Year-over-year growth in Hollywood’s “homevid” business hasn’t happened since George W. Bush was midway through his second term, with the market following the inexorable decline of DVD. But on Sunday, studio-backed research firm the Digital Entertainment Group released data showing that the U.S. home entertainment industry is up 1.4 percent through the first six months of the year.

The digital side of the business generated $2.4 billion during this period, according to the DEG, a 78 percent uptick. Leading the way has been subscription video on demand, which the group says has spiked in revenue by 430 percent for the first six months to $1.1 billion.

Also read: Forecast – Online demand for movies, TV shows will top DVD sales this year

With Netflix reporting $1.04 billion in U.S. streaming revenue during the first two quarters, it’s easy to tie this metric to Los Gatos, Calif. Yes, it’s all true you — the company with the cratering stock price has turned the home entertainment business around.

Other research groups, including IHS Screen Digest, have suggested that the SVOD market will never replace DVD sales as a profitability driver, given the vast difference between margins. At least in the short term, however, SVOD is generating real revenue.

Revenue from electronic sell-through (i.e. downloads on iTunes and Amazon) in the U.S., the DEG also notes, was up 22 percent to $329.4 million.

The overall disc business keeps declining, with sales of physical video media dropping 3.6 percent to $3.7 billion during the six-month period and disc rentals declining 26 percent to $2.3 billion.

However, the kiosk rental business, led by Redbox, is still expanding nicely — it was up 23% to $990 million, according to DEG.

Also read: Kiosks keeps rolling: Redbox reports 26% revenue increase

Cheerleading a bit for the studios’ pet initiatives, the DEG also says that U.S. consumer spending on Blu-ray was up over 13 percent (but it didn’t release a revenue figure).

Also read: UltraViolet creeps along – now up to 3M users

DEG also claims that the major studios’ cloud initiative, UltraViolet, has now signed up 4 million users. While still underwhelming, that represents an acceleration of growth, with the Wal Mart-backed UltraViolet group reporting 3 million users as recently as early June.

Driven by significant revenue growth from subscription streaming as well as Blu-ray disc sales and rentals, U.S. home entertainment spending rose 2.5 percent to around $4.45 billion in the first quarter, according to the Digital Entertainment Group (DEG), a research operation funded by Hollywood’s major studios.

It was the second out of the last three quarters that DEG talled growth for the sector — a third-quarter uptick of around 5 percent in 2011 was the industry’s first black ink in three years.

Since peaking at around $21.8  billion in 2004, the U.S. home entertainment industry has seen steady declines, descending to $18.4 billion last year.

Blu-ray, which has long under-performed in its expected role as the high-definition successor format for the aging DVD, has finally started to deliver on some of its promise. Revenue from Blu-ray sales and rentals increased 23 percent in the first quarter, according to DEG.

In fact, sales increases of Blu-ray titles almost offset the continued cratering of the traditional DVD market, with physical media sales dropping just 0.62 percent in the quarter. Overall, Blu-ray accounts for about a quarter of the sell-through disc market now. And with 2.4 million Blu-ray player devices sold in the first quarter, the format has reached 40.8 million U.S. homes.

Subscription streaming was another big driver in the quarter, with DEG tabulating a 549 percent year-to-year increase to $548.6 million. Netflix, of course, accounts for the lion’s share of this bounty, reporting subscription streaming revenue of $507 million during its first-quarter earnings call last week.

As Netflix builds its streaming business at the expense of online disc rental, the overall home entertainment rental business has taken a hit — it was down nearly 18 percent in the first quarter.

That number would have been much worse if not for the offset provided by the red-hot kiosk rental business led by Redbox, which was up 30 percent during the three-month period. Last week, Coinstar reported 39 percent first-quarter revenue growth of $502.9 million for its Redbox division.

Of course, having in-demand titles helps — DEG reported that the total box-office performance of new home entertainment movie releases in the quarter was up 12.5 percent compared to those titles put out in the first quarter of 2011.

Meanwhile, with the DEG also providing a marketing role for the home entertainment industry’s digital cloud endeavor, UltraViolet, the group reported that the initiative now has 2 million subscribers, doubling its tally from February.