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Oppenheimer and the resurgence of Blu-ray and DVDs
- whycome 3y agoAnd Best Buy is officially pulling such media from its stores. Bad timing? https://www.npr.org/2024/01/04/1222813514/best-buy-says-it-will-soon-stop-selling-dvds-and-blu-ray-discs https://www.npr.org/2024/01/04/1222813514/best-buy-says-it-w...
- barryrandall 3y agoIt's possible that reports about the resurgence of physical media (based on numbers provided by the historically, very shady publishers) doesn't reflect the reality faced by people who sell physical media.
- maxsilver 3y agoIt's doubly weird, because "cinephiles collecting 4KUHD discs" would seem like a thing Best Buy wants to capitalize on, it's a high margin hobbiest niche much like custom car audio, and it's slowly growing as conventional streaming services are starting to fall apart (HBO Max and Paramount+ especially) And every Best Buy I've been in, is practically empty anyway. They aren't hurting for floor space, they clearly don't have any higher-margin / higher-value / higher-selling thing they can fill that space with instead.
- ksec 3y agoWe need something that is more resilient than BluRay in long term but cheaper, much larger capacity and smaller.
- tonetegeatinst 3y agoI think our best bet would be tape. Currently tape is amazing technology for archiving data and long term storage. The pysical media costs very little...the big cost is in the hardware for reading and writing. I really wish we had an alternative open hardware competitor to the current tape market. I could justify the cost of tape but even used a lto7 library or a single reader for a desktop can run from a few grand for parts all the way up to 8 grand from what iv seen. YMMV
- vlovich123 3y agoIs there something about tape HW itself that’s inherently complex and expensive? Or is it just that the target market is enterprise and so the manufacturers are able to price discriminate more effectively? Regardless, I doubt tape is a good consumer solution because it’s primarily for archival. That means that retrieving data is super slow (average seek time is ~1 minute). On the other hand, given that’s for an 18TiB cartridge, you might be able to cut that drastically by using less capacity. So it would be interesting if someone attempted a consumer play with tape, I just don’t know what the business model would look like since most customers rely on the cloud for archival to offload the technical and physical maintenance parts of the problem.
- toast0 3y agoIt's probably a mix. Consumer tape drives used to exist, but uptake was low. And really, most consumers want to ignore backups and hope nothing bad happens (which usually works out ok). Something like a cost reduced two generations old LTO tape drive might work, but of course it has to compete with surplus two generations old LTO tape drives and be careful not to attract the business of enterprise which should be buying the current drives. Anyway, I'm not sure how much cost reduction is possible --- there's a lot of precision movement required. Edit: also, at least in the current market, I doubt many consumers have enough data to make tape economical. An online array of rotational drives, plus backup to and rotation of external drives is probably a better fit for consumers, and a lot of enterprises.
- sschueller 3y agoTape would be perfect because people don't tend to skip through movies to random points. At least I don't.
- toast0 3y agoYou might not, but some people do. And disc based formats assume reasonable seek times for menus. Plus if you're storing multiple movies on a tape, you still need to seek to the beginning of the one you want. A 100-disc changer or an archive of discs onto rotational hard drives would be a better experience.
- AniseAbyss 3y ago[dead]
- sschueller 3y agoThat's the primary issue. It's not the medium it's that you don't own it and it can be taken away. If you could download a movie and store it without someone taking away some decryption key or deleting it I would probably prefer that over a DVD.
- forward1 3y agoIt's already the case with several movies and shows. The French Connection for example has an entire scene removed on streaming services because a racial slur was uttered in 1971. Multiple Always Sunny episodes are not even available except on physical media, i.e. censored because it might offend someone.
- sneed_chucker 3y agoSomehow we can handle films and TV shows full of murderers, rapists, and all forms of violence but naughty words or the wrong color face paint on the wrong colored person simply cannot be tolerated.
- hulitu 3y agocensored ? In a democracy ? You must be joking. /s