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This article is old, and the headline misleading. It's talking about Q1 2021 sales, which in practice means it's talking about 2020 movies, which means that the
by mkozlows 4y ago
This article is old, and the headline misleading. It's talking about Q1 2021 sales, which in practice means it's talking about 2020 movies, which means that these are weird, pandemic-fucked numbers that don't really mean anything at all.
There are more recent numbers available. Here's the end of October, the latest week available right now: https://www.mediaplaynews.com/research/sales-report-for-week-ended-10-29-22/ https://www.mediaplaynews.com/research/sales-report-for-week... -- at the bottom of the page, you can see a link to the previous week, and you can step back week-by-week.
If you do that, you'll see that DVD sales are larger than Blu-ray sales, but it's in that 50-something range, which puts it about on track with pre-pandemic trends. Also, disc sales in general keep falling annually at an incredibly fast rate, so both DVD and Blu-ray are tanking.
The obvious cause for this has nothing to do with particular weakness in the Blu-ray format, but that the "mainstream" disc market is now increasingly streaming, and the disc market is bifurcating into:
1. Technophobes who don't understand new technology, and who don't understand or care about HDTV, and so just buy the same DVDs they always bought.
2. People who want the best possible image/sound quality, collectors, and physical media fetishists. This is a niche market, and always has been.
The obvious end state is that DVD fades out in the same way that CD sales are fading out in the music world, and that 4K UHD Blu-ray ends up in the vinyl-style collector niche.
- kypro 4y agoI think a lot of it is simply that there's a sizable chunk of the market that doesn't own Blu-ray player and doesn't see any point investing in one when the quality of DVDs are acceptable to them. The jump from VHS to DVD was big with a lot of benefits beyond just quality. But the jump from DVD to Blu-ray was far more marginal so a lot of people didn't bother. While those people probably would be buying Blu-rays if they had a player at home, they're probably not going to spend $100 replacing their DVD player with a Blu-ray player. And if you have a DVD player in your living room and a couple more in your bedrooms you'll have to replace several DVD players.
- chrisseaton 4y agoYeah really struggle to see the point in investing in a standalone Blu-ray player, let alone committing to storing all that physical media.
- nightski 4y agoMany consoles come with one built in. We just use the PS5. I'm not particularly into buying tv shows, but there are definitely quite a few movies out there that look a lot better on a 4k blu-ray than 4k streaming.
- chrisseaton 4y agoYeah people forget a movie can be 4k pixels but not a lot of bits to encode them. I wonder if we should start quoting bit-rates for quality.
- anonymouskimmer 4y agoFlashback to when I encoded 56 kbps mono mp3s to save on limited hard disk space. :D
- account42 4y agoThe codec, aka how efficiently those bits are used also matters a lot.
- chrisseaton 4y agoI wonder if you could give a universal metric of the differential from the source.
- laurencerowe 4y agoI got a PS5 with a 4k blu ray player but have yet to put a disk in it since many films are simply not available. Tried to find Lawrence of Arabia but it seems completely unavailable. Maybe the format is great but lacking lots of content.
- secondcoming 4y agoI genuinely don’t recall ever handling a Blu-ray disc.
- buzzerbetrayed 4y agoSame. I switched directly from DVDs to streaming.
- jamiek88 4y agoSame. I don’t miss my massive collections of books, dvds or cassettes. I humped those fucking things across three continents and 6 countries. iTunes Match obsoleted my cd collection (some of which had rusted and were unplayable on regular stereos), Calibre for my books and I don’t really care about movies enough to archive them, stream most things bought those shows I watch over and over again on iTunes.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y agoSame, except 8-track.
- FpUser 4y agoSame here
- NikkiA 4y agoI own 1 that I bought to check my BD-RW/BD+RW drive could read them.
- anonymouskimmer 4y agoAdding on to what you wrote: The monitors my wife and I use are both >15 years old, and still working fine. But they require VGA-to-HDMI adapters to plug into our more modern computers, which renders Blu-rays unplayable on them thanks to DRM. The one Blu-ray we rented to test out the Blu-ray player required using a small laptop screen to display, which kind of defeats the purpose of the higher resolution. On our desk setups wide-screens would be problematic, and it's difficult to get modern 4:3 or 5:4 screens anymore. Probably not an issue for most folks, but likely still applicable to a few. Especially the smaller screen issue for those who don't own a separate TV, or even a separate monitor from their laptop screen.
- userbinator 4y agoBut they require VGA-to-HDMI adapters to plug into our more modern computers, which renders Blu-rays unplayable on them thanks to DRM. Hint: many of the cheap Chinese HDMI-to-VGA (I think that's what you meant) adapters "support" HDCP in that they'll decrypt it. The branded ones don't want the attention of lawyers, but the no-name ones don't care. Ever since the HDCP master key was cracked, it's possible to generate device keys without licensing them from the central authority, and that's what these manufacturers are likely doing.
- smackeyacky 4y agoEven better, there are EDID injectors that can lie about the capabilities of your display. I used one on front of a HDMI to component cable for years to force blu ray to 1080i for an old projector. Was great until things like the chromecast removed the interlaced modes from their output.
- vel0city 4y agoThere were some Blu-ray players with high quality analog video outputs. I've played modern Blu-rays which surely had HDCP protection on them on analog display inputs. They're rare, and you'll pretty much only find them used I imagine.
- 4y ago
- pantalaimon 4y agoOn top of that BluRays can be quite a hassle with all the DRM they pack.
- jart 4y agoNot if you use MakeMKV. I own so many BluRays now that I could start my own underground Netflix. It's funny because this is what I always imagined Heaven being like.
- account42 4y agoSame here, but I'm sure you can see how having to use MakeMKV is an additional hassle that your average consumer is not going to bother with. Also, last I checked, UHD Blu-Rays require your drive to be supported by LibreDrive frimware for MakeMKV to be able to rip them. Again not a huge obstacle when you are dedicated to having an offline movie collection but wouln't it be better if we could just get plain video files (on discs or online) without all this DRM crap?
- mkozlows 4y agoThe point is that most people _aren't using their legacy DVD players_. They're streaming. If you want to watch a movie in 2022, the extremely normal thing you do is stream it. If you're watching on DVD, you're weird (probably technophobic or backward in some way); if you're watching on Blu-ray/4K disc, you're weird (probably an obsessive cinephile). I don't expect people using their DVD players in 2022 to migrate to Blu-ray. I expect them to drift away from discs entirely.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y agoI'll stream movies, but when it comes to movies I want to watch more than once, I absolutely will buy it on disc. Why? Easy - that disc will always be present and playable. You can't say that for the rotating options with streaming services. Go back to watch a Christmas movie in July, and it's gone. As for DVD vs blu-ray, I just use a 32" TV, so I just pick whichever is cheaper. If that's weird, I don't want to be normal.
- account42 4y ago> if you're watching on Blu-ray/4K disc, you're weird (probably an obsessive cinephile). I'm OK with streaming video quality. I'm not OK with subscriptions, depending on internet connection, playback device restrictions and all that other crap that the normal viewing experience entails these days. That means either piracy (risky in many places) or ripping my own Blu-Rays (perhaps not entirely legal everywhere but ~0 risk). DVD quality is significantly lower, and especially interlacing is something I never want to deal with. So yeah I'm weird. But I don't consider myself a cinephile or technophobe.
- Mistletoe 4y agoThe jump from dvd to blu ray isn’t marginal though at the tv sizes I assume we are all at now? DVDs look bad on my tv and I get really disappointed when I notice that’s all I have of that movie.
- acomjean 4y agoSome upscalers are pretty good. DVD is fine for me. honestly when I’m watching something without a high def reference to compare to probably helps. DVD is clearly not as good. At this point I’m more interested in the quality of the content.
- kypro 4y agoPersonally, I agree. My girlfriend often watches DVDs on our 50" HD TV and I don't understand why she does it because the quality is so bad. For a lot of people it's good enough apparently... But to my point, this is really the only benefit of DVD to Blu-Ray - a sharper image when viewed on a large HD TV. VHS on the other hand had noticeable visual artifacts and would degrade with use. They didn't feature all of the extra DVDs had like subtitles, director commentary, and other extra content. They had no chapter selection / skip. VHS tapes were bulky and difficult to store. It was just an inferior format to DVD in so many ways. On the other hand I think you can argue DVDs are still perfectly fine when viewing on smaller TVs.
- account42 4y agoRight, 480i DVD vs. 1080p H.264 Blu-Ray is night and day. And then there's UHD. It sucks when the only non-streaming option for some content is DVDs even though the source material is higher quality.
- mark-r 4y agoTo me, DVDs look acceptable but bluray is perceptibly better. I do prefer the bluray, but not to the point where I'll pay appreciably more for them. 4K on the other hand is a complete fraud, I've tried about a dozen but I haven't seen any I would prefer over the regular bluray.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tsukikage 4y agoMost people mostly stream things these days. This doesn't mean no physical media gets bought. I mostly buy physical media to give as presents to other people, since the streaming services don't generally provide any pleasant way to gift specific things. After all these years, though, I still don't remember for sure which of my friends can play blu-rays and which cannot. Therefore I get hybrid (blu-ray and DVD) boxes where they are available, or just DVD where they are not.
- dusted 4y agoThat's kind of interesting, I never got to use DVDs because the quality jump from VHS to "kazaa" was sufficient.. and then came HD movies and the DVD rips looked pretty bad.. For physical media, I could see the point in blu-ray, but, I don't see any practical point in it.. So I only have LD, which is slightly worse than DVD in some aspects, and slightly better in others (bit lower resolution, but never any compression artifacts), but that's more for the fun and cozy ritual of spinning up the giant disks and watching them on the big flickery CRT :)
- brnt 4y ago> Technophobes who don't understand new technology, and who don't understand or care about HDTV, and so just buy the same DVDs they always bought. That seems like a strangely unfriendly reduction. Although I don't buy DVDs, I am perfectly fine watching subHD content because the visual quality is good enough and not what interests me. I also don't have a 'modern' or especially large TV (it's already too large, if anything). I care about the story. When I read a book, it is similarly of no significant importance to me whether I'm reading from an old paperback or a new hardcover, or an e-reader. As long as the text is legible (book's not deteriorated and the font's not too small), I don't care. This is not technophobia, it is merely the absence of technophilia.