PhantomStranger

The home video market had such a different mentality in the early days of Beta and VHS, I remember everything you described. Hollywood had such a completely different approach to releasing movies. They weren't the disposable commodities they've become today.

morriscroy

This sounds very much like "supply and demand" at work. (At least a psychological perception of it).

The only time I remember tv shows and movies ever being "high valued" subjectively to me, was before my family purchased a vhs machine.

When my family purchased a vhs machine in the early-mid 1980s, I remember the subjective "value" changed somewhat. For tv shows and movies on non-premium cable channels, it felt like they no longer had a subjective "high value" to me. The one thing which still had a "high value" subjectively, were then-current or recent movies which were not on played any non-premium cable channels. Basically anything which was only available as vhs tape rentals still had a high subjective value to me.

This completely changed when my family purchased a second vhs machine. Excluding macrovison encoded vhs movies, it was easy to dub stuff from tape to tape (such as vhs movie rentals). Then completely overnight, most movies didn't have a "high value" subjectively to me anymore.

IIRC prerecorded VHS movies became a disposable commodity sometime in the late 1980s, when the local rental outlets were selling former rental copies of recent movies for $10 a pop or less. Also record stores and some department stores, were carrying new copies of older vhs movies for $20 a pop or less.

The final "knockout blow" for movies becoming completely devalued, was when dvd became ubiquitous and the css encryption being completely cracked in 1999.

BobO'Link

Your purchases are not safe on Amazon's servers.

I, too, dl everything I obtain via Amazon (notice I did not say "purchase" as I use those free digital credits for slow shipping to "purchase" digital from Amazon). I've had at least 2 titles become unavailable. Both were on backup drives that went bad. When I went to Amazon to dl replacement copies I discovered the loss, contacted support, they said "sorry... no longer available" and refunded my purchase cost plus a couple of $$ credit for my trouble.

In spite of preaching to others "Make multiple backups as you can't trust any media" I failed to do so myself for those files thinking I could just dl them again from Amazon should the media fail. That has been remedied following that incident.

slop101

They're safe as fuck after I've downloaded them on to my hard-drive, copied onto a separate thumb-drive, imported on my iPod and also burned onto a disc.

WeeBey

DVD+BD Market in 2007: $15.9 billion (includes rental market, I believe)
DVD+BD Market in 2018: $4.03 billion (+$1.785 billion for rental market)

The decline is accelerating. In 2017 the decline was 14.10%, in 2018 it was 14.56%. In the best case scenario, by 2025 sales will be less than $2 billion. Less than $1 billion is possible, though, if the decline doesn't slow down. The physical home video market peaked in 2004 at $24.9 billion (includes rental market). (FYI: rentals declining faster than sales, down 15.59% in 2018.)

For context: CD sales peaked in 2000 and fell below $1 billion for the first time in 2018. That year sales were $698 million (vs. $1.057 billion in 2017).

BuckNaked2k

mattysemo247

Ouch

JimRochester

That is sad to look at. But even without streaming services, people just can't continue to buy the way they did even 5 years ago. People have large collections. They have most of the catalog titles they want. In the early days we were so hungry for titles we would buy anything. I don't even stream and still only buy a couple a month now compared to the 5 or more a week I used to. I just DVD Netflix most of them.

On a side note to plug physical media; I have been binging Castle. I don't own the later seasons so I was just going to jump into the 21st century and watch them on Amazon Prime. The seasons were double what I could buy the DVD sets for brand new. So for the first time in a while I actually bought some DVD's

stingermck

Ooof those numbers. My wife is selling antiques on the side, so we go to a lot of yard sales, flea markets etc. Seems like each person/vendor is selling hundreds of DVD's and Blu's. I would be cleaning up if I still got physical media. But its interesting to see just how quickly the average person is dumping their collections.

Gizmo

You can barely give them away at this point.

slop101

Yeah, if someone like me is down to buying only one title every 2 or 3 months, then you know shit's bad!

Coral

Not surprising in the least. We all saw this coming - or at least most of us.

The industry will try to spin any positive gain they can, but physical media will continue to decline. UHD-BD won't save it, nor will any other future physical format.

I'm just looking forward to seeing more BDs hit the bargain bin. I've recently passed on a few BDs because I couldn't bring myself to spend $6.99 on them. Gotta be $4.99 or under - and even then it has to be something I really love and has a lot of replay value.

milo bloom

Yeah, I've topped out too. There's but a handful of discs I'm looking for, and I rarely ever find them in the used DVD stores. I should just buy them on eBay and be done with it.

Sometimes I read blogs like CineSavant for ideas of DVDs to add to my list just so I'm more likely to find something (like when I found When Worlds Collide at Disc Replay last weekend just after reading about it somewhere).

But the streaming is really where it's at. Even my wife will use streaming to watch something we have on our shelf just because it's so easy.

PhantomStranger

The industry wants physical media killed off as soon as possible. Once the big music labels hit upon streaming services as a viable business model, they quickly moved to deemphasize CD and gut its retail presence. The same thing is now happening for movies in Hollywood.

A digital future is coming where it will be almost impossible to "own" a movie or album like we are used to as DVD consumers.

BuckNaked2k

Our collections will seem so quaint someday....like an old man with a room full of 78 records.

slop101

"Will"? They already do feel quaint, and have for a while now! I get mocked whenever someone comes over, and my collections tidy and doesn't take up that much space.

WeeBey

Coincidentally, we recently received worldwide numbers.

Global market for physical media in 2014: $25.9 billion
Global market for physical media in 2018: $13.1 billion

Just about cut in half in five years. Globally, the physical media market is declining by 13-19% per year.

As for global digital spending:

$15.7 billion (2014)
$42.6 billion (2018)

170% growth.

Total video entertainment market:

$40.9 billion (2014)
$55.7 billion (2018)

Growth driven by subscription streaming.


https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.ph...&id=1554952970

EDIT: Just found this chart and found it interesting.




USA went down from $9.7B in 2015 to about $5.8B in 2018. Also, look at how small the physical media market is after Japan. And these are the top markets!

slop101

If you adjust those figures for population, they wouldn't be much lower than the US, and Japan would be the same as US, maybe even a little higher.

WeeBey

Adam Tyner

For what it's worth, the decline is primarily oriented around DVD. Blu-ray (combined with Ultra HD Blu-ray since it launched) has been more or less flat in the U.S. since at least 2011.

Swiping hariseldon's numbers from another forum:

Gizmo

At this point, I'm only buying TV on DVD that is unavailable anywhere else (like Early Edition complete series). I just don't see a point when I can stream it.

Coral

In line with people bailing on physical media (DVD, BD and UHD-BD), the "All Digital" XBOX One S we knew was coming was leaked:

https://www.slashgear.com/xbox-one-s...sole-14573206/

rw2516

78RPM was abandoned over 60 years ago yet people never stopped being able to play them. As long as there is a need for 5 inch disc drives players will be available. Only when the 5 inch disc is completely abandoned for all it's multiple uses will drives/players become scarce.

milo bloom

Hari Seldon, eh? Wonder why he didn't also have the numbers for the next 5 years...


Anyways, we have to face facts that we're going to be "those" people. The people that collect vinyl, laserdisc, and now DVD/Blu/UHD. Heck, even CDs are becoming a niche collectible.

One thing we can hope for is better and better upscaling players for all the stuff that never made it past DVD to hi def formats. Some of these DVDs hold up better than others, and we're going to need something to be able to watch them or it will be no better than watching on VHS (yeah, I know there's people who collect that too).

PhantomStranger

My gut feel of the market is that BD likely will see revenue declines over the course of 2019. Retail support is beginning to collapse at notable chains and Disney's streaming service will become a real inflection point for certain physical media consumers.

The Blu-ray market isn't going to collapse overnight. We should have 2 to 3 decent years left, as much to prop up more expensive UHD sales than anything else.