According to Video Business, companies that supply stores with DVD titles are slimming down the size of their accompanying packaging.

For example, companies like “Warner Home Video and A&E are launching multi-disc DVD sets this year that are 30% to 50% smaller than the studios’ original box-set packaging.” Other companies like Passport Video have supposedly cut over 70% from their box set size.

Companies that create packaging like AGI and Nexpak offer studios a variety of ways to get more DVDs into a slimmer package. There is the popular “flipping tray” in which “discs snap onto thin, individual plastic pieces that consumers turn as they would pages of a book.”

Recently, Nexpak brought to market “a multiple-disc tray improvement that fits 10 discs into a case just 1 1/4 inch wide.”

Nexpack is also the company responsible for the recent introduction of the Triple-Amaray case. It is the same size as a regular amaray case and it can hold up to 3 discs.

It is believed that HD DVDs will be smaller than regular DVDs currently on the market. In fact, some think “that packages for both HD DVD and Blu-ray single-disc titles will be 11mm thick apiece, down from standard DVD’s approximately 15mm package.”

“There’s a desire to max the number of units that can be racked at retail, and there’s a desire to have a clear difference between traditional DVD and HD DVD and Blu-ray,” AGI’s executive VP sales and marketing, Richard Roth says. “I think also from a design perspective, the coolest things these days are light and small.”