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.

Comments

Generation Smartphone with impaired eye-sight?

[ffkom]

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.

Re:The CD and the Damage Done

[Joce640k]

Young's entire argument applies at noticeably low resolutions. There is always a digital resolution at which any given expert will find a digital recording indistinguishable from a clean analog, assuming that such an analog recording exists.

For playback, CD is enough for any human ear.

There's a half-argument for going to 48kHz because it allows for a more gradual rolloff in the reconstruction filter, and I wouldn't argue against it, but all this 192kHz/24bit stuff being thrown around by "golden ears" is rubbish. 16 bits and 44/48kHz is more then enough for playback.