re: Blu-ray and DVD sales - #2, but we try harder
 

Actually my extreme paranoia over bad sectors, has absolutely nothing to do with concerns about digital content being lost.

Ironically the few dvd/bluray discs I own which possess bad sectors (due to manufacturing defects), turned out to be mostly $1 or $2 (or $3) crappy movies which I didn't really care much about anymore after a single viewing.

I know now that my paranoia over dvd/bluray bad sectors, is largely due to "perfectionism" and other ocd related issues. Basically it's the same type of ocd related perfectionism I had when I use to collect comic books, where I would search for copies of issues which looked the most "pristine mint" in condition. In areas like mathematics/physics/engineering, it would be obsessively searching for exact "closed form" solutions to complicated integrals and/or differential equations, when an approximate series and/or numerical solution would be sufficient.

After I stopped collecting comic books, it felt like a huge burden was lifted off my back. (At the time).

re: Blu-ray and DVD sales - #2, but we try harder
 

I don’t know if age really has anything to do with this anymore. I know plenty of people in the Gen X and Boomer age brackets who have fully embraced streaming. I don’t think the general public ever really cared about buying DVDs, even during the buying boom last decade. It just happened that, at the time, buying DVDs were more convenient than renting. Now with streaming services becoming ever more popular, the general public doesn’t see a need to buy DVDs or BDs anymore.

That was sort of my rational for having a large collection in my pre-college DVD collecting days. Whenever I’d talk to people about movies or DVD, I’d always tell them I was building my own movie library. Once I started to college in ’08 I put a pretty big damper on buying DVDs and BDs because of my finances. I still bought some, but they were few and far between. Even though I had very few DVDs coming in, my backlog never seemed to get smaller. I think it was then, that I started to realize I didn’t watch or re-watch movies nearly as much as I thought I did. Joining Netflix in ’09 was probably the best thing I did as it satisfied that movie craving I still had, but cost less than $20 a month. Flash forward to now, and I honestly have very little desire to buy DVDs and BDs. I do still buy them, I currently have a page and a half want list, but my spending is nowhere near what it was pre 2008.

In an above post, slop101, you mentioned no longer having the time to watch movies anymore. I'm right there with you. With my other hobbies (video games, comics, TV), plus working full-time, I hardly have time to watch movies except on the weekends. Actually, in the last two years or so, I've been watching way more stuff on TV than I ever did. When I see how little time I have to try and watch new stuff, let alone stuff I already have in my collection, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me to buy movies I'm probably going to watch once and never look at again. It's times like that when Netflix comes in handy.

re: Blu-ray and DVD sales - #2, but we try harder
 

The real thing going on is that most working people have a limited time budget for something like movies. The low-cost monthly streaming is eating up most of their free time allotted to movies, so the pressure to purchase new releases is far reduced. The people still buying Blu-rays are the ones demanding excellent A/V quality.

re: Blu-ray and DVD sales - #2, but we try harder
 

Similar sentiments here. This story could have been straight out of my life, if one replaces the words "DVD" and "BD" with "music cd". (Going back 25+ years ago).

Since then, the cycle has repeated itself several times for other niches which are prone to ocd compulsive collecting/hoarding, such as books, games, dvd/bluray, etc ...

For example, I have twenty+ floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with tons of books which I hardly read these days. (At least 10 of these bookcases are filled with engineering/math/physics/computer type of technical books).

re: Blu-ray and DVD sales - #2, but we try harder
 

Initially when I first started buying blurays, this was one rationalization/excuse I was using. (The other big rationalization/excuse was that many blurays were the same price as the dvd-only versions, or a $1 or $2 more).

Today, these two rationalizations/excuses are no longer valid for me.


My main excuse now for still buying blurays, is that it is an easy way to severely constrain my ocd compulsive buying/hoarding behavior. I have very little interest in newer current movies. So most of my bluray purchases are older catalog titles, primarily from local dump bins. (This eliminates a lot of low volume + expensive catalog titles released by companies like Twilight Time, Olive, Kino, Shout! Factory, etc ..., which don't show up often in local dump bins).

In contrast, $1/$2 deep catalog dvds are plentiful and very easy to go on buying binges. (I'm glad this phase is over for me).

re: Blu-ray and DVD sales - #2, but we try harder
 

Same here.

In hindsight I was largely watching tv too, instead of watching my dvds/blurays.

After supper, I end up mostly watching daily reruns of NCIS, Star Trek franchise, Criminal Minds, etc ... Occasionally I'll watch a movie on AMC, or something recorded earlier.

(At the present time, the only current shows I've been following closely are: How To Get Away With Murder, Person of Interest, Scorpion, Stalker, and Hawaii Five-0, where I watch them either live or an hour later after broadcast. Anything else is dvr'd and watched on the weekends).

Also ironically, I have watched many movies on cable after I had already purchased the bluray, but have never watched my actual bluray copy.

re: Blu-ray and DVD sales - #2, but we try harder
 

More generally, wonder if the same thing can be said about kids these days.

These days it seems like many kids' waking hours are being "overscheduled" by their parents and school, with very little to no unstructured free time. (Some teenagers too). Stuff like too much homework, extracurricular activities outside of the home, etc ...

In contrast when I was a kid, there was hardly any homework. I was one of those "latchkey kids" that came home every day with nothing to do, other than watching tv. (Only three channels and no VCR in those days).

re: Blu-ray and DVD sales - #2, but we try harder
 

Yeah, me too. I had minimal homework, and after school I'd either play basketball/football with friends (unstructured, or course), ride bikes, or just veg out in front of the TV, but since there weren't that many options on TV, we'd make up our own fun, as our parents didn't come up with shit for us to do besides some chores, maybe.

re: Blu-ray and DVD sales - #2, but we try harder
 

Kids' time these days are being sucked up by their phones and videogames. Movies are an excuse to get away from their parents.

re: Blu-ray and DVD sales - #2, but we try harder
 

Time budget...money budget...my main constraint is space. My movie shelving unit is nearly full, and I'm not replacing it with a new one. Once that thing is at 100% capacity, that's it for me. One in, one out.

re: Blu-ray and DVD sales - #2, but we try harder
 

http://www.homemediamagazine.com/fil...112914-12C.jpg


First year Black Friday sales week has seen a decline. Even more remarkable though is that Blu-ray declined 13.2% from a year ago, while DVD fell 10.7%. It pretty much mirrors the declines the formats have had since the middle of the year, and reinforces the strong possibility that we'll see Blu-ray fall from grace at a faster rate than DVD next year.

Anyway, pretty much a bad sign any way you look at it (even box office power was up for the week by almost $100 million), and I expect the 2 weeks leading up to Christmas to be down as well. In fact, maybe every week till the end of the year will be down, since the box office power was higher last year for those weeks.

I expect the final YoY percentage for Blu-ray to be in the negative upper single digits (and in the low to mid teens since July).

re: Blu-ray and DVD sales - #2, but we try harder
 

I've usually gone nuts on Black Friday (the first time DVDs went below $5 caused my collection to start getting out of control! I was like 'Freddy Got Fingered for $3.88? Hell yeah!') but only bought a few this year. Most of the ones they had cheap were the same they've had the past couple years, and I already got the ones I wanted out of those. Black Friday 2010 was the first time I remember there being $5 Blu-Rays, and also the first year I had an HDTV so I bought a ton then just to jump-start the collection. 4 years later and I still haven't watched many of them.

re: Blu-ray and DVD sales - #2, but we try harder
 

What was your largest haul over the years?

re: Blu-ray and DVD sales - #2, but we try harder
 

I counted more than 50 DVDs on Black Friday 2007. Bought lots of crap titles too, like the Beverly Hillbillies movie- think that was less than $3 so couldn't resist. Running out of shelf space I've gotten much more selective now, this year I passed up tons of stuff I would've bought earlier.

re: Blu-ray and DVD sales - #2, but we try harder
 

This year's Black Friday offerings were rather paltry.

Aside from a few decent offerings like Godzilla and Transformers AoE, most of what was offered at Best Buy, Target, and Walmart just felt like a bunch of dump bin crap with a couple of dollars knocked off of it. There also weren't many blu-ray deals out there. Most of the black Friday bargains were DVD only, like all Dexter seasons and American Horror Story seasons 1 and 2. I would have picked those up had blu-rays been available.

Also, the way these sales are run --these five titles are only $3.99 each, over 100 more available in store-- make it nearly impossible to plan your purchases and you're left scrounging through unorganized shelves and bins while fending off dozens of other shoppers.

re: Blu-ray and DVD sales - #2, but we try harder
 

This.

re: Blu-ray and DVD sales - #2, but we try harder
 

But that's always the case, since there many more DVD releases and many more people buy DVD.

According to HMM, the average price of a Blu-ray during the week was $9.73, down from $10.68 last year: an 8.9% decline.

The average price of a DVD was $6.58, down from $6.73 last year: a decline of only 2.3%.

So relatively speaking, the DVD sales were worse than last year, compared with Blu-ray. Even so, Blu-ray sales were down more than DVD.

As a point of reference, last year the BD average was $10.68 (as mentioned above) down from $11.15 in 2012: a decline of 4.2%
DVD was $6.73, down from $6.94: a decline of 3.0%. So the price decline for Blu-ray was much greater this year than last.

re: Blu-ray and DVD sales - #2, but we try harder
 

I of course picked up a bunch of those $3 TV season sets at Big Lots in 2009, hardly any of which I've actually watched. Maybe this January :)

re: Blu-ray and DVD sales - #2, but we try harder
 

Bolded for emphasis.

This is it folks, this is the problem. All these people that thought they wanted TV shows on DVD/Bluray really don't. They may have thought they did based on memories of watching it in their youth or they wanted it to show up on Netflix.

The era of physical media is fading fast. We are the vocal minority, we love our packaging and inserts and statues, but most people just want to watch the damn show, and if a little Roku box will get them that, then that's how it's going to be.

re: Blu-ray and DVD sales - #2, but we try harder
 

The OCD crowd.

re: Blu-ray and DVD sales - #2, but we try harder
 

This about books, obviously, but it's also more than applicable to our movie collections:


http://i.imgur.com/bZuuFk0.jpg

re: Blu-ray and DVD sales - #2, but we try harder
 

Last night I saw a commercial for a model railroad show that will be at a local convention center. Dealers, etc. How popular is model railroading? You can't just go to Wal-Mart and buy this stuff. You have to go to a hobby shop or specialty store. I'm sure there are far less people into model railroading than physical media. If the hobby of model railroading can survive, and be popular enough for conventions and shows, I'm positive physical media will survive for those who want it.
In the future there will be video conventions/shows where collectors go to browse through thousands of OOP tapes, cds, dvds, bds, laserdiscs from dealers. Specialty labels will have booths to promote their latest releases of classic films on physical media.

re: Blu-ray and DVD sales - #2, but we try harder
 

This sounds like what the comic book hobby was like back in the late-1970's and early-mid 1980's. One had to go to specialty comic shops and/or conventions to find older back issues. (But new current issues could be found at local newsstands).

If I was young, I could probably be interested in the convention circuit for "physical media".

But these days, I just don't have the time and patience anymore to go to hobby-based conventions and/or spending the entire afternoon going through bins at specialty stores. (For example, back in the day I use to go through all the bins at large indie record stores, searching for less popular metal/punk rock records. Back then, many such specialty record stores didn't have a separate section for heavy metal or punk rock).

re: Blu-ray and DVD sales - #2, but we try harder
 

Dude, have you checked the prices for model railroad stuff lately? I did about 10 years ago having enjoyed them as a kid and I immediately turned in the other direction. I can't imagine the prices are any better today. If you want Bluray collecting to remain viable, we'll be seeing Criterion pricing across the board.

re: Blu-ray and DVD sales - #2, but we try harder
 

The last time I purchased current issues of comic books (a few years ago), I was paying around $4 per issue (or more).

(Fortunately they were mostly limited series, or I got bored with a series and stopped buying new issues).