small market.

 

[Henning Serger]

Not sure you grasp the impact of the professional shift to digital over the past decade.

I am aware of that. Friends of mine are running labs. Successfully, in 2012. They've been clever and extended their services. New film and processing options, excellent mail order services nationwide / europewide.

Their enormous consumption of film materials kept the quality pro labs afloat for the rest of us.

In Germany and other European countries the number of professional labs is still quite high and stable for the last years. No problems at all here to get quality processing.
Concerning the whole film market consumers have always been the most important user group of film. 80 - 90% of the film was shot by consumers, not by pros in the glory days of film.
Clear indication that there is still a huge market for consumer film: I can buy consumer CN film at nearly "every corner of the street" here in Europe, because all drug store chains sell it. At extremely low prices: 85 - 90 Cent per film.
Such extremely low prices are only possible if there is enough volume. The demand is there, that is the reason why this film is offered.

Let's change the view a little bit:
Europe is the biggest market for photofilm. How is film development organised in most European countries:

1. Drug store chains are offering film and development. Both is very cheap, with the house brand films and some chains extremely cheap, with film 85 cent and development only 85 cent as well. Films are collected in the stores and sent to big labs, e.g. labs belonging to the big European photofinishers CeWe or Fuji Eurocolor.
After two days you have your developed film and prints back. You can also choose between cheap, lower quality prints ( 1 Cent for 9x13cm) and a bit more expensive and higher quality prints. You can order CN, E6 and BW.
Even very small towns have at least one drug store.
So getting your films developed based on local shops is not a problem.

2. You can get your film developed at local photo shops. These shops either send the films to CeWe or Fuji Eurocolor, or to specialised medium sized labs.
Some photo shops operate a mini lab and offer in-house service.

3. In bigger cities there are pro labs. Lots of pro labs offer mail ordering.
Mail order is very easy for example in Germany. The national postal service ("Deutsche Post") is even offering different special envelope types for the labs if they want, so that labs can offer their customers dedicated services. And of course sending in standard envelopes or packages is no problem at all. Just choose what you think fits best.
So, if you want your films be developed, just put them in an envelope, go some hundred meters to the next mailbox and send it to your lab. Two days later you have your developed films back.
It is very convenient, fast, reliable and cost efficient. Driving to a local lab is costing fuel, parking charge and time. In most cases it is more expensive than using mail order.

When reading about this obsession about local pro labs and mini labs some North Americans seem to have Europeans shake their heads.
Even in the glory days of film in Europe the majority of films has not been developed by these types of labs.
For the long term survival it is not necessary that each small town has its own local lab. A more centralised infrastructure is working.

There are great chances for professional labs in the future, which adopt to the new film market: Offering attractive mail order services nationwide, expand the product programme, do marketing for film and their services.
I have three pro labs in my city. Nevertheless I mostly do mail order sending my films 500 km away. Because there is a lab offering more value for me.

Best regards,
Henning

 

[Henning Serger]

They shoot too few rolls of film to make a difference.

They can make a difference.
Take a new perspective:

For example Ilford. Simon has explained several times here they need at least 6000-8000m² to coat one run of film or paper cost effeciently.

Imagine SFX 200, a niche product, which is coated only one time a year due to Simon's statement. Let's guess "serious" photographers generate a demand of a volume that covers 90% of the 8000m².
Not enough demand for Ilford to justify the coating run.

But meanwhile there is an increasing number of these Holga and Lomo low fidelity shooters. 10 - 15% additional demand. With this demand the critical limit of the 8000m² is exceeded and Ilford can do the coating.

There is the difference. This additional demand from the low-fi shooters can keep films with critical volumes in production. Two manufacturers have confirmed me that.
Believe me, Simon and his colleagues are quite happy about this demand.

Best regards,
Henning