PhantomStranger

Many of the older royalty deals didn't include terms for digital copies and the like, so the studios may be trying to get out from paying them via streaming loopholes. Notice how a lot of newer content with updated contracts are often pulled from HBO MAX and the like - they simply aren't worth streaming thanks to the newer contract terms.

TheBang

I'm pretty sure that, like digital music, digital movie purchases are in decline, and streaming subscription revenue is where the growth is.

Josh-da-man

Hell, even if I have something on DVD or blu-ray, and I get the urge to watch it, if it's available on a streamer I have, I'll just watch it on that instead of getting my lazy ass up and finding the disc, getting the it off of a shelf, opening it up, removing the disc, and putting it in a player.

I also find that I'm much slower to buy blu-rays of stuff now, too, and I put off acquiring them even though I'm a collector at heart and want a physical copy in my own library.

This could end up biting me in the ass, though, if they stop making discs and they go out of print, and the prices on the secondary market skyrocket for OOP titles.

morriscroy

This is the biggest reason why I don't really buy many music cds and blurays anymore. Easier to just listen / watch on a streaming service or youtube.

As mentioned in a music subthread on here, I go through a lot of stages to determine whether a title has much of any replay value for me, and is not removed from my to-buy list.

In the case of movies, if I think a particular title will only end up being only watched once or twice, I'll just wait a year or two for that title to eventually watch it on a basic cable channel or even generic network tv. For example, I eventually watched the past several Star Wars and superhero Marvel / DC films in this manner.

milo bloom

Yeah, I'm buying fewer and fewer "new/popular" titles and more vintage special edition kind of stuff.
I don't even keep up with all the Star Trek series like one would expect of a long time Trekkie like myself. I have the movies and a couple of the series but it's so much nicer having ParamountPlus and watching it all there.

stvn1974

I mostly stick to older horror flicks from the 1970's and 80's that I missed back then. Haven't been disappointed yet. I haven't even seen that many films in the last twenty years and only a few of those I felt I would watch over and over to justify buying them on disc.

sleepyhead55

This. The quality of stuff in the last twenty years just doesn't me buying and watching it again. Not the US stuff anyway. Foreign films I might consider. I do a lot of impulse buying. Some of it's blind buying. A good portion of it is just buying a film I'd seen once or twice and seeing if it holds up or gets enhanced upon another viewing. And a lot of times I come away with the "how'd I miss all this stuff the first time around", "this is great, and the film should be better known". That's probably why I still buy physical media. It's the discovery aspect. For better or worse, I usually don't get that with streaming, even if its just a different method of watching a movie. I really can't explain that part.

PhantomStranger

I kept waiting to buy The Spanish Prisoner on BD and now it commands over $100 on the used market whenever it does even show up. They must have only made something like 1000 units because it's very rare.

BuckNaked2k

If inferences can be drawn from the music industry, the last full year's data showed digital permanent downloads right under $500 Million. Sounds big, right? Compare that to digital subscription & streaming at $13 Billion.

I understand that music is different than movies. One might stream music for hours and hours every week, but a movie is more of an 'event' where one might only watch a few titles per week, but I would still think that permanent downloads have severely dropped off.

Source: 2022 RIAA Revenue Statistics

orangerunner

I'm not a copyright expert but I think physical media requires a "mechanical" license which is permission granted for physical replication distributed to the public. I guess since physical duplication is permanent and its viewership is not able to be counted or ceased in a pre-determined amount of time, it demands a much higher cost for music rights.

Broadcast viewing or streaming is much more tightly controlled by the content holder as they can closely track the number of viewings making it less expensive to license. Or something like that...

lwhy?

I found these numbers for 2022 online:

The main 2022 US home video revenue figures, organized by category, are below, followed in parentheses by the percentage up or down from 2021.

Subscription streaming: $30.3 billion (up 17.3% from 2021)

Digital sales (“electronic sell-thru”): $2.5 billion (up 1.7% from 2021)

Digital rentals (“video on demand”): $1.7 billion (down 14.1% from 2021)

Physical media sales: $1.6 billion (down 19.8% from 2021)

Physical video rentals: $502.4 million (down 16.7% from 2021)

Total: $36.6 billion (up 11.4% from 2021)

https://www.diversetechgeek.com/2022...e-video-sales/

BuckNaked2k

Those numbers are a surprise! Compare total home video market at $36 Billion vs. total music industry at $16 Billion. Had no idea video was more than 2X music. I guess "subscription streaming" at $30 Billion casts a wide net over all types of cord-cutting trends erstwhile covered under various cable TV packages.

orangerunner

I agree streaming is where the growth is but growth and profit are two different things. Attempting to determine how profitable a streaming service is can be very difficult to calculate.

Think of a streaming service like a buffet restaurant serving everything from Chicken Asiago (made by Wolfgang Puck) to Kraft Macaroni Dinner. Everyone pays $9.95 for the all-you-can-eat menu.

If your clientele helps themselves to large portions of the Chicken Asiago, the restaurant will make less profit. If the clientele helps themselves to large portions of Kraft Macaroni Dinner, the restaurant will make more profit.

If the restaurant cuts-back on the Chicken Asiago, will fewer people come to the restaurant? How much control does the restaurant have over what their patrons eat and how much?

This is where the streaming profits and measures of success get very foggy. There are multi-million dollar Mandalorian-style shows mixed-in with content like "Mickey & Friends!" animated shows from the vault which have paid for themselves many years ago. If they cancel the Mandalorian-style expensive epics, will their subscriptions drop significantly? How influential are the big budget epics with subscription numbers? Are the monthly rates enough to cover the elaborate production costs?

Physical media is in decline and streaming is the future in technological terms but as profit-per-title, I imagine physical media was more profitable and much more easy to calculate from an accounting perspective. On the other hand, maybe the studios like the streaming model as it is difficult to cut a royalty cheque for profits which cannot be easily formulated.

Maybe the current model of streaming is just a "loss-leader" to switch customers over to the convenience and familiarity of streaming and going forward everything will be exclusively pay-per-view?

morriscroy

A future media pundit / historian might concoct a narrative of this being similar to a process of "tenderizing meat".

At the current time, this ^ is more likely the equivalent of "throwing spaghetti against the wall" to see what sticks.

TheBang

Here are the numbers from 2019:

Subscription streaming: $15.9 billion
Digital sales (“electronic sell-thru”): $2.6 billion
Digital rentals (“video on demand”): $1.96 billion
Physical media sales: $5.9 billion
Physical video rentals: $1.44 billion

Total: $25.2 billion
https://variety.com/2020/digital/new...on-1203463878/

As you can see, streaming has grown, at the expense of every other category. Physical sales and rentals, in particular, are in precipitous decline, making less than 1/3 of what they did 3 years prior. Digital sales and rentals haven't declined as much as I expected, but if it follows the trends of the music industry, I expect those to continue to decline slowly over the coming years.

TheBang

I mean, that is a major sticking point of the current strike negotiations. The guilds are asking for viewership transparency on streaming platforms for fair calculation of royalties or residuals. The platforms and studios, following the precedent established by Netflix, would like to keep that information as private as possible.

PhantomStranger

There is no doubt, studios love the opaque nature of streaming's ratings. It's much easier obfuscating how well each film and program are doing in this digital era, which endlessly benefits Hollywood's Byzantine accounting. It's my understanding outsiders don't trust what the studios are selling as the ratings and so they trust things like social media engagement more as a proxy for viewership.

It's apparent to me films are secondary now in Hollywood after funny accounting (ie money laundering).

orangerunner

It's sad but I'm beginning to think most big business models are built on the framework of money laundering, tax evasion and/or illicit drugs whether it's real estate or the entertainment industry.

Adam Tyner

lwhy?

Those numbers don't match up when you add DVD and Blu-ray together. It should be 23.3 million instead of 9.3 million.

Coral

Yeah, 9.3m is way too low... and would definitely be larger than a 23.3% drop.
Sub 10m will be the new norm eventually, but we're not there yet. Maybe another year or two.

TheBang

Looks like it was probably supposed to be $23.3m and 9.3% drop.

Adam Tyner

morriscroy

Likely the big reason why this can happen for such long periods of time, is that the creative types (ie. writers, actors, musicians, etc ...) don't have the resources to fight a long drawn out legal case which might involve the books actually being audited.

One of the few documented cases of a creative type actually fighting back in a long drawn out legal case, was Tom Scholz of the band Boston. (Scholz had an independent source of income unrelated to making records). This was described briefly on pages 138-141 in the book "Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside The Music Business" by Dannen.

Adam Tyner