slop101

Yeah, at this rate, these places will only have two racks of movies, one for new releases and one for last week's releases. Anything older won't be stocked.

DJariya

Star Wars The Last Jedi and probably Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle should help increase BD sales in the next few weeks. I think those are titles that fans will want to own.

orangerunner

Considering the format has been around almost twelve years, it's hard to believe that it's just starting to eek-out 50% of the market share over DVD.

Just goes to show how ingrained the DVD format is in the consumer landscape.

Gizmo

I think it will always be new releases, evergreen titles (Jurassic Park, Back to the Future, etc.) and kids releases. It'll never shrink that low.

Coral

But that's only when a major comic-book/geek factor/big animated movie is released, otherwise it goes back down to the 30%-40% range.

It is amazing that's it's been 12 years though and this is as far as they've gotten, when 99% of the TVs sold in the last 10 years are HD.
Nevermind that fact that it's already been 12 years in general - time flies.

It's already been 2 years for UHD-BD... and that's still only scraping the bottom in sales overall.

jjcool

Partly due to the prevalence of streaming nowadays and partly due to people not seeing blue ray or 4k as a worthwhile improvement. DVD, for the vast majority of people, seems to be good enough. Its tough to argue with lower priced media, lower priced hardware, more title selection, and more places to play them. We see it week after week with a roughly 2:1 sales ratio.

bruceames

Average Blu-ray share last year was 40%, with it rising about 3 percent a year. Although it seems like it will be rising a little faster going forward since we have UHD as well. So instead of the share ending this year at 43%, it may be 45% (as an example).

orangerunner

It's strange to think that time-wise Blu-ray is in the same place that DVD was back in 2009.

DVD 1997-2009 = 12 years

Blu-ray 2006-2018 = 12 years

The fate of DVD was supposed to happen in 2012!

Coral

Yea, I think it's pretty obvious that BD/UHD-BD will never have the market DVD once had and that the majority of the market will be streaming.
For most people. good is good enough - the presentation of movies just isn't that important to them.

Hell, from what I've witnessed - movie viewing in general isn't that important. I can't tell you how many people I know who will jump into a movie they've never seen halfway through and it's fine with them. Or have no problems stepping away from the movie to do something else while the movie is still playing and coming back without watching the scenes they've missed.

big e

Technically, Blu-ray has been on it's own for 10 years, since from 06-08 it was fighting with HD-DVD. It seemed like the studios didn't know what to do with Blu-ray once it won the format war. There wasn't any real effort to move consumers away from DVD, I don't recall the advertising being that great, quite a few catalog releases for the first couple years were subpar, and a lot of smaller labels didn't jump on until a few years later. All in all, Blu-ray kinda played out like it was something dumped on these studio execs who didn't want to deal with it.

bruceames

I've heard that argument before. The same could be said about DVD as well, and until all the studios got on board in 1999, sales were nothing to write home about.

Alan Smithee

They used to play a demo loop at Target that talked about how great Blu-Ray was- and it had a part with someone saying "Can't I just play DVDs on my HDTV?" and the announcer answered that was like driving a sports car in the wrong gear.

I remember the first few waves of Blu-Ray titles was pretty crappy, sort of like the selection of 4K movies out now.

Adam Tyner

Catalog titles are tough. I remember being so disappointed by the early release slates for HD DVD and Blu-ray, while Ultra HD Blu-ray really has brought some heavy hitters to the table. At the same time, a lot of these movies are either too recent for me to get excited about, or I've bought them on so many different formats that I can't muster as much enthusiasm as I feel like I should. It's basically a new release format for me.

bruceames

It's certainly more of a new releases format than Blu-ray, but a surprising amount of catalog is making its way out. Certainly more than I had imagined. I thought it would just release a smattering of catalog, especially the more recent stuff, due to not wanting to do revisionist HDR grades. But now the fear of that has been pretty much debunked and practically no one is complaining about too much HDR on a catalog movie.

orangerunner

I can imagine there was a lot of uncertainty when they released DVD as it was basically Laserdisc 2.0 - and Laserdisc didn't even crack 5% of US homes.

Digital VHS was released in 1998 and went nowhere even though it was one of the first consumer products that offered high-def content and even produced better quality in standard def than DVD.

But again, DVD had the convenient factor as the discs were small, portable, had random access to the content and discs are just more aesthetically-appealing than a clunky-looking tape.

morriscroy

More generally, this seems to be the case in niches which have been "digitized".

I've been noticing this in the market for books. Folks are willing to just read digital ebooks, instead of buying (or borrowing) and reading the paper version. This is especially the case for books which have very little to no re-read value, such as generic Star Wars type novels or other generic fiction paperback novels. Less and less current/recent Star Wars novels showing up at local used bookstores.

(Though I can see why some non-hardcore types don't want anybody to see their bookshelves filled with Star Wars novels. Reading Star Wars digital ebooks gets around this problem).

morriscroy

Speaking in terms of hypotheticals.

Wonder if dvd might have died an early infant death if the css encryption system had been completely cracked a year or so earlier in 1998. (The dvd's css encryption system was completely cracked at the end of october 1999, where three different ways of cracking the encryption keys could be done easily in seconds).

morriscroy

Similar sentiments here. I find this is also that case for me, even when it is just basic cable after I dropped all the premium channels and/or streaming services.

Watching too many procedurals/dramas, and recording a movie or two every day from basic cable channels which I haven't seen previously. Most of the time, I end up just keeping the tv in the background playing all the shows/movies I recorded to the dvr over the previous days.

Not really much extra time to watch anything from my dvd/bluray collection, or even reruns on basic cable channels.

More recently, I haven't picked up the "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" bluray yet. A year or two ago, something like this would have been a first-day buy for me. For reasons I don't understand yet, it seems kinda "flat" to me now. Mostly apathy than anything exciting.

(More generally).

I find this is also the case with other time + cash intensive hobbies in my life.

For example, I don't even bother buying or reading sci-fi books anymore. After watching/reading so much sci-fi over the years, the newer titles aren't quite so exciting anymore to me. It is almost as if I'm mentally ticking off a list of generic sci-fi tropes, every time I'm watching or reading anything sci-fi.

Even in the case of non-fiction books (or documentaries), I've been coming to the realization that so many books are just filler/padding with sometimes a few golden nuggets. Frequently the interesting golden nuggets are mentioned in online reviews, or it is stuff I have read previously. It is almost as if reading wikipedia pages or googling, ends up giving away (or revealing) almost all the interesting stuff in many non-fiction books. What's left is mostly the details padded out to fill several hundred pages.

Nowadays instead of buying a lot of mass market type books, I just go to the nearby public library once a month on a Sunday afternoon, and skim through books which look interesting. Even just doing fast skims (ie. reading the first and last chapters, and maybe some of the middle padding), I've realized many non-fiction books aren't even worth the paper they're printed on. Not even worth borrowing for a week.

morriscroy

Heh.

https://www.oppodigital.com/farewell.aspx


No more new high end dvd/bluray/4Kbluray players.

Alan Smithee

Fuck- and all because people would rather keep buying $50 players and keep replacing them when they break instead of spending $500 for one that will actually last a few decades.

slop101

That's the way of almost all appliances, even industrial machinery. Some machinery that's 40 years old, will last longer from now, than a brand new one will from now.

Gizmo

Oppo is out? Damn.

If this isn’t writing on the wall I don’t know what isn’t. Criterion next?

If I had to guess, the HT enthusiasts are the only ones buying Oppos and everyone else is using gaming consoles or sub $100 players. More and more people are streaming and disc sales are getting lower. I still have a region free modded 103 that’s gathering dust in my closet. When I need to play a disc I would just use my Xbox One S.

Gizmo

Most people likely don’t care about the bells and whistles Oppo offers. Disc sales are down. Studios are slowing down releases. 4k is it for physical media.

Plus when you buy a new $100 disc player every two years you likely get more streaming apps. Does Oppo even offer any? I remember having to get some special Roku stick for them to show up on my 103.

Alan Smithee

I never got why you would need streaming apps on a disc player. They're nice to have, but the only time I used them on my Oppo BDP-93 was watching a movie on Vudu after watching a movie on disc, or having it play music from Pandora after a disc while I decide what to do next. Pandora is pretty redundant now that it's in my receiver AND TV. It makes more sense to have a small external box for streaming as those are easier and cheaper to replace as the ones in a TV or disc player get obsolete and not updated.

The UDP-203 has no streaming apps, but it will stream files from other devices. They said they left them out to reduce boot-up time, as well as the issue of keeping them updated. It'd be nice to at least have Vudu with 4K and Dolby Atmos (my TV won't output that), but I bought it for playing discs and that's what it does.

I was hoping Oppo would eventually make a no-nonsense display with the same mindset (supporting all existing picture formats, with no silly crap like motion enhancement, no apps and no TV tuner, relying on external devices for those) but that won't happen now.

JimRochester

I hate to see the beginning of the end for this stuff but will admit I never purchased a high end player. I had high end TV and audio but never invested the big bucks in a player. So it's my fault. Did they sell retail? Even our local high end audio, video place didn't carry them.