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DVD and Blu-Ray Sales Nearly Halved Over Five Years, MPAA Report Says (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In its annual Theatrical Home Entertainment Market Environment report, the Motion Picture Association of America described an immensely sharp drop-off of physical media sales over the past five years. According to the data, which was obtained from DEG and IHS Markit, global sales of video disc formats (which in this context means DVD, Blu-ray, and UltraHD Blu-ray) were $25.2 billion in 2014 but only $13.1 in 2018. That's a drop in the ballpark of 50 percent.
Don't expect 8K Blu-rays or other emerging quality-focused formats to turn the tide, either. Market data published by Forbes showed that the aging, low-definition DVD format still accounts for 57.9 percent of physical media sales, and 4K Blu-rays are only 5.3 percent. With drops that sharp, you'd expect apocalyptic financials for companies making and distributing movies. However, while there are certainly losers in this trend, the overall industry actually grew over the same period. Home entertainment spending grew 16 percent in 2018 thanks to surges in consumer spending on digital video services from players like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu. The report says that subscriptions to online streaming services grew 27 percent globally to 613.3 million in 2018, surpassing cable subscriptions (at 556 million) for the first time ever. "However, cable still drives more overall revenue than streaming -- it was the highest revenue platform in 2018, with $118 billion globally," Ars notes.
Don't expect 8K Blu-rays or other emerging quality-focused formats to turn the tide, either. Market data published by Forbes showed that the aging, low-definition DVD format still accounts for 57.9 percent of physical media sales, and 4K Blu-rays are only 5.3 percent. With drops that sharp, you'd expect apocalyptic financials for companies making and distributing movies. However, while there are certainly losers in this trend, the overall industry actually grew over the same period. Home entertainment spending grew 16 percent in 2018 thanks to surges in consumer spending on digital video services from players like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu. The report says that subscriptions to online streaming services grew 27 percent globally to 613.3 million in 2018, surpassing cable subscriptions (at 556 million) for the first time ever. "However, cable still drives more overall revenue than streaming -- it was the highest revenue platform in 2018, with $118 billion globally," Ars notes.
How are you going to sell as much physical media when physical retail stores keep closing, and Amazon keeps trying to push customers to do streaming?
fp?
Breakfast served all day!
DVDs and CDs are so last decade.
Everyone around here buys LPs, except those who realize tape is even better.
No, I'm not joking.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It doesn't help sales that DVD releases are delayed to push people to streaming. Shows that used to release the next year are now languishing for years without fresh DVDs.
Pretty sure sales of Betamax, VHS, and Laserdisc movies are down too... what's your point?
What I find most disturbing about the trend is how the younger generation seems to have lost the ability to discern the abysmal video quality of streaming services from the usually way better video quality from physical media.
I can only speculate that when you grow up watching stuff mostly on tiny smartphone displays, you are prone to impaired eye-sight. At my biblical age, I can still see within seconds whether a UHD BluRay conveys a true 4k image or is just a cheap 2k upscale. But many of my younger colleagues seem to not notice any difference, even when I point out the most obvious areas on a paused still image. And even less are they able to see how compression artifacts differ from ordinary motion-blur in high-motion scenes.
Therefore I expect the downward-spiral of readily available digital video quality will continue, with ever decreasing bandwidths and ever more aggressively "lossy" video codecs replacing actual image details with guesswork.
They will blame pirates and piracy somehow for falling sales.
Also, will want more taxes on computer shit.
While physical sales have declined, overall sales are up by $15B because of digital purchases. The article somehow doesn’t mention that.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Now that they no longer make any movies worth stealing
Wanna sell ? Lower the price !
Bluray prices should be on par with dvd by now.
Without Blockbuster, where can you go get a DVD? I mean, I am really finding it hard to rent anything in VHS.
You know, the supposedly next big thing in "inexpensive" write-once storage.
what percentage of those sales are to Netflix and RedBox video rentals.
They have no way of tracking sales of "used" Blu-rays and DVDs, which are both pretty healthy, but the MPAA can';t profit off those sales (yet)
THE CD AND THE DAMAGE DONE an editorial by Neil Young (c. 1992)
I'm a huge Neil Young fan, but sometimes he has some ...interesting ideas.
(emphasis blow is mine)
We're living in the darkest age of musical
sound. When they started capturing music on
records a long time ago-on 78's--the sound was
pretty shaky.Then it got a little better, and from
that point on, right up to the beginning of digital recording,
everything that was done was better than the digital recordings
that are being made today. Digital is completely wrong. It's a farce.
They've improved digital technology to the
point where you can at least say,"Hey, that's music."
But your brain and your heart are starved for
a challenge, and there's no challenge, there are
no possibilities, there's no imagination. You're
hearing simulated music. Your brain is capable of
taking in an incredible amount of information,
and the beauty of music should be like water
washing over you. But digitally recorded music is
like ice cubes washing over you. It's not the same.
My album Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere is
now available on CD, but it's not as good as the
original, which came out in 1969. Listening to
a CD islike looking through a screen window If
you get right up next to a screen window, you can
see all kinds of different colors through each
hole. Well, imagine if all that color had to be
reduced to only one color per hole-that's what
digital recording does to sound. All that gets
recorded is what's dominant at each moment. I
would like to hear guitars again, with the warmth,
the highs, the lows, the air, the electricity, the
vibrancy of something that's real, instead of just
a duplication of the dominant factors. It's an insult
to the brain and heart and feelings to have
to listen to this and think it's music.
There's a certain emptiness in the air these
days.Youthink that it might be today'smusic, because
it just isn't as heartfelt as yesterday's.
Everybody says, "Well, business came in and took
over, and they ruined music," but that's just an
excuse. The real reason istechnical. It's not that
people don't have souls anymore. All these bands
have got huge souls and can't wait to play; they
just can't figure out why their albums don't sound
as good as some of the things they used to hear.
I've been making records for twenty-six years,
and I'm telling you: from the early 1980s up till
now, and probably for another ten or fifteen
years to come-this is the darkest time ever for
recorded music. We'll come out the other end
and it'll be okay, but we'll look back and go,
"Wow, that was the digital age. I wonder what
that music really sounded like. We got so carried
away that we never even really recorded it. We
just made digital records of it." That's what people will say-mark my words.
And then he started selling Ponos. I'm not a big enough of a Neil Young fan to buy one though.
for the trees apparently.
My guess is this is due to the fact that their executive levels are all staffed with older generations who grew up under different rules.
Time to hire some new blood if, for nothing else, to learn what needs to be modified with their business model.
Here's a tip:
The " new " generations doesn't want to be bogged down with physical stuff. They want the content available to them, on demand and a la carte, with an infinite choice of platforms to experience said content. ( Phones, Tablets, PCs, Consoles, etc )
They don't want to have to buy*:
( * Multiple times every time the format changes. See Betamax -> VHS -> Laserdisc -> DvD -> Blu Ray -> 4K -> Streaming -> ? )
1) An industry approved Smart Tv.
2) An industry approved content player.
3) An industry approved audio system.
4) A dozen different subscription services because exclusive content can only be found on Service X or Y.
Your physical media sales are down because the new generation is learning that, most of the time, steaming is " good enough ".
It doesn't compete with the likes of BluRay or 4K ( streaming video compression sucks and I have yet to see any stream with 7.1 DTS / ATMOS ) but " good enough " is where most of your sales are going to be.
If you don't do something about the exclusive content being locked into Service X, you're going to start seeing your streaming services die off as well and get replaced with the always reliable Yarr Matey versions.
The sooner you figure out that non-exclusive streaming is where things are going, the better the odds your business will survive to see the next evolution.
DVD is still my first choice: it's much cheaper (sometimes only a couple dollars), the DRM is thoroughly broken, and even lossless MKV rips are small.
Streaming has its place, but if I'm forced to rent something that I'd rather buy, instead I won't pay at all.
CDs added DRM, DVDs had CSS and then some post-CSS drm that broke things on older players.
Bluray has phone home DRM that required regular player key updates to be able to play...
Notice a trend here?
LPs have none of that, plus the retro-nostalgia of an earlier better time.
I bed if they started providing DRM free DVDs and Blurays they would see an uptick in purchases among people who don't like streaming services or prefer to have their media purchases in physical format.
Personally I can attest that the limit on purchasing media for me has been a LACK of mainstream media to purchase rather than a lack of interest. I've spend at least $100 usd in the past 2 years on 'legacy' DVD collections I was interested in, but as a full time linux user with only a legacy dvd player and a PC bluray drive for a linux PC, I can't watch Blurays unless the keys have been leaked for that particular disc, whereas DVDs are almost always playable thanks to the weakness of CSS and the fact that many of the 'old timey' DVDs I am buying don't have DRM to begin with.
but am watching high-def videos daily. I've never had a blu-ray disk player either. Had dome DVDs and a player but haven't been using them for the past few years. Who ever buys this physical garbage any more when everything is available over the net?..
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
You wanna know why I haven't bought any new Blu-Ray media? Because the last Blu-Ray disc I bought wouldn't work with my hardware blu-ray player. Why? Updaed keys, and no updates existed for my blu-ray player.
So fuck you, Sony. You and companies using your platform get no sales from me.
Ayup - the decline in the music and movie business is all due to Napster...
I can still tell the difference, but I simply don't care. An idiot behind a ludicrously expensive camera is still just an idiot behind a camera. I can almost always tell if there's an idiot behind the camera within five minutes, regardless of video format.
More generally, camera = script + casting director + DP + director + editor, these being the core of the essential creative team (costumes, sets, and special effects are plus items, but not essential).
The talent component is complex. You don't always need Tom Hanks. I've seen many productions featuring five people you've never heard of who hit it out of the park (for a small value of "park", minus the preposterous spectacle we're usually sold instead of a competent story).
Bad news bears for us that still want a digital product, but not in streaming form.
>bad for network infrastructure(creating a peak hour)
>bad for picking winners and losers(subscription models reward all)
>bad for quality(reducing bitrate reduces bandwidth costs)
>bad for accessibility(they locked 4k behind certain intel cpus and windows 10 edge browser)
>bad for portability(no internet, you're fucked)
>bad for editing and making the dankest memes(no file)
All I want is a steam like platform on which they offer full seasons or the movie in AV1 wrapped in mkv for a set price and a similar review system(to stop them fucking with the bitrate).
Is that so much to ask for?
The DVD sales stat. is not surprising given not all AACS variants are cracked, i.e. you can actually backup a DVD.
There will likely be a move to BluRay once the players are down to $30 and AACS is fully dead, so you can get all the content as you currently can with DVD.
If you are not buying the disc but the movie as the packaging claims, then disc replacements should be free for your lifetime with proof of purchase.
Is about the same quality as non-HD TV is/was.
I speak as a child of the 80s-90s. While I can get higher resolution media, most of the time I prefer a faster download rate over a higher quality of media. Most of it is throwaway content anyway and details in the background don't make much of a difference to the plot, character development, etc. Only that rare show that takes full advantage of its media is worth high resolution, and those shows and movies are few and far between.
That said, the real killer of media sales is the online activated DRM for Bluray discs. When you have to connect your player to the internet in order to watch the content you have on disc, the utility of offline media is eliminated. And that is really what has brought the millenial and post-millenial generation into their mostly-streaming mindset. It's convenient, it's on the go, and it's the exact same DRM you'd have on physical discs, but with all the media at your finger tips, no disc change or format shifting required.
There are still members of these new generations learning to enjoy the benefits of legacy media and tech, but most people don't care enough for those nuances or differentiations to make a difference. they are consumers and will have moved on to the new platform within 2-4 years, leaving the previous iteration to the annals of history as they march forward on their path of consumption. Neither is right or wrong, at least until society collapses. Then the consumers will be left adrift while the techies and legacy media enthusiasts may have what it takes to keep going, or recover from the brink. But until such a situation arises the consumers will continue to economically drive the march forward towards progress or regress, whichever way the market flows.