, and now's the time to kick yourself if you ever paid more than $3.99 for The Hangover, by the way). But December is the time for massive spending on video. The charts below show why studio executives anxiously await video sales reports over the next few weeks.

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To see just how much DVD spending is weighted towards December, look at the following chart, which summarizes DVD spending by month, based on the titles we track each week (about 1,000 in total):

(Note that columns may not add to 100% due to rounding.)

December enjoys almost twice the sales of any other month, based on our tracking, with November in second place. November has a slightly bigger share of unit sales thanks to the millions of discs that are sold at deep discounts on Black Friday.

Another way to look at the market is to calculate the total sales for all titles in a single week. Here we see just how much gift purchases influence the market, with eight of the top ten weeks being in the three week period before Christmas. The other two were Thanksgiving week 2006 and 2007. Note also how only one week from 2008 makes this list, and none from 2009 and 2010: another sign of how much the DVD market has declined in the past couple of years.

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Last week's analysis: OpusData Reveals the Top Leading, Supporting and Voice Actors of All Time.