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.
Most of the DVDs I’ve played can skip the previews with chapter selection, but daaang the blu-rays locked that up. Can’t skip anything at all!
i try to put in the disc, hit play, and just walk away so i miss all the garbage and the paragraphs warning me about prison time. kinda kills the mood
You wouldn’t download a car
I would absolutely download a car 😆
Free and instantaneous creation of a useful asset? Sign me up
That’s a big part of why I have a 3D printer.
Just rip it and skip it!
If you don’t want to wait for it to rip, you can play it in VLC. It will let you skip anything you want to.
VLC! Itll let you do anything for only free 99
It’s sensible for businesses to shift from physical media sales.
Sensible to who?
For the businesses.
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.
Even outside of cost, the level of control they can exert is vastly higher than any physical media.
Being able to prevent someone from reselling the movie or game they bought is very appealing to rights holders.
Physical is practically dead.
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.
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.
The smaller towns like mine feel the effects first. It’ll trickle up.
Game went that way, eventually being taken over by the used section, and now all we have left locally is CEX, which is used only. Most of the prices are about the same as buying new from Amazon. Anything really cheap is often the same stuff in subscription services.
Game still exists, but it’s tucked away at the back of Sports Direct shops in out of town shopping centres, and their main products appear to be plushies and funko pops.
It is dying, and I’m not convinced it can be saved at this point. Who has a CD player any more? DVD players have gone from a £30 box that everyone had to something stuffed in the attic and the apps are built into the TV. A 4K BR player is still £150+ even for a cheap one. You don’t even get Dolby Vision at that price point. I don’t expect the next generation of consoles to have disc drives at all.
Physical media is on life support, and it won’t be long before they pull the plug completely.
When I think small town, I’m thinking a couple hundred people. I’ve never seen such stores there. Medium is a few thousand. They usually have one.
The nice thing is that there are millions of discs and players still out there. For anyone who prefers physical media and avoids streaming (this guy!) there is no shortage. Prices could stand to come down. But even if they do quit making them, there are lifetimes worth of vintage media, and newer isn’t always better.
I’m talking a town of 35,000-40,000 people. There is not a single dedicated new physical media shop here. The most we have is the rack in the supermarkets. It all went online to Amazon, etc, and now it doesn’t look like it has long there either.
And while that old media will last a decent while, it doesn’t last forever. The discs degrade, and fairly soon compared to CDs. Like 25 years or so.
And if nobody is making discs any more, the drives won’t be far behind. It’s full of moving parts, so stock up on them. It happened to floppy discs, it’ll happen to optical discs too.
Yarr harr harr
🏴☠️ Yo-ho! 🫡
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?
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.
Isn’t Blu Ray dead?
No, bluray is 1080p (or 2160p if UHD Bluray) while DVDs are 576p-720p (what looks really shitty on a 4K TV). I only buy BDs and UHD BDs these days
while DVDs are 576p-720p
576p is the absolute maximum. Most DVDs are actually 480p.
I am pretty sure 1080p video will fit on DVD just fine if formatted as regular data disc. But I am not sure if H.264 or anything newer is supported, and video may not have the highest quality, but still better than 720p I guess.
That’s true, but the DVD-Video standard only supports MPEG-2 at 720x576 (PAL), or 720x480 (NTSC).
Sure, you can put a 1080p AVC-encoded video on a DVD formatted as a data disc, but it won’t play on a DVD player.
Huh. I had a vague memory that my DVD player allowed regular movie files to be played, but maybe my memory is just bad.
That would be very device-specific, if they wanted to add additional support for data discs. It would be outside the scope of the actual DVD-video playback functionality.
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”.
So I rather support pirates.
Yo ho!
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
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.
Now I just need time to watch these things.
Check out Gargoyles too, that shit rules
One business dying is not the death of a media type, FFS.
Well, it’s not just one business. It’s an 86% reduction in volume that represents the death of the media format.
There’s still the public library.
For now.
Removed by mod
Unskippable commercials on DVD? What did I miss?
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.
If you had unskippable commercials on dvds, you probably missed pirated dvd stores like this one:
I have a 4k BluRay player I picked up for cheap. But I only have like 2 movies for it.
Why would I want dvds when I can own digital media?
Rip your own DVDs and you can have both, with redundancy
DVDs, appealing? Have you watched them lately?
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.
