Alan Smithee

An extreme waste if that's so. Just one day of TV is enough to drive one insane, seeing the same commercials repeated ad nauseum.

JimRochester

At my peak I was getting 5 - 10 per week. I was doing that for quite some time. It would have been impossible to keep that up simply because there isn't enough new stuff being released I have interest in. I have it already. Once the reality set in that I was collecting but not watching or enjoying that was the death knell.

morriscroy

Oddly enough, it is possible to avoid most commercials if one is flipping between dedicated sports channels which feature live european soccer games all day, and the BBC news channel. Apparently these particular channels don't really sync up in their commercial advertising time periods.

PhantomStranger

I think many older people, especially retirees, feel cut off from society once their careers are over. I've noticed that many of them fill their day watching the news. I think this is their way of connecting with current society in some small way. The demographics for all news channels are shockingly old.

JOE29

After I change over some of my disc's to Bluray from regular DVD ( some, not all )
There won't be any other reason to keep up the purchasing because I would already have the ones that I want to buy. Yes, there are some new titles being released now and then, but the heavy purchasing day's are finished, except for the odd title now and then.

Goonies85

I'd also add that back in the day, mainly when DVD was dominant, places like Future Shop and Best Buy would get even one or two copies of the most "fringe" movies, and I'd constantly make impulse buys when I went shopping. Ever since stores started cutting down their movie sections, there's many times the only way to purchase certain movies is through online retailers like Amazon. As such, it gives me more time to re-consider which movies I'm going to buy, whereas back in the day I might go to Best Buy expecting to purchase one movie, but instead walk out with four or five...And with HMV closing up in Canada, there's very few stores that actually stock the movies I want to buy...Thus, while I add a lot of movies to my Amazon shopping cart, it's really only the key releases that I'll purchase...

An especially good example is horror movies...I was working at Best Buy/Future Shop during the hey-day of DVDs, and would constantly just randomly buy horror DVDs (mostly Anchor Bay) just based on the covers and whatnot, whereas nowadays those types of movies are rarely stocked by Best Buy...Thus, while I still own a ton of horror movies, I have a different mindset when it comes to ordering them off of Amazon...

PhantomStranger

The lack of a retail presence for niche fare has certainly cut down on my impulse purchases.

milo bloom

I've said that I've cut back, but I still have nearly 50 titles on my wishlist and this weekend we went out hunting for Amiibo figures at the used shops and I ended up getting 5 used DVDs from my list. I still don't have any room on my shelves for them, they're just sitting on top for now until I can downsize something else.

I certainly don't buy much new anymore, The Last Jedi was the most recent, and Blade Runner 2049 before that.

Streaming has taken over so much for us in our household these days.

morriscroy

(From an historical perspective).

I've experienced this already over the past decade or so, when it comes to music cds. After the big places like Tower, Virgin, etc ... closed down entirely, the remaining places leftover didn't have much to offer at all. Basically no more impulse cd buying of less popular stuff.

I suppose it is now dvd/bluray's turn in this sorry state of affairs, where less popular stuff is only really available online.

morriscroy

I use to drive around town checking out several (or many) shops for cds, dvds, etc .... (or books and vinyl when I was younger). Sometimes even drive to the next bigger town.

This activity largely stopped when I came to the realization I was hardly buying anything anymore. Basically wasting a lot of gasoline, and toll fees, parking fees, etc .... adding up.

rjh_54

I'm also a huge CD collector (more CDs than DVDs or BDs), and I agree with you. Nowadays, I'm only really likely to make impulse purchases on used stuff at places that do that. But you hit the nail on the head. There just isn't any retail presence anymore. What little remains of the music and movies section at Target, Best Buy and Walmart is a sad, picked-over ghost town. There is no organization to it anymore, which makes looking for a movie or CD (that you probably won't even find) a painful task. Even the Barnes and Noble somewhat close to me has pretty much completely eliminated their enormous CD and DVD selection.

I find it absolutely hilarious that stores like Target and Walmart, with their next-to-nonexistent selections, now have signs everywhere that say "Can't find it in the store? Visit us online!" It's laughable. For one, most films and music are easily available online for free. I'm buying physical because I want it in my collection, and I checked the store because I want it as fast as possible. Ordering from your website won't do me any good. Which leads me to my next point, most people have Amazon Prime. Not only are their prices better, but knowing I can have it in two days with free shipping (and not having to spend a certain dollar amount to get it that quickly) is the next best option, so naturally I'm going to buy from there. I guess when you think about it, it's really the sad state of the stores today that play a huge factor in my lack of collecting these days.

PhantomStranger

Pretty much agree. I wonder how indies and less mainstream releases are doing these days considering media is almost now an online thing for everything but the biggest albums and movies. I know it's hurt CD's sales in the past three years. You can directly correlate the reduction in retail availability with its declining sales figures.

BuckNaked2k

Chicken or the egg?

Michael Corvin

Yeah but then you're stuck watching soccer. I'd rather take my chances with commercials.

morriscroy

For the really horrible niche stuff, some movie companies seem to be only releasing their titles dvd-only. For example, such as stuff that is distributed by Cinedigm like The Asylum, etc ...

For a long time, my impulse buy weakness was for lousy scifi movies. Over the past several years, such lousy scifi stuff has largely disappeared altogether from offline shops. Only place they seem to show up nowadays is either amazon or local dump bins which take 15-25 minutes to search through.

No point anymore in searching through dump bins, just to walk out empty handed.

PhantomStranger

Good ol' Cinedigm and other niche distributors send me those dvd-only cult movies practically by the crate for review. It's overwhelming how many I have to pass on reviewing.

morriscroy

Even worse is when so many middle/big budget action and scifi/horror/etc .. movies, have devolved into resembling the shovelware cranked out by The Asylum, etc ... (ie. Middle/big budget garbage released by the big movie companies like Sony, Universal, Fox, Lionsgate, etc ...).

Brian T

We've obviously reached (passed?) a saturation point where literally ANYONE can make a "movie" for next to nothing with technology and software that does most of the work for them, and so long as it as some exploitable elements (regardless of how proficiently they're accomplished) companies like this Cinedigm outfit and others will gladly pick them up and dump them on DVD, or streamers will acquire them for padding on already content-choked services. I visit this Walmart in Michigan about twice a month that still has a large DVD/Blu-ray department, and I swear there must be 10 - 15 new wannabe "cult" genre movies on the shelf every single time! Most of them have garishly Photoshopped covers that shamelessly oversell the mediocre product contained within (not unlike the exploiteers of the 50's and 60's, I suppose), while the photos on the back suggest amateur prosumer visuals all around, with a Tom Sizemore or an Eric Roberts shoehorned in for whatever marquee value anyone thinks such actors could possibly bring to their projects (although Roberts is on record stating that he truly enjoys helping out newbies and never-will-bes). But the days of actually making money and forging sustainable careers by making movies like these is long over. And not unexpectedly huge batches of this junk routinely ends up repackaged in Mill Creek multi-packs, that in turn clog up the racks and dump bins at Walmart and any other retailer that needs some P.O.P. junk near the registers.

The continued and increasing existence of so much instantly forgettable, often regionally-made crap reminds me to stay the course that I'm already on as a collector: see as much of everything I ever wanted to see -- nearly all of it from long before this contemporary over-saturation began -- as cheaply as possible on disc, sell what isn't worth keeping, generally at a profit, and curate a "close-to-final" permanent disc collection before adding streaming for whatever new odds n' ends I'll care to watch in the decades ahead, which, based on what I've seen on Netflix and other services up here to date, will be very little.

morriscroy

Without a smash hit like The Hunger Games, it seems like the only difference between the shovelware cranked out by Lionsgate and Cinedigm, is that Lionsgate is still willing to pay a slight premium for B-list actors/producers. (Or the occasional A-lister, such as Liam Neeson in The Commuter).

In contrast, just about everything cranked out by The Asylum (or Cinedigm more generally), consists of C-list/D-list actors or has-beens (or lower). (ie. Folks who are willing to take a huge pay cut, and/or are really inexpensive to hire).

JimRochester

I just picked up a few titles from the BB black Friday early access sale. So I added 4 4K titles and replaced one of my HD DVD's with a BR. Today I went through and grabbed eleven DVD's and BR off the shelf to get rid of. I offer them to my son first, then donate what he doesn't want. The HD's I either replace with BR or just throw out. The five I bought, I bought because the price was right, not that I needed to own the titles all that badly.

Paul_SD

My DVD/Bd purchases this season will be way down. More because the sales I was counting on have sucked (TT, Ronin) and also because I goofed and let some good deals slip by, expecting them to get price matched elsewhere.

My budget for this stuff was 2.5X what I'll end up actually spending this year.
Most years I go over my budget, frequently by >2x.

Unfortunately, anything I saved on discs I spent on books and CDs. My spending in those areas shot through the roof. Especially in the last month.

morriscroy

Similar sentiments here too, in regard to books.

In recent times, I've been "bottom feeding" through the "dump bin" equivalents in a particular narrow book niche. I've been spending a lot more on such book titles than I ever did with dvd/bluray. (The "dump bin" titles in this highly specialized niche is typically around $20-$35 a pop).

orangerunner

I went around to several of the Black Friday sales at Wal-Mart and Best Buy and there were just a few titles sprinkled around the store, nothing like it was a couple of years ago where the DVDs and Blu-ray were a front-and-centre attraction.

Maybe it's just my neighbourhood as I've seen videos on youtube from the same stores in the Los Angeles area and it looks like 2011 all over again except with 4Ks. The attention to physical media doesn't seem to have slowed down much - at least as far as displays go.

I ended-up buying absolutely nothing. I guess it doesn't help that I have no interest in 4K. For me, the only interesting stores now for media seems to be the thrift stores and pawn shops.

Alan Smithee

I'll concede that I SHOULD cut back on collecting since I've run out of space, and I didn't buy a lot of Black Friday stuff (probably my weakest year to date), yet I STILL can't stop altogether! It's just too damn addicting, even if I have to sleep in between piles of media!

JimRochester

There is no problem with picking up a few things when they are released or the price has fallen to the bargain bin. The big difference is the weekly frenzy of picking up every title we might eventually have an interest in. Cleaning out the old crap helps. Since moving up to 4K I've picked up 48 titles, but my total numbers have gone down thanks to finally going through my shelves and tossing the never watched or seldom watched crap.