It's sensible for businesses to shift from physical media sales. Per CNBC's calculations, DVD sales fell over 86 percent between 2008 and 2019. Research from the Motion Picture Association in 2021 found that physical media represented 8 percent of the home/mobile entertainment market in the US, falling behind digital (80 percent) and theatrical (12 percent).
But as physical media gets less lucrative and the shuttering of businesses makes optical discs harder to find, the streaming services that largely replaced them are getting aggravating and unreliable. And with the streaming industry becoming more competitive and profit-hungry than ever, you never know if the movie/show that most attracted you to a streaming service will still be available when you finally get a chance to sit down and watch. Even paid-for online libraries that were marketed as available "forever" have been ripped away from customers.
When someone buys or rents a DVD, they know exactly what content they're paying for and for how long they'll have it (assuming they take care of the physical media). They can also watch the content if the Internet goes out and be certain that they're getting uncompressed 4K resolution. DVD viewers are also less likely to be bombarded with ads whenever they pause and can get around an ad-riddled smart TV home screen (nothing's perfect; some DVDs have unskippable commercials).
No ads when you pause, but holy hell, we've been getting DVDs from the library, and sometimes it's a good ten minutes of crap before the movie actually starts.
I guess I've just been spoiled on Criterion Collection as that's the only Blu-ray media I buy these days, because there's nothing before the menu besides maybe a splash screen with the Criterion logo.
If you keep an eye on prices on Amazon, these versions are not as pricey as they used to be.
Way back when I used to copy movies to .avi files, my computer was in one room, my TV in another, I had a video card with TV out and a long set of cables, I'd preserve the copyright warning because it gave me time to start the movie then walk to the living room to watch it...
Yes, the costs to actually make and distribute a physical disc are relatively low on a unit basis, but the cost of distributing a digital copy online make physical media look astronomical.
And customers. Almost everyone prefers to consume media in a simple way and that is streaming. Almost no one will go back to physical media. If streaming becomes absolutely unbearable, people would turn to digital downloads.
One by one I've seen pretty much any shop that specialises in physical media go bust. Virgin Megastores, HMV, Blockbuster, Game. The media section in my local supermarkets have gone from several aisles of games and movies, down to a single rack of recent releases. Even in gaming, I've had my disc PS5 for two years now, and the only thing I've put in it was Top Gun on 4K disc. The other games (BG3, Talos Principle 2) I purchased weren't even available on disc.
Consumers don't want it in large numbers, so they stop making it.
I've had my disc PS5 for two years now, and the only thing I've put in it was Top Gun on 4K disc
You are really missing out then, because if you know where to look (like psprices.com) you will often find sales on only physical copies at Amazon, Best Buy or GameStop.
I'm talking like significant sales. Like AAA games less than a year old (that still costs $60 on PSN) for $15.99 kind of sales.
I cannot tell you how many PS4 and PS5 games I've gotten, and which, for 40%+ off. Too many to count. I've saved hundreds if not over a thousand dollars doing this.
Really? Because used media stores are booming all over the place. Stores that sell new and used records alongside CDs, Movies, and video games seem to be in every mid size town I pass through.
No DRM digital files downloads is the simple answer. There is no reason to go back to physical media to avoid subscriptions.
Keep in mind that DVDs did have DRM and the corps did try and get at the people who broke it. A new and improved physical media would have DRM and it's possible the corporations will prevent it being defeated this time.
Which means that yoy would only be able to play it on approved hardware. You can have your shiny disc but they will decide if you can play it. Perhaps they can detect how many people are present via a camera or require you do drink that verification can.
No DRM digital files w/ guaranteed re-downloadability if I have a license key or something
No DRM physical media
Offline DRM physical media
Low cost subscription service with fantastic selection w/ offline viewing capability
Anything after 4 is unacceptable. VHS was 2, DVD and Bluray are 3, and Netflix was 4. Now Netflix has higher prices and worse selection, so it's now somewhere after 4 and not worth the effort.
I'm willing to pay a premium for 1 or 2, and I'm willing to buy discounted 3, but nothing is offering 4 anymore. 1 & 2 don't really exist anymore, so if 3 goes away, I guess I'll go back to the alternatives I used when I couldn't afford 1-3 and Netflix wasn't around yet.
VHS did have a halfassed copy protection technology attempted, though, which was Macrovision. It didn't really work worth a damn in the end, but even in that area the media giants were already huffing on the DRM crack pipe.
When someone buys or rents a DVD, they [...] can also watch the content if the Internet goes out and be certain that they're getting uncompressed 4K resolution.
I'm sorry, is this a special version of DVD that can store 4K video? Uncompressed?
They're talking about 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, which was introduced in 2016. The video is still compressed, but it's still much higher quality than DVD and Blu-ray, and can hold 60-100 GB of data.
It's easy as long as you're okay with only being able to fit probably 1-2 minutes of video, the resulting disk not playing in any consumer player ever, and probably not even being capable of real time playback on a powerful PC with a fast drive.
Surely not? DVD is 576p/i (PAL) and 480p/i 💀. Not even 720p. 720p looks like garbage on a 4K display IMO. I really hope you are getting higher resolution from your streaming services than that, otherwise I think you're getting ripped off. (Streaming services are a ripoff to me regardless, but that's another point.)
At first I was cool with buying digital copies of movies from streaming services, when they first offered them. Until my neighbor apparently got his account suspended and had absolutely no access to all the digital copies of movies he had bought. I then realized... it's true, we're entering an age of, "you will own NOTHING and be happy".
I have no issues paying for movies, as long as they’re actually mine. I have major issues with paying for a limited license to stream a movie, until the streaming service decides to end their contract and the streaming rights get clawed back without a refund. If purchasing isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t theft.
Yup, but only physical media, not streaming services or anything with online DRM. If I can't play their media offline legally, I'll find other ways of getting that data to work offline.
I mean......I just bought Batman the animated series on DVD. Whole series too. I never got to watch it as a kid, but I hear it holds up even for adults.
I also bought Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles DVD which has the first 3 movies from the 90s. The stupid Micheal Bay reboot from the 2010s, and also a movie called "Batman vs TMNT". Which sounded bizzare enough for me to buy.
May not be the same type of stuff, but I've seen comple box sets of shows like Courage the Cowardly Dog, Edd Ed N Eddy, and a few other shows for roughly around $30 a set at my local Walmart. It's absolutely beautiful to see physical media box sets at a reasonable price crushes streaming prices.
Are the numbers about DVD sales strictly about DVD sales or do they include all optical formats (Blu-ray/UltraHD Blu-ray)? Because unless I’m getting an old TV show that was only ever SD, my preference is to get a Blu-ray, not a DVD. I suppose if I still saw the super cheap ($3-5) DVDs in the grocery store for something I like but not enough to buy normally (this is how I bought Brewster’s Millions) then I might buy a DVD, but otherwise I at least want HD quality.
Several tech YouTubers have talked about moving entirely to Jellyfin or similar, self-hosting their own movies and TV series from legally owned, ripped copies from their own DVD or Bluray collection.
It takes some work and time to rip, encode, and organize the files. But if you want to go this route, there has probably never been a better time. You can routinely purchase used DVDs and Bluray from thrift stores for a few bucks per disc... sometimes less. If I had a server and hard disk space I'd probably be going this route for media consumption.
Eventually the DVDs will go away entirely and then it will be impossible to create your own legal archival copies.
"Self hosting their own movies and TV series from legally owned, ripped copies from their own DVD and BluRay collection"
Ngl, whenever they say that they be doing that in said videos I smirk a lil. Yeah sure, that's what you say when you're in front of the camera&recording a video pointing out what others could be doing as well. All while they likely got stuff obtained from the seven seas on there as well, just like folk that are going to replicate that setup are going to have as well. Let's not kid ourselves, a whole lot of content is only legally accessible via streaming services with no other options (shortly before it gets removed from the streaming services, leaving no legal way to access it), and that amount is becoming more each and every single day 😅
Honestly, I'd rip my collection, but at the time it takes to download that quality rip I'd be quicker just typing them all into Radarr and coming back later...
I've been doing this since 2008 - although I only recently setup Plex in 2017, before that I just ran a web server and played movies in a browser on various smart TVs, but around 2017 was when my main TV got an update that rendered its browser mostly useless... Fuck Sony by the way. And before smart TVs I just had a video card with TV out and long cables... Or burning VCDs, I still have my 5-disc DVD changer that could play VCDs as long as they were burned to CD-RW discs, though it's just gathering dust now.
I've had enough movies and shows unavailable to me that I'm doing exactly this. I bought a PC just to use as a media server, set up Plex, and started ripping all my DVDs to the computer and I can stream them to my Chromecast. No ads, available permanently. I can buy movies from thrift shops and garage sales, and at least for now DVDs are super cheap. It's not high quality video but I don't really care too much.
My favorite part about DVDs is how sometimes they look just fine but the video doesn't actually play. I got a DVD from the library recently that the video stopped 10 minutes in the first episode and you couldn't even play or rip past that point either.
Physical media still really sucks in a lot of ways.
This is what's made me a little more okay with digital video games. The chance that some bizarre event will lead to that game becoming unplayable is non-zero. But, that's the case for physical game discs as well.
I'm upset at events like The Crew's removal and hope for more laws to make such things unlikely. Still, I'm generally accepting that by and large, publishers don't try to delete or remove access to people's games. There's no specific motivation in it for that particular evil.
Movies, however, I'm reticent. I liked being able to buy a few cheap movies on digital services, but Sony's mass deletion of their library makes me hesitant to continue there.
Also, you don’t have to worry about some random service shutting down. There are so many online dependencies with modern consoles that of the service shuts down, you gave an unusable brick, regardless whether you possess the bits they sold you
Likewise, I'm far less hesitant to accept buying digital console games than video because I generally can expect that once I download a game on my one device that I'll pull out the same device whenever I want to play it and it'll keep working when offline and even after the servers are gone, until the hardware fails. Modern games' physical releases rely so heavily on updates and DLC that the cart/disc you get isn't complete anyway; buying physical effectively becomes a digital game with an extra point of failure (and partial resellability). PC gaming complicates things but at least some games are available completely DRM-free there.
With video content sold online, streaming directly from some server is always the focus. As soon as the server disconnects you become unable to watch by default. Even if some service lets you pre-download within its app and watch offline (which probably won't work indefinitely without checkins anyway), that'll defeat the portability expectations for watching your videos on any device interchangeably.
Blu-ray video isn't ideal considering you cannot watch it on a phone, tablet, or linux system without cracking its DRM, but that's still way better for lasting access than anything else major movie/TV studios are willing to let consumers access without piracy.
DVD is better than Blu-ray in that regard - I've ripped DVDs that look like they fell off a truck and got run over multiple times and had no problem, meanwhile about 1 out of 5 Blu-rays I got from Netflix would have problems despite looking pristine. It has to do with the data density, Blu-ray packs so much more in the same amount of space, one microscopic scratch wipes out so much data...
Of course some DVDs suffer from bad materials. I was re-ripping my collection recently, and I have a few that have sat in a closet untouched for years, not a scratch on them, but the drive won't even recognize there's a disc. Probably oxidation of the reflective layer.
Oh yeah 100%. Old DVDs had ads that were unskippable, which played before you got to the DVD’s home menu. Usually just ads for other movies that were coming up around the same time the DVD landed. You could usually get around them by hitting Stop twice and then Play to get to the main DVD menu, but not always.
UNLESS you buy the dvd or Blu-ray from the UK. I found that out when I bought the UK version of a movie and when I put the disc in... The movie just fucking started. No earnings, no ads, no features, no menu. Just... Movie.
I remember this as a kid, where (usually a Disney DVD) would have 2x 3 minute trailers, before you even got to the main menu, for other movies and if you tried to hit Next Chapter it would just spit back "Unable to do this at this time".
Sometimes you might bypass it by hitting Root Menu if your DVD player remote had it, but yes very frustrating.
The enshittification of streaming is enshittifitentional.
Major B&M retailers of physical media are either dead, dieing, or have phased out physical media.
What a perfect time to issue a deathknell to the whole concept physical ownership.
Streaming originals that disappear will come back in limited release. It'll basically be the Disney Vault of streaming. A company like Netflix would subtly drop references and nods to "removed" popular shows in their new shows to make you nostalgic for the old show. Then bring it back for a couple months.
You'll especially see them all fighting for the best Christmas specials, but they'll pull this shit with Stranger Things by the end of the decade. They expect people to plan-hop and will use limited releases and seasonal specials as their carrot.
I've started buying DVDs and Blu-ray again after years of not doing so because there have been multiple instances of me purchasing a movie on some streaming platform and then it no longer being available. Also, there have been even more instances where it's less expensive to buy the physical product and then rip it than it is to buy the digital copy.
I tried to watch a DVD lately (as in past few years). Holy. Yeah. Not as I remembered. It's not even 720p. Looks like manure on my 65" 4K OLED. 💩 And the audio. I had to stop.
I think it was Band Of Brothers? Had to download a 1080p boxset at least. Then it was consumable.
It's one of those things were people have gotten used to 1080p or better and they remember DVD being pretty good, but when they go back, yeeesh. I remember thinking that about VHS vs DVD. Got used to DVD, remembered VHS being just fine, put a VHS on, oh boy.
Yep. I've recently been collecting Criterion Collection blu-rays (and 4k BR in the case of Citizen Kane. Which was incredible btw. First time seeing it too) for some of my favorite films plus classics I haven't seen yet. If you keep an eye out for sales you can get some really great stuff for under $20. Sometimes under $15.
The picture quality is second to none, the bonus features are always amazing and actually worth checking out, and I own them outright forever.
Edit: oh, you meant like actual old school regular DVDs... Fuck that
Yeah. I didn't even know people sometimes used DVD to mean just all sort of optical discs. Nothing against Blu-Ray, their quality is excellent. DVDs on the other hand, off.
The end of Redbox marks another death knell for the DVD industry at a time when volatile streaming services are making physical media appealing again.
But on Wednesday, Judge Thomas M. Horan of the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware approved a conversion to chapter 7, signaling the liquidation of business, per Deadline.
Redbox's remaining 24,000 kiosks will close, and 1,000 workers will be laid off (severance and back pay eligibility are under review, and a bankruptcy trustee will investigate if trust funds intended for employees were misappropriated).
In April, Target confirmed that it will only sell DVDs in stores during "key times," like the winter holiday season or the release of a newer movie to DVD.
But as physical media gets less lucrative and the shuttering of businesses makes optical discs harder to find, the streaming services that largely replaced them are getting aggravating and unreliable.
Still, places that offer DVDs have gotten significantly rarer recently, and relying solely on an increasingly cable-like streaming industry for home entertainment is a scary proposition.
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