Hollywood wants you to forget about DVDs and physical media

2023 has been a tough year for

physical

media

, with major retailers like Best Buy finally pulling the plug on sales of movies and TV shows and Netflix ending its mass-order DVD rental service. Major video games like Allen Wake 2 are experimenting with skipping a

physical

release entirely. In a move towards an all-digital future, you will truly own nothing and love it or get nothing. I guess physical

media

is just another thing that Millennials have killed along with dress codes and answering the phone. Growing up, my parents had cabinets full of VHS. tapes and DVDs and this is my stash in comparison, this is the last one I bought and I only bought it because we lost internet access for a few days.

It's a good movie, but I question the value proposition, why would I buy this at Target for 20? dollars and watch it just once, when I can take that same money and watch as much of the Netflix catalog as possible in a month, I can binge watch the entire series at the office in that time or I would if I hadn't moved to a different streaming services different channels offering different shows are really reinventing cable for the internet, aren't they the same picture? Mainstream audiences have largely decided that they are fine paying monthly fees as long as they don't have to get up and open the disc tray ever again and this could change now that we live in a world with real interest rates and streaming services are They are forced to raise their prices to make a profit like any other business, but there are hopes that their widespread support for physical discs will collapse.

Hollywood will double down on the collector market, kind of like how vinyl evolved from mainstream to obsolete and back to niche, back to mainstream; however, the CLI will become more intense now that the mainstream has more or less abandoned it in this video. Let's explore what could happen when the physical home video market crashes and why that might be something Hollywood is secretly supporting. Let's oversimplify the home video market. There is the mainstream, who are the people who watch movies and television. shows casually and sometimes they feel inclined to buy physical media because maybe they want to rewatch something on their own terms and then there is the hardcore enthusiast or collector, this is the type of person who likes the movie or the show itself , but are more interested in additional features such as audio commentary or behind the scenes, cases pass as a backdrop for YouTubers and can be used as a way to indicate tastes or care about the quality of the presentation in order to show off their settings movie at home.

Do you know what a bit rate is? then you are a foodie, like this video and subscribe to my channel. When I started researching this topic, I expected to find the possibility of physical media dying as a sour topic among enthusiasts, but by some accounts, physicality has never been better than image quality. it's the best it's been with 4K Ultra HD, prices are low, especially compared to high-end media from other eras in the past, laser and betamax devices had better image quality than their peers, but were too expensive so that the masses would buy them. The perfect video format has to hit that sweet spot between price, convenience and quality.

Every aspect of the DVD stood out. This is the DVD. It truly was the best of all worlds. Records are a cheap medium, costing as little as 2 cents per copy by some reports. did that paved the way for humanity's greatest invention, the $5 DVD bin at Walmart, the only place you can find SpongeBob SquarePants next to Scarface. They also delivered on the quality, assuming you can prevent the disc from getting scratched you can expect the image quality to not change afterwards. repeat viewings, which was a problem in the cassette world, where tapes could deteriorate over time or even develop mold and nothing was more convenient.

Remember those Blockbuster Be Kind Rewind stickers, not with DVD, just insert the disc and you're good to go unless they had those unskippable ads at the beginning, marketing really does find a way to sneak into all of our homes, the Disc format paved the way for Blu-ray and 4K Ultra, meaning the DVDs you bought 20 years ago are compatible with the newer DVD player, leading to the most robust physical movie market we've ever had. Since home video was invented, it's never been a better time to collect with boutique sellers catering to fans of genres like horror and sci-fi and most mainstream material available on Amazon for under $20.

This is possibly the best. time for physical media consumers, but at the same time the market is shrinking. DVD sales peaked in 2005 and it's all downhill from there. It's quite curious that YouTube started that same year that YouTube killed physical media, let's say streaming is killing physical media. Mainstream media Netflix began offering streaming in 2007 and has become one of the largest companies on the stock market. People have spoken and they no longer want to change the inputs on their televisions. Convenience right now is what matters most to them. Casual customer and the price for streaming service is acceptable for now and the quality is not bad, as long as you have a decent internet connection and don't know what a bitrate is if you don't, do yourself a favor and don't do it.

Find out that you will be happier seeing things, not seeing pixels everything you see. The next generation is being trained to make streaming services the default way to watch content and it will be difficult to reach new customers if the physical format is not even available in physical version. stores and mortars earlier this year, Disney pulled the plug on its physical operations in Australia and Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 was the final release for the continent in the US, you can see this decline every time you go to a major store like Walmart Target or Best Buy over the years, the movie and TV selection gets smaller and smaller, the future of these $5 movie bins is in jeopardy, which means the days of buying jewelry Since these combo packages are numbered, then what will happen to the home video market if the standards no longer buy discs, the most obvious effect is that the scale of the industry will be greatly reduced.

This is important because scale is what gives publishers leeway to take risks on certain projects. Matt Damon talked about this in most popular, dbd was a big part of it. of our business of our revenue stream Where, while eating hot wings, he explained how the DVD market made it possible for mid-budget films to be made, these are the films that occupy the space between the Blockbusters and the independent films that we don't see on In theaters, these films could no longer afford to make all their money in theaters because they could count on the physical release a few months later to act as a sort of second release.

When that went away, it changed the type of movies that could be made. I wonder why we watch so many superhero movies nowadays. This is part of the reason why even studio back catalogs are no longer safe bets. Studios have almost a century of content at their disposal, but putting it on disc to sell is not a free print. The discs are cheap with wholesale prices but that may change if they feel they can only move smaller batches they may need to rescan the film with 4K in mind which is a time consuming process on its own and overall costs do not change.

They still have royalties to pay the marketing expenses if they really want to sell it, someone must be hired to do the additional functions. Logistics to move the product to places, you don't have to worry about transporting anything with digital releases so there is more money per sale in the pockets of the studios, the margins may no longer exist if there is no mass market to reach sell. One solution is to license films to some of the boutique vendors and have them handle everything, effectively transferring the risk to them in exchange for a smaller cut of the profits.

Players in the boutique sphere are outlets like Criterion Kinol lber Vinegar Syndrome Arrow these companies create beautiful packages that come with the movies, but they have to be careful about the projects they take on, these companies probably can't absorb the same kind of hits at the major studios and if mainstream audiences are no longer buying, how much juice is can you squeeze out of the toughest audiences? Sure you may have spent thousands of dollars setting up your home theater, but are you really going to buy Star Wars for all four of you? "Maybe yes to Star Wars, that might not be the best example, especially if Han shoots first in 4k, please make this happen Disney, but not all products are going to be Star Wars and when the market does not have general support, that's all".

It will make every future physical release riskier and more expensive because you can't have the same amount of volume that you used to have when people like me, your casual consumer, were buying records regularly, the variety of products that come out each year will be affected and a lot of good movies and shows could be forgotten straight down the memory hole, the future may result in fewer movies on shows being released physically, but that may not be a bad thing for one, there is less material in landfills, so That's good, but on a more personal level.

I have a problem every time I open a streaming application and I feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content I face, how many minutes, hours, how we spend scrolling through the catalog, deciding what we want to watch. I only have a limited time to commit to watching. something like that I want to make sure it's spent on something worthwhile. This is analysis paralysis and opens up an opportunity for someone with great taste or at least someone who has great taste as part of their brand. This is where those boutique labels act as a filter. so the customer doesn't have to, and as a bonus, having a more centralized library with smaller updates means it might be feasible to build a community around the brand.

There are people who have entire shelves and closets full of Criterion Collection films. I know any Die Hard Netflix or Peacock fans who express themselves like this, if this is something I'm completely unaware of, I invite you to Roseme in the comments below. I see healing as a good thing because of the focus on quality over quantity. Of course, there is a more cynical and conspiratorial reason for the death of physical media. Hollywood hasn't always embraced home video; In fact, they initially saw it as a potential threat to their business model; some of them thought that early video recorders were a gateway to piracy.

Disney and Universal even sued Sony in the early 1980s over its betamax video recorder, claiming that recording its programming violated their copyright. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where a 54 decision ruled in favor of Sony in the Pirates' growing consumer electronics market. win again the studios at the time were saying if you can't beat them, join them and started releasing their own catalogs C Now that popular demand for physical media has waned, it's the perfect time to restrict releases so they can control once plus how people can watch your stuff, the main selling points of physical media are especially strong today - as long as the disc and player work, you own your content forever, you're not subject to the Streamers and networks play games by shuffling things, there is no monthly subscription fee. and you're largely free from having your media censored, which is an important issue if you care about preserving the media as it was originally portrayed, so we'll just ignore that hate crime, huh?

There are examples of wholesale shipping by Netflix, like when they released the dungeons. of dragons community episode after the blackface accusations, there is a second-hand market with discs that you can exchange with friends, in fact, giving your friends a recommended movie, like handing them something, literally has more weight than sending them a YouTube link, you can watch it in the library or even burn it as an effigy, basically anything you want because it's yours, it's a medium where the consumer has control. Hollywood is acting as if there is no future in the physical market and is putting all its efforts into streaming, which may not yet be profitable, but cuts the physical format.

Offer to crack down on password sharing and raise subscription prices, exceptSome of their customers will take to the high seas, perhaps even lobbying Congress to pass a law restricting VPNs. I don't know, but this is where you can use your imagination to see how bad it is. The future may be when it comes to internet rights and the boom, after all they might be able to make streaming work or who knows, physical video could go the way of vinyl where it becomes cool to go back to watch DVDs. I doubt the main difference is the vinyl. an analog technology, it works on a physical level, there are literally bumps and grooves in a piece of plastic that turns into sound when you scratch it with a stone, it's not perfect audio, but that's the point, the imperfections give the sound a texture unique, like some sort of vintage wine or, in my case, a Diet Pepsi that sat outside in 90-degree weather and that I enjoyed just before freezing M crunchy.

What I'm trying to say is digital media, the ones and zeros we take for granted can't feel as special as an analog. DVDs and Blu-rays don't have consistent enough imperfections that can bring the same joy as listening to a vinyl record. You would have to bring movie projectors or VHS tapes to get a similar feeling. Film is expensive and high maintenance, and VHS is not. Again, not a viable long-term storage medium, tape can literally grow mold. This is the mold I found on a tape in my grandmother's laundry room. Folks, if you're going down the VHS rabbit hole, don't put your VHS tapes in the laundry room. rooms, but I guess nothing really lasts forever and that might be the thing about physical media and the reason we feel so attached to them, since we are somewhat aware of their mortality, they might not be buried underground or incinerated when it's gone, it may not even be missed, but it's nice to know that it will be there for us if only to take up space on that shelf, unlike digital downloads, we buy things we don't own and just buy a license to watch 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray DVDs.

Have a good trip, I will be looking for you in the big garage, queue in the sky, but dear public, do you have a preference for physical media? If so, any particular genre I'm getting into is an animated series that originally aired on Standard Death. I hope I can get it. a good deal on Futurama and a few seasons of The Simpsons for my collection. I want to know what you're into, so let me know in the comments below. Thanks for watching. See you next time.