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Physical Media: Down, But Maybe Not Out
jfruh writes: "For many tech-savvy folks, it may come as surprise that physical media like DVD and Blu-Ray still generate more movie revenue than streaming services. But PriceWaterhouse Coopers is predicting that the the lines will cross in 2017 as physical media sales and rentals decline; already, fully half of those revenues come from supermarket Redbox kiosks. Still, there are signs that physical media won't vanish entirely, including the obsessive needs of collectors and the music industry's increasing suspicions of digital sales."
When someone starts making new 456 1/4" tape again.
Mostly random stuff.
I'm spontaneous enough that I almost always stream. I can't imagine others are far behind.
Tech-savvy folks rip physical media and ffmpeg it into whatever format their device prefers. Fools spend money on DRM'ed downloads.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
There is definitely an aspect of obsessive collectors liking physical media, yes: they're more tangible, sometimes look nice (especially in fancy limited editions), etc.. But even people who are not really that big into collecting have a pretty big reason to still prefer physical media: you have some chance of actually keeping it. Your purchase of a book or CD will probably not be remotely "revoked" by the manufacturer, which is more than can be said for the currently popular methods of digital delivery.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The problem with digital "sales" is that they aren't really a sale. They are effectively an extended rental. That rental can be revoked at any time and your entire collection can be made to go away.
That said, what is going to kill physical media is the availability of cheap subscription options. If something can be had on Netflix for $8 it makes little sense to pay $20 or $60 for the DVDs.
The comparison between physical media and expensive pay per view services is another matter though. Streaming doesn't have an obvious price advantage.
Plus there's the question of whether or not what you want is on ANY streaming service.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Steaming movies still is not an option in many rural areas of North American (not to mention developing nations). Until broadband connections are available in rural areas the only practical chocie for watching videos will be physical media.
If something can be had on Netflix for $8 it makes little sense to pay $20 or $60 for the DVDs.
Unless the only Internet providers that serve your home charge $5 to $10 per GB. This is common for satellite and cellular ISPs.
blu-ray for 4K / 8K download cap are to low for that. Cable internet may be able to do that but with say 25% of people on the same node are all Streaming at the same time?
satellite and cable tv have more room but some cable systems like comcast are loaded with old MEPG 2 hardware that can't do it.
I'm not surprised. I consider myself pretty tech savvy, but I don't stream anything. I used to buy lots of records, then CDs and DVDs. I haven't really bought much recently, but if I were to buy anything, it would be physical media. I don't do streaming for several reasons. If it is DRMed, I worry that the site will shut down. if it is not DRMed, I worry about not being able to save it for later viewing, interrupted transmissions, reduced quality, bandwidth, and other things as well.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Is the music industry still really suspicious about this? iTunes and Amazon offer thousands of albums/songs for a fair price and their files are DRM free. Not seeing any suspicion on their part...
1) There is isn't enough bandwidth for streaming everything.
2) I think Blockbuster might still be in business if they hadn't run all their customer off by trying to get them to purchase extra things. Redbox shows that there's a demand for DVD rentals.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
While not a consummate prepper, I can still lose cable, internet, and even electrical service... and bide the disaster with a semblance of civilized entertainment.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The only reason I still rent movies is because broadband in my area comes with fairly low data caps. I'm stuck paying about $100 a month for 18Mbs, and 150 GB limit. Gotta love monopolies.
Not true. Virtually ALL current common forms of physical media degrade in 10 or 15 years. It seems to get even worse as bit density increases too. Physical media has an expiration date, and is fragile.
Way, way way way way better to have non-DRM digital files with proper backups. That's what I do. Screw both DRM and physical media I boycott both. As soon as content producers decide to sell a product in a format worth buying, they get my money. Otherwise it's The Pirate Bay.
When will we see the "Criterion" version of movie streams or downloads?
Too often what's on consumer video of many films (and, maybe, all films in some way) is compromised intentionally or circumstantially, either in the making of the film or the home video release production.
Will we ever get "Criterion" editions of these films as streams or downloads? I imagine the jungle of licensing gets in the way not to mention the lowest common denominator thinking that goes with Netflix. But I would expect iTunes or Amazon to sell Criterion streams as downloads.
More than half of all movies currently can't be streamed. How can a delivery format go away if content providers won't move most of the content to alternate media?
Digital rentals are still like $5 a pop, and the backlogs of the big movie companies aren't available.
The two conveniences of digital movie rentals - price and availability of everything - are suddenly gone. No wonder physical sticks around.
Almost all of my purchased media these days is because of my daughter. She goes over to friends houses and grandmas and other grandmas and brings with her movies to watch. Streaming is still so locked down in the draconian, paranoid past that they've only barely made it convenient for me to do in my own home/network/devices. It's no where near convenient enough to "take with you". Also, there's little to no cost savings for all the downsides.
When streaming services can deliver 1080P at 25mbits/sec, sign me up. Most "HD" streaming services I have seen are fairly horrendous. Either they are streaming at reduced resolutions such as 720P or the data rate is poor enough that there are bad artifacts in high motion scenes and transitions. When you have a projector and a large screen, this is a major problem. You see it all. With Blu Ray, there are no artifacts it feels like you're in a theater.
Also, outside of big cities, most of us are on fairly slow 1.5 to 5mbit/sec connections. The local cable provider recently got a fiber backbone in town which greatly increased their offerings (pulling about 18mbits / sec at home right now) but I am moving and the new neighborhood is back to the slowboat offerings. The duopoly is slow to catch up, they need a concrete competitor before they will make any improvements to their infrastructure. It was only when the cable service started offering internet that the phone company (AT&T) finally started offering DSL in the area.
The problem is that the physical media formats still are continuously changing with no guarantees of backwards compatibility. I don't know about everyone else, but I'm not buying Lion King on VHS, DVD and BluRay "remastered" or not. The average consumer doesn't have the money to keep up. It makes sense that PriceWaterhouse Cooper is predicting only a small segment of the population will be driving the sales.
So at the risk of seeming gross: I've shelled out for porn sites in the past (before you get all judgy, so has my fiance, and we're fine. Deal with it or skip to another comment.) Convenient access to a selection of media that interests me, unlimited downloads and they seem happy enough to take my word for it that I'm not going to turn around and make their lives harder by copying their content all over the 'Net.
For other media types - I might use band-camp or something, but if I want a movie or mainstream music I'm buying a used DVD or CD. Sorry Hollywood, if you wanted my money there were a good ten or fifteen years during which you could have decided not to be complete a-holes about the arrival of the Internet. As it stands, I think you are an even bigger bag of pricks than the porn industry, and I hope your business model takes you down with it.
You know, if you have troubles with throughput there is this awsome website that lets you cache the movies you want to watch right to your hard drive. You just start it before you leave for work, and when you get home its there to watch with no chance of network congestion problems. Go here to find out all about it: http://thepiratebay.se/
Not all physical (optical) media is devoted to entertainment; there are plenty of folks who have yet to be sold on "the cloud" for whatever reason but who still worry about bitrot and the ability to access content relatively quickly. Case in point, one of my immediate family members is a photography buff who has a large library of scanned negatives dating back to the 30s and he's been eyeing M-Discs for a while now. Still too expensive for regular use but like many amateur archivists, he's playing a long game.
Posterity, my posterior.
Even if streaming services eventually overtake physical media usage it still makes little sense to buy a streaming-only player (AppleTV or Roku) instead of a blu-ray player which can access streaming services as well. The difference in costs between the two is too small given the additional functionality of a blu-ray player for playing physical media, including the library of DVDs people may have already from "the good ol' days" before Netflix instant streaming.
Plus, it's a bit more convenient to take your DVD/BD to a friend's house than uncoupling a VUDU or Amazon-On-Demand account from a device to sign in as someone else and access a different library of content.
Still eats up data cap
despite living in a major city, in a suburb popular with young educated professionals, all we have access to in much of the area is 4G, which tends to be a washout at peak times (a youtube video at low quality is a "go away and read a book" while it caches is par for the course at 6am-7am and 6pm through to 10pm weekdays).
Given I can drive down to my local bricks and mortar store, buy a 1080 def blueray (for pocket change) drive home AND watch half the movie before a download of a 420 def movie has cached enough to not splutter, jerk and pause regularly (and that's on the services that allow significant caching) I think I'll be waiting a long, long time for broadband upgrade (or moving to some other geographical location) before streaming movies becomes my service of choice (and don't even get me started on regional licensing where the low level of any quality content (talking artistic quality not def this time) makes the locally available subscription models a bad joke.
Piratebay as a caching site, that's a first.
However, your haughty derision is not a first.
Drive north of Boston to Dartmouth College. Home of the 1st remote computer connection (from Bell Labs, 1947ish). Oh, and BASIC. There's a bit of tech in the area. Those living in most of the towns nearby can get comcast cable. Many roads don't have cable but there's a wireless internet provider.
But there are still local DVD rental stores. Remember those? Drive 20-30 minutes out, away from interstate 89 & 91 and you cannot get internet except by Satellite or dial up. Your cell phone will be intermittent. 4G? 3G isn't available out there. There are cell towers on the interstate, but there are still dead zones along the way. Heck, when the iPhone came out, some Dartmouth students found their contract canceled because they were always roaming, even on campus. And the iPhone is only 5-6 years old.
If you want to watch a movie, you drive 20-30 minutes back into town for the theatre or you get a DVD rental.
This is most of the US. The people in dense areas and on the coasts can stream, but for the rest, it's DVDs or VHS.
Same answer. I don't know what you pay for pay for view movies, but they're typically only a couple of bucks most places.
Expensive PPV events are largely limited to live events, and are thus, irrelevant. Hence my bringing the discussion back to what *is* relevant, things directly comparable to physical media.
Now kindly fuck off, the adults are having a discussion.
show mw a streaming service available to me(that is in Norway) that streams the restored StarTrek series (Tng, ENT) in 1080p with 7.1 lossless sound. I suspect you will find that a hard job, so at present the only way for me to get what i want legally is to get the blureays.
Call me crazy but I prefer to have the physical copy. This way I can watch it anytime I want and I don't need to worry about the inevitable loss of Internet connectivity. It's the same with Cash, I prefer Cash as it's inevitable that via some Galactic event or War; Satellites will be disabled. People don't generally think about these events, but they are inevitable.
I still buy DVD also, I turn my nose up at Blu-ray due the ever-changing DRM and sorry quality of the players. Upscaling HDMI DVD Players are the best they have ever been and look just as good as HD Programming on TV. There is also a rumor among companies like Warner and Fox that they are currently taking a loss on Blu-ray sales by trying to match the DVD prices; you see it costs money to go back and do new transfers and add all that extra content. Not to mention all the angry people that will come when they realize they need to buy the Disk again when 4k/8k and whatever else arrives. And to be fair I tried to get into Blu-ray, the quality upgrade wasn't worth the constant lock-ups, slow menus and firmware nonsense.
Also for people like me, having to replace 1000+ DVDs is not financially possible since I own all the movies I ever wanted and have no real interest in "modern" films; they're all either remakes or reboots anyway and consist of 90% CGI. But if I were forced to choose, I would probably skip Blu-ray and go Digital Download, as if I wanted, I can record the stream and make my own DVD. For anyone who has done it, a DVD made from an HD source is very high quality, even better than the retail version.
In any case, I don't think Physical Media is going away anytime soon. I think you would have a better chance of dying in your own Bathroom.
I live in Thailand, out in the boonies far away from Bangkok.
I can't legitimately obtain most media. Western TV shows are generally unavailable, and if they do show up on commercial TV they are weeks if not *seasons* late. Movies are readily available -- in the form of cheap pirated DVDs. If you buy one, there is a 50% chance or so that it will be a cam version (ie. recorded by small videocamera in a theater). I haven't seen any BluRay DVDs for sale, but if they were I imagine they would be poor quality pirated rips also. Software is generally installed by computer shops, who will always put on a pirated version of the OS (Windows) plus a software pack that suits the needs of the most customers (Office, Photoshop, etc. all pirated). Game software is available through DVDs with pirated .isos, or from the "I know a guy" type connections that I was used to in the US.
Streaming via Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc. -- not available here unless you want to pay for a VPN and then pay for the service on top of that.
So, I pirate *everything*. And feel remarkably little remorse about it. I suppose that I could and probably should use Steam for games, to support developers. In the few instances where I have felt strongly about that, I order a physical copy and have it shipped to my old house in the US -- and then go about using the pirated copy.
A few others here have mentioned that pirated movies / TV aren't up to their standards in terms of visual quality. That used to be an issue -- most of the popular "scene" sources for movies used pretty aggressive compression to keep file sizes down, AND usually limited the resolution. The biggest names of the past that I used were aXXo and Jaybob. aXXo got (extremely) popular by having "good enough" video quality in very small filesize rips - usually 700MB for a movie. Jaybob came later (after aXXo got busted) and had a bit bigger files and a bit better quality. Still, with either source I had very noticeable issues with compression artifacts -- dark scenes with smoke or clouds etc. would look terrible. BUT, a fairly new source is a huge improvement over those. Check http://yts.re/home -- YIFY makes 720p or 1080p rips with still quite reasonable filesizes (1.5GB or so) that look great to me. Drastically higher res than the older sources, and I almost never see compression artifacts.
And if you're looking for TV, eztv.it has a nice usable layout and search.
Some day, researchers will find a trove of old CDs and DVDs, and reassemble the lost culture of the early computer era which vanished from the DRM servers in walled gardens after it became unprofitable. Researchers will puzzle over why Generation X kept entire albums of old songs which were no longer popular, and why they would ever listen to a song that wasn't a single and wasn't for sale on a DRM server. Was there once a culture that wasn't disposable, and cherished childhood and adolescent memories? Did people once look back on consumable media from their past, rather than streaming from the DRM servers? What did they do with all this music and other content? Did it mean something to them besides disposable entertainment?
I doubt anyone from the future will understand a world where culture wasn't simply consumed and discarded.
It only takes Netflix/Hulu removing your TV series or movie a couple of times before you decide you'd rather just own it on DVD/Blu-ray. It's never a good idea to let other people control property you value.
Wow, I didn't realize how effective a vehicle for wealth redistribution entertainment media really was.
why are people still watching all the vacuous crap Hollywood pumps out anyway ? it all looks the same, sounds the same and has the same message.. who's watching that crap ? the damn streaming of this crud is strangling the internet too.. then they have a hissy fit when other suckers download it free.. god help us.. lets move on as a civilisation and stop sucking on the teet of big business and celeb culture and make our own entertainment, actually put some effort into something tangible, rather than just zoning out, watching hypnotising flashing lights.. the human spirit is being squeezed into a box, and hardly no-one is noticing.. message ends.