TheBang

Music streaming revenue is starting to level off, meaning the market is starting to get saturated. Nevertheless, the amount of revenue growth in streaming this year outstripped the entire revenue generated by CDs.

Josh-da-man

Cracking the DIVX encryption would be completely pointless now unless someone wanted to do it as a challenge. Actually, I'm sort of surprised nobody has done it yet just for shitz-n-giggles.

You'd need to find an actual DIXV disc, though. Once DIVX died, they became useless.

Got curious, and there are some DIVX discs up on eBay right now. Looked at a few on the listings. One of them is "guaranteed to play." Someone else is asking $92 for a copy of Armageddon. Curiously enough, none of the listings for the discs I saw had a disclaimer that they were no longer playable without the DIXV infrastructure.

milo bloom

Disney may be getting back into disc based releases.

https://www.mediaplaynews.com/says-c...-disney-focus/

PhantomStranger

The labels drastically increased CD pricing and made some very questionable business decisions regarding expensive box sets, which had propped up sales for the past few years. Another problem is legacy acts have released most everything multiple times in their catalog, so there is little left to explore outside of Hi-Rez releases.

TheBang

That's interesting. That makes it sound like it's possible they may try bringing some streaming content to home video, instead of keeping it exclusive to Disney+

BuckNaked2k

My goodness, SACD and DVD-A are so small they lumped them in with CD singles, cassettes, and vinyl singles. 400K total units compared with CD/LP/EP's 75 Million.

slop101

Yeah, even though I hardly buy this stuff anymore, there's a couple D+ shows I'd definitely buy on blu-ray, like Andor and maybe a couple Marvel shows.

milo bloom

I would be all over a 4K set of the complete Andor series and Rogue One, especially if they tweak the deepfakes of Leia and Tarkin in R1.

morriscroy

Tangentially, this was eventually done for sacd long after the few remaining record stores stopped carrying sacd and dvd-audio titles. Some hardcore hackers figured out how to do it on a sony playstation 3.

Adam Tyner

WeeBey

Surprised puss in boots couldn’t get blu-ray in the green considering how well it did in the box office. Last year the best selling blu-ray this week was Belfast, a tiny box office movie, so it’s not like puss has a tough year on year compare.

Coral

I think it just illustrates how much physical media has declined - even in just the last year.

The last 17 charts posted have had YOY revenue declines for total discs, DVD and Blu-Ray.

Adam Tyner

Coral

18 now!

BuckNaked2k

The ol' 60:40.

WeeBey

I think Avatar 2 will be the first release to break this red streak.

Adam Tyner

Adam Tyner

Coral

It's like watching a car crash in slow motion.

I guess 25M is the new high water mark for total disc revenue.

Amazing that only around 3 years ago the revenue of either format would be double what the total disc revenue is today.

orangerunner

Here's a short youtube video with Matt Damon explaining the importance DVD had on the movie industry and how it influenced the choices that were made by the studios.

Coral

^ He mentions making a movie like Behind the Candelabra was a massive gamble unlike it would've been in the 1990s. DVD didn't become mainstream until around 2000 - so I'm not sure what he's referring to there as DVD wouldn't have been a factor.

Also, if the lack of DVDs nowadays are changing what studios greenlight - then was this a problem before DVDs were a thing?

orangerunner

When he mentions DVD he may also be referring to the VHS rental market in the 80s and 90s as well which gave the studio a very lucrative financial afterlife for films. Prior to that the network cable release was the only other option which was essentially a one-night-only revenue stream.

If you look at the studios in the early 2000s, they all had their independent branches such as Fox Searchlight, Paramount Vantage, Miramax (Disney), Warner Independent Pictures etc. which all took financial risks with smaller personal titles that would play well on the small screen and possibly find a bigger audience after their theatrical runs.

More and more studios became corporate conglomerates in the 80s and 90s and thus profits became much more important than the previous win-some/lose-some model. The lure of the international market meant movies which had more explosions and mayhem translated to bigger revenue than dialogue-driven films.

The challenge with streaming is there is no clear way of defining how much each film title is earning or what certain titles add to the financial growth of the streaming service. Steaming only succeeds in the eyes of a corporation when there is subscription growth. If the streaming service has the same number of subscribers paying their usual $12/month to watch the new $100 million dollar streaming-exclusive movie, then how does one define that film's worth or value?

Josh-da-man

Matt Damon is right.

What happened was in 1994 Pulp Fiction was an arthouse movie that hit big and generated a lot of interest in independent cinema at that time.

The shockwaves in the years that followed, when tons of indie films getting greenlighted and produced, coincided with the release of the DVD format.

In the late 1990s, DVDs were a killer app that people who never got into laserdisc were waiting for. Better quality than VHS, cheaper and more convenient than laserdisc. Same size as the CDs everyone was familiar already familiar with.

People were buying a lot of DVDs back then; often they were blind buys. This really benefited the "arthouse" type of movies that Damon is talking about that might have limited appeal in a theater, but people would buy them in stores for twenty bucks or so, about the same price as a couple of tickets or a compact disc. DVD was so popular that it provided a long tail for a lot of projects that probably couldn't make their budget back solely by theatrical release.

Behind the Candelabra came out in 2013, so it's kind of at the tail-end of the DVD/blu-ray era and the early days when Netflix really started taking over that movie market. These days, a movie like that would probably be a Netflix original.

Josh Z

Behind the Candelabra was an HBO original. It only had a limited theatrical release to festivals and the UK market.

Coral

They're still making arthouse and independent films. I really don't see how anything's changed.