bunkaroo

The thread isn't called "What will you do when B&M stores stop carrying physical media?"

It said "goes away completely".

It'll be a long time before that happens. Maybe not 2025, but certainly not in the next 5 years.

Alan Smithee

Seeing as LPs are making a comeback (and being an early CD purchaser, I don't really see the attraction of buying new music on records but more power to those who do), I don't think physical media will "go away completely" but at the worst it might become a niche market. I've thought about what I would do if that happened though, and it comes down to this:

I won't switch to buying movies or albums as downloads or streaming access as they're trying to do now, so if that becomes my only choice I'll just stop collecting. I still love buying new stuff, but I have literally thousands of movies on every format imaginable (including EVERY CED videodisc, most US HD-DVD titles and more than half of all D-VHS releases), a lot of which I haven't had time to watch yet, so I'll just spend more time actually watching what I've got. If a new movie comes out that I HAVE to see, I'll rent it through a digital service like Vudu but won't buy it that way- if they won't sell me a disc (or tape, or computer chip, or SOMETHING that I can keep on my shelf and play on any compatible equipment without an internet connection), I'll just go with seeing it one time. Of course I would still search out older stuff in thrift stores and the like.

I've said it many times, but if studios really wanted to keep physical media alive they'd be doing something to promote it. They seem to WANT to kill it right now, seeing that they've put many new movies up for 'purchase' on digital services a few weeks before they're available on disc, and the packaging of discs keeps getting lazier each year, with no inserts in crappy Eco-Cases that house discs with plain labeling instead of the full-color printing they used to have, then just assume nobody wants media anymore when they don't sell as many as they used to. If digital is going to be the new paperback, then make Blu-Ray the new hardcover!

Oh- and the obvious answer to what if B&M media goes away is: I'll stay home much more!

zyzzle

Of course they want to kill it... they want to be fully in control.

Groucho

I'd pull a Murdoch.

dvdshonna

I don't think 90% of movies are any better than network TV shows you can watch for free. ...Considering the lack of quality movies released, I doubt if I would even miss watching new movies. ...I'm certain, I won't be paying $2.99-$3.99 for digital rentals, or $9.99-$14.99 for digital purchases.

Wouldn't be a big change for me. ..I don't buy DVDs for $9.99-$14.99. ..I don't think 90% of movies are worth more than $1.00 to rent or own.

BuckNaked2k

Don't fall for all that hipster talk about LPs making a comeback. Total sales of vinyl (LP/EP/45) went from $124 Million in 2011 to $167 Million in 2012, a mere rounding error in the over $7 Billion music industry.*

*Source

JTH182

Right, my question was meant to be a hypothetical if the studios only made new releases available digitally.

bobert3

I'll be streaming mostly. I can't see myself purchasing a digital copy on purpose, now if somebody was to give me one, I'll take it. Maybe I'll finally catch up on my unwatched pile.

Alan Smithee

I gave up on TV a LONG time ago however, since to me it's just plain unwatchable now, presentation-wise. I refuse to accept the practice of keeping network logos onscreen through an entire show, and the amount of commercial time is just ridiculous now also. Even when watching recent shows on disc or Netflix, the shows run pretty short without commercials and I can tell where the breaks would have gone, which would have had me incensed if I'd been watching them on TV. (There used to be no more than TEN MINUTES of commercials per hour, now it's almost twice that!) Plus the production values of most TV shows can't match that of a movie, and the content restrictions get in the way too (darn! shoot!)

stvn1974

This.

Alan Smithee

That's still a lot, compared to $0.00.

dvdshonna

That's a good idea. ..They should put commercials on DVDs/Blurays and give them away for free. ...I'd pick up 1/2 dozen per week.

But until then I'll see what's on tv.
MOLL FLANDERS (Robin Wright, Morgan Freeman) is on the ThisTV network you can pick up for free with your rabbit ears. Robin Wright becomes a prostitue to survive in 18th Century England. P&S with commercials. ..Or you can buy the DVD for $28.99 on Amazon.

VALMONT (Annette Benning, Colin Firth) This delectable thriller stars Colin Firth (Bridget Jones's Diary) and Oscars® nominee* Annette Bening (American Beauty) as embittered aristocrats who weave a wicked web of cruel intentions and savage seductions. P&S with commericals ..Or you can buy the DVD for $15.24 on Amazon.

hanshotfirst1138

You'll become a blind superhero with a radar sense and fight the Kingpin ?

Mr. Cinema

YMMV as always, but I made the rounds over the weekend at Target, Best Buy, and Walmart. The Target was a Super Target and they've copied Best Buy with combining BD/DVD on the same shelf. Looks really messy. The troubling part was Walmart. I went to both Super Centers in my area and it seems like they've shrunk some space of BDs in favor of more DVDs. Not something I would expected in year 7 of the format.

I'm not too concerned as my disc buying days have slowed tremendously. Man of Steel is about the only thing I've bought on disc recently. My Vudu library keeps growing with cheap HDX digital copies. The older I get, the less dust collectors I want in the house I suppose. It's pretty convenient to browse the digital list.

bunkaroo

I saw this too at Target. I only buy new releases at Target here and there but it's still crappy. Fry's hasn't combined them yet, but they have reduced the DVD section greatly.

TimeandTide

You obviously haven't heard of HBO, Showtime and AMC.

No offense, but bailing on TV because of commercials and a logo in the corner of the screen seems a little silly.

And while I agree that most TV shows lack the production values of, say, a film with a $150 million budget, there's still plenty on TV currently that's on par with, if not better than, what's being produced for the big screen. If I need a fantasy fix, I'll opt for three season's worth of Game of Thrones over three Hobbit movies, 23 episodes of CW The Arrow over Man of Steel, or a couple seasons of Strike Back over the Rock's latest cookie cutter action movie.

JeffTheAlpaca

I would catch up on all the dvds and blu-rays still sealed in the plastic.

zyzzle

Right, I gave up TV around 22 years ago, when the "logo bugs" first started appearing. TV is now completely useless to me, so intrusive are the 'tickers', bugs, logos, and 20+ minutes of annoying and stupefying ads per hour.

It is good riddance that more folks should do. It might actually be productive.

Alan Smithee

Those are CABLE. I don't have cable. Yes, shows made for HBO (like The Sopranos, which I have on disc) are better than most network shows, but again that's cable.

No offense, but it seems a little silly to defend those annoyances unless you work for a broadcasting company (which I wanted to do a long time ago, but would never do now). I tried to at least keep tolerating the Fox logo during The Simpsons since it was such a great show, but it really ruined it for me. There's just no logical reason to have a permanent mark on the screen, and if I can't enjoy a show why should I waste my time watching it? Commercials are like brainwashing- seeing the same commercial several times in one day makes me feel significantly dumber. My tolerance for repetition has diminished over the past few decades too, I can't even listen to the same radio station all day anymore if they play the same commercial several times.

I used to watch a LOT of TV decades ago (and spent plenty of time defending it against those who said "TV rots your brain" and all that) and never would have imagined that it would get so bad that I couldn't stand to watch it anymore, but it did and I did. I used to buy a LOT of CDs, but that stopped when record labels got greedy and started raising prices. Some prices are coming back down now, but the passion for collecting those I once had is already gone. (Plus maybe I'm just old, but a lot of current music is pretty bad. There's still some good music though, but it's sad that many music producers don't care much about sound quality.) I started buying MORE movies when DVD prices kept going down (having been used to $40 laserdiscs before that), but if that market gets ruined I'll just find something else to spend my time and money on.

thetao

I don't quite acknowledge the validity of the question. To do so IMHO means ignoring the history of laserdiscs, 16mm and 8mm film prints, and other specialty formats for home viewing that existed and often thrived outside of any mass-market environment. And I don't suspect companies like Criterion, Kino, Shout, Olive, and VCI, whose incomes come largely if not totally from media sales, are going to just close their doors and go home.

If copyright holders decide they won't license to home media producers anymore, then I'll concentrate more on public domain material, occasionally buy titles (likely used) that I missed from DVD's heyday, foreign releases (how many countries actually have reasonable infrastructures for Internet streaming and a willing public?), and what I can watch/record through TV and streaming. Long live the "VCR". Life goes on, but I sure won't be spending anything like what I do now on "virtual" products.

Join the A-Team and spaz out? Hee hee.

Spottedfeather

Being annoyed by the channel logo in the corner of the screen speaks more to the quality of the show rather than the logo it's self. If the show is good, (whatever your definition), then you won't even notice it. Plus, a lot of them are semi transparent to be less intrusive.

bruceames

I'm with you there. I hate commercials so bad that in my car I'm always turning off the volume when commercial come on. They really annoy me.

As for TV, I only use it for sports and most of the time I'll just watch a DVR recording so I can FF thru the commercials. I haven't watched any TV series directly ever since The Sopranos came out on DVD in 2000. I got hooked on having complete control of my viewing experience with DVD and haven't looked back (nor have time to watch regular TV because I have so much to watch with Blu-ray and DVD).

Xiroteus

Do they think Blu-ray is a waste yet are okay with spending too much on a lower quality no ability to give away, trade or sell digital copy?

When I was buying movies I hardly like to pay over five dollars for blu-rays (used at the time) let alone that much for a digital copy of a lower quality. And five dollars will hardly even get you a rental in HD these days. Not going to happen.

Ten dollars or less for video games with no control are okay, much more and I have to pass for the most part.

dvdshonna

When I'm watching for free, commercials and/or logos don't bother me. ..I would prefer a bar at the bottom of the screen with advertisments rather than the LONG commercial breaks. ..Either way, commericals pay for the content.

Some people like commercials:
1001 Classic Commercials ...$4.99 Amazon
Commercials From The 50s, 60s, and 70s! ...$15.99 Amazon
TV Commercials: Ultimate Collection ...$15.96 Amazon
--

Alan Smithee

Just got the latest issue of Home Media Magazine (formerly Video Store Magazine) in the mail today: the editor's statement really made me want to vomit. I'll share it with you here:

"It’s good to see the studios are becoming increasingly aggressive in pushing the digital sale, rather than streaming, of movies.
Several of the majors are giving big movies an early digital release in the hopes of spurring sales, which for years were stagnant and dominated by iTunes sales. That’s because there was no real incentive for people to buy a digital movie, and my hunch is they were put off by the relatively steep price, compared to streaming.
Consumers took to buying music over the Internet because they could easily purchase their favorite songs at 99 cents a pop. Studios came into the game with a decided disadvantage: While music is sold by the song rather than by the album, with movies you have to buy the whole thing, not a scene or two. And finding the right price for a download — which lacks a physical, touch-and-feel presence — has been quite difficult, with the electronic sellthrough, or EST, needle remaining stuck in the “anemic” range even when the price of a new movie dropped to about $10.
An early window for a digital release just might be the game changer everyone’s been hoping for. Studios, after all, cling to the physical disc simply because it’s tried-and-true and we haven’t seen a precipitous sales falloff as we did with the CD (a fact that, again, can be explained through consumer purchase habits: music by the song, movies by the whole movie).
But given their druthers, every studio executive worth his or her marketing degree would like to replace that disc-based revenue stream with a digital model, with nothing to manufacture, nothing to package, nothing to ship and nothing for retailers to return.
The problem is, getting people to fork over even $10 for a download has been incredibly challenging, because the concept of ownership, at least at this point, still mandates something physical. It’s more about the product than it is about the experience.
But making a hot new movie available only as a download two, three or four weeks before its release on disc is a whole other story. The consumer who doesn’t see value in buying a download for $15 when he can buy a beautifully packaged DVD or Blu-ray Disc for roughly the same amount now has a whole new reason to do so: He’s not paying for the ownership so much as he is paying for the privilege of having something before anyone else does. Call it pride, call it vanity — it’s human nature, and clearly it’s working.
As reported in our magazine, DreamWorks Animation’s Ann Daly on a conference call Oct. 29 said the early Digital HD (now the standard name for all digital versions of a movie) release last month of The Croods generated 15% more sellthrough revenue than any other DreamWorks film.
Daly applauds 20th Century Fox, which distributes DreamWorks Animation titles into the home entertainment channel, for being “aggressive in promoting and developing the electronic sellthrough portion of their business,” and maintains, “It is having a positive effect on our overall business.”
Keep it up, guys. Clearly, it’s working."

This is from a publication that's supposed to serve people in retail. I hope some of them have a few choice words for this guy.